Kerrey revelation reopens 26-year-old wounds

By Christopher Michaud

NEW YORK (Reuters): As the nation marks the 26th anniversary on Monday of the Vietnam War's end, former U.S. Sen. John Kerrey's revelation he was involved in a massacre demonstrates the power that conflict still wields to reopen national wounds.

The barrage of media interest in the revelation by the former senator and U.S. presidential candidate shows that the protracted conflict, which bitterly divided the nation during the tumultuous 1960s, remains a painful topic.

Perhaps Kerrey himself put it best at a news conference he called to discuss the 1969 incident in Southeast Asia: "In Laos and Vietnam the war is over; in the United States, it's not."

Kerrey told this week of a combat mission he led in Vietnam 32 years ago during which more than 20 unarmed civilians, mostly women and children, were killed in the Mekong Delta.

"For more than three decades I have carried this deeply private memory with a sense of anguish that words cannot adequately convey," he said on Thursday. "Others have justified it militarily to me. I haven't been able to justify it either militarily or morally."

In most quarters, including Vietnam veterans, editorial writers and columnists and even the Vietnamese themselves, there has been no rush to judge Kerrey.

Many, including his former fellow Sens. John McCain of Arizona and John Kerry of Massachusetts, both Vietnam War veterans themselves, leapt to his defense.

"Bob Kerrey made a mistake in Vietnam," McCain wrote in a Friday column in The Wall St. Journal. "But unless you too have been to war, please be careful not to form your judgment of him on your understanding of what constitutes a war hero."

"People who weren't there," echoed Kerry, "ought to think twice before they start second-guessing this 30 years later."

Vietnam veterans at the Vietnam memorial in Washington, D.C. voiced similar sentiments. "I don't think it was murder. It was an unfortunate accident," said one, voicing the sentiments of many.

But a pilot who flew on the most notorious U.S. atrocity of a war that killed nearly 50,000 U.S. troops and one million Vietnamese civilians differed sharply.

Hugh Thompson was a pilot involved in the massacre at the village of My Lai on March 16, 1968, when troops from the American division killed more than 300 civilians. Vietnamese sources put the death toll at more than 500.

"If he did the murdering, he should receive the maximum punishment ... He had bad judgment, and made a mistake that he will be punished for the rest of his life," he told Reuters.

"If Kerrey did what is supposed to have been done, he will walk free," he said, adding that a war crimes tribunal would not be a bad idea.

"It has been 26 years since the war itself ended, for America if not for Southeast Asia, and to this day the conflict resides in the popular consciousness as a dishonorable undertaking," the New York Post said in an editorial.

But the stain of Vietnam has perhaps faded somewhat, as evidenced by the presidential campaign of McCain who spent several years as POW during the unpopular war. His "war hero" status served him well in the Republican primaries, when he gave George W. Bush a stronger run than had been expected.

The New York Times reported this week that Kerrey's decision not to run against Gore in 2000 came only weeks after Newsweek magazine interviewed him and presented documents about the Vietnam mission. Newsweek never published the story.

Concluded Newsday newspaper in an editorial, "This revelation may well put an end to any further political presidential hopes Kerrey might have had." Kerrey himself has since stated flat out that he was not running in 2004.

"But," Newsday continued, "he shouldn't be excoriated 30 years later for what appears to have been a tragic mistake in judgment in a confusing war."

Even the Vietnamese, both in the U.S. and Vietnam, were largely sympathetic to Kerrey.

"We believe that it was an accident," said Nguyen Xuan Nghia, the chief operating officer of California-based Little Saigon Radio, a Vietnamese station that reaches about 700,000 listeners in California and Texas.

Vietnamese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Phan Thuy Thanh said "In the statements about what happened in the past in Vietnam, Kerrey had shown he was remorseful."

"We think the best way for Kerrey as well as other Americans who used to fight in Vietnam to find peace of mind, is to have concrete and realistic actions to contribute to healing the wounds left by the war."

But a day later Vietnam's state-run media described the killings as a crime.

"Another painful tragedy has been exposed before the April 30th liberation date, although no one is still vague about the crimes of the Americans during the war," the Tuoi Tre (Youth) newspaper said in a story headlined Nightmare in Thanh Phong.