Anti-Hero
<http://www.thenewrepublic.com/051401/editorial051401.html>
by the Editors
Post date 05.03.01
We all know that we will never all know what happened in the nocturnal
jungle at Thanh Phong on February 25, 1969; but still there is something a
little grotesque about the alacrity with which Bob Kerrey seems to have
been understood and forgiven. After all, a war hero was confessing to the
possibility that he may also have been a war criminal. It was also not
especially uplifting that Kerrey made his confession only after a reporter
discovered that his seal team had murdered women and children, and many
years after building a political career not least on his valor in Vietnam,
and on his stirring representation of the predicament of the Vietnam
veteran. The revelation about the massacre at Thanh Phong unleashed yet
another bout of bathos about America in Vietnam, about our "shame" and our
"glory." The commentary about this atrocity was curiously self-regarding,
nationally and generationally. We moved ourselves. We felt deeply. What we
did not do was think critically.
In the public mind, Kerrey has been exonerated on two grounds. First, that
it was a good war, and he was doing his job. Second, that it was a bad war,
and he was doing his job. Weirdly enough, both sides in the most
excruciating debate in contemporary American history seem to be in
immediate agreement that there is no moral scandal. The supporters of the
war are worried that the dead of Thanh Phong will further disgrace the
cause: My Lai was damaging enough. (It should be said immediately that the
American culpability at My Lai was unequivocal, whereas it is the equivocal
character of the events at Thanh Phong that has provoked this week's
reckonings.) The opponents of the war are not surprised by the dead of
Thanh Phong. Since they insist that the American evil in Southeast Asia was
systematic and deranged, you might call this the Chomsky-Coppola analysis
of the war, they are reluctant to make it personal and contrite. And so
Kerrey is given a quick pass. Anyway, he is plainly a decent man, as the
evidence of his subsequent career shows.
All this is much too simple. What if the war in Vietnam was a good war that
went bad? What if Kerrey is a decent man who committed an indecent act?
These are the kinds of complexities that embarrass ideology and
sentimentality. Senator John McCain, who speaks about this subject with a
special authority, observed on television that "our job ... is to try to
heal the wounds of war and not reopen them because of any specific
incidents." But this is not at all obvious. The more we learn about the
past, the better we comprehend it. And we learn about the past only by the
study of "specific incidents." Surely "healing" is not accomplished by an
indifference to truth. Or is the ascendancy of "healing" as an American
ideal owed precisely to its indifference to truth, to its emotional
efficiency, to its promise of an instant absolution and a swift "moving on"?
There is another reason for Kerrey's smooth passage through this ordeal of
memory. It is the view that war is dirty. This view has the entire history
of warfare to support it. But it, too, cannot explain the Kerrey disclosure
away. Even if all war is dirty, not every soldier's every deed in war is
dirty. Soldiers kill, but they are not all war criminals. There were many
atrocities in Vietnam, so many, in fact, that they justified the
extrication of the United States from the conflict, but atrocities were not
the norm. It is hard to understand Senator Max Cleland's comment about
Kerrey's conduct at Thanh Phong that "[i]n many ways it's a microcosm of
what we all went through." Surely not every American soldier in Vietnam
returned with the blood of women and children on his hands. In this sense,
too, Kerrey appears to have distinguished himself.
But the issue is not only historical. We are living now in a golden age of
atrocity, and American foreign policy is torn over the question of
"humanitarian intervention." In the Balkans, the United States and its
allies are seeking ways to bring to justice soldiers who were responsible
for Thanh Phong-like outcomes in Bosnia and Kosovo. More and more we are
relying upon truth commissions and international tribunals to record the
unpleasant truths about recent conflicts and catastrophes, and to secure
those unpleasant truths against the faulty memory of politics and culture.
The culpability of Bob Kerrey has not been definitively established, but a
country that makes such culpability into a burning question of policy
cannot simply look away from what it has just learned about one of its
leaders. He has to reckon with his conscience; but we have to reckon with
our consciences, too. Idealists, if that is what we wish to be in our
actions abroad, are not people who forgive themselves easily.
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