Salute Kerrey: He Was There War never ended for a guy with unending courage Twenty-six years ago today, a helicopter lifted off the rooftop of the embassy in Saigon, carrying the ambassador, his poodle, and the American flag. The long and terrible adventure in Vietnam was finished. North Vietnamese tanks were in the suburbs, rumbling toward the presidential palace. Those who cast their lot with the Americans were fighting desperately to escape. The Viet Cong were easing out of the shadows, moving openly in the streets, filled with triumph. It was over. But, of course, Vietnam is never over, as Bob Kerrey has taught us all in recent days. The Americans finally got out of Vietnam, but Vietnam will never get out of millions of Americans. It comes to them, driving a car on peaceful roads, when they hear The Doors or Janis Joplin or Aretha. It comes to them fearfully, when they hear the chugga-dugga chugga-dugga of a helicopter's rotor blades. They pass a Vietnamese restaurant on the border of Chinatown, and a certain odor puts them on Tu Do St. in 1967. They see fireworks burst over an American river and suddenly glimpse flares in the inky darkness of the Central Highlands and remember the ghastly beauty of napalm as it scudded over distant hills. They remember other things, too, most of them unspoken. "It's not uncommon," said Bob Kerrey in his press conference the other day, "for men that are holding any kind of memory of war to not want to talk about it." For all of us, including Bob Kerrey and men who were young with him in Vietnam, memory is not linear. It is not a clean and orderly procession of events filed in the mind; memory is a highlight film. So I believe Bob Kerrey when he says that he can't remember with precision the exact order of events that took place in the hamlet of Thanh Phong on the night of Feb. 25, 1969. He has now dredged up what he does remember in interviews with Gregory Vistica for The New York Times Magazine. "The thing I will remember until the day I die," he told Vistica, "is walking in and finding, I don't know, 14 or so, I don't even know what the number was, women and children who were dead." Conflicting Account He remembers the mission, leading a team of seven men into this hamlet in the Mekong Delta to kill Viet Cong leaders. He doesn't remember what team member Gerhard Klann remembers: coming upon one hut where an old man, a woman, and three children huddled in fear. He doesn't remember holding the old man down while Klann cut his throat. He doesn't remember ordering his men to stab the woman and the children to death, so that no weapons would be fired, exposing their presence. Only Klann remembers those details. The other five men in the unit are now like Kerrey: They don't remember this moment of savagery. "I don't know what Gerhard's motivations are," Kerrey says now. "I know that he's got a memory, and he believes it's true. I just happen to believe it's not true." Kerrey remembers that there was no moon that night over the marshes and rice paddies of the Mekong Delta. He remembers taking fire from the blank darkness. He remembers his men — and his younger self — opening fire with M-16s, pouring 1,200 rounds in the direction of moving Vietnamese, all of them presumed to be the enemy. Klann says that these people first were herded together, and then mowed down. Kerrey's memory is different; as he describes the assault, it's a kind of Vietnam version of the Amadou Diallo killing: panicky young men with too much firepower shooting at strangers they believed might shoot them. By the time Kerrey arrived in Vietnam in 1969, the American war had turned dirty. The 1968 Tet Offensive convinced the strategists that every Vietnamese was a potential enemy, and in a way, they were right. "Free-fire" zones were set up around the country, permitting the killing of everyone who lived within them. The Phoenix Program was well underway, using assassination squads to murder without trial any suspected Viet Cong leaders or sympathizers; Kerry's mission was surely part of that program, which killed about 23,000 Vietnamese. At home in 1969, the anti-war movement was gathering immense force. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were dead at the hands of American assassins. The country seemed to be unraveling. Still, Bob Kerrey went to Vietnam. Many others did not. Bill Clinton didn't go, of course, and George W. Bush chose to defend the skies of Texas in the National Guard, a sacred duty he shared with seven Dallas Cowboys. Joseph Lieberman took two deferments, one as a student and one as a father. Richard Gephardt and Bill Bradley also served in the National Guard. While Bob Kerrey was moving in the marshes of the Mekong Delta, most of today's cadre of Republican tough guys were avoiding Vietnam, too. Rudy Giuliani, for example, never got to Vietnam, although he was the same age as Kerrey (25) in 1969. Neither did Newt Gingrich, son of a military man; he was 26. Phil Gramm and John Ashcroft were 22 in 1964, when the American war truly began; by 1969, they were still at home, safe in their deferments, and would never go to the war. Dick Cheney was 23 when the war started, and got five deferments, explaining later that he "had other priorities." Trent Lott didn't go, and neither did Tom DeLay or Dick Armey or Dennis Hastert, all of whom were of military age during the war. Some of these flag-waving anti-Communists took student deferments. Some had marriage deferments, even though the statistics show that 17,539 married Americans were killed in Vietnam. Tens of Thousands Dead But this we know: Bob Kerrey was there in 1969. That year, 11,527 Americans were killed. That year, 55,390 were wounded. And that year, Bob Kerrey also became one of the 5,283 Americans who lost limbs in the course of the longest American war. This happened on March 14, 1969, when he led his team of SEALs up a 350-foot cliff on an island in Nah Tang Bay, to attack a meeting of Viet Cong cadres. This was three weeks after the terrible events in Thanh Phong. In this battle, Bob Kerrey lost his right leg below the knee. He kept fighting. Klann was there, too: "This is the guy that held me in his arms the night that I was injured. ..." For Bob Kerrey, it was a short war. He left a leg in Vietnam, along with his youth and his innocence, and when he came home, he insisted on living a decent life. He went on to an honorable career in politics, and did not add a single sentence to the history of American lousiness. Now he's in New York, the one American city that understands memory and forgetting. He's an educator now, and has much to teach us all, about pain and remorse and how the unexamined life is not worth living. Today is the anniversary of the end of the war that never ends for Bob Kerrey. No matter what happened that night in Thanh Phong, we should cherish him. Original Publication Date: 4/30/01