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Bob Kerrey's War Story
Memoir Covers Dispute over Deadly Raid on Vietnam Village
 Listen to Bob Edwards' report.
Listen to an extended version of the interview.
 Read an excerpt from Kerrey's book, When I Was a Young Man.
President Richard Nixon presents Bob Kerrey with the Medal of Honor in 1970.
Photo: Richard Nixon Library & Birthplace, When I Was a Young Man by Bob Kerrey
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Bob Kerrey
Photo: Chris Allingham
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I did not have to give an order to begin the killing but I could have stopped it and I didn't. In truth, I remember very little of what happened in a clear and reliable way... -- Bob Kerrey in When I Was a Young Man.
June 5, 2002 -- Bob Kerrey led a U.S. Navy SEAL team into the Vietnamese village of Thanh Phu in search of a high-level Viet Cong meeting one February night in 1969. But in war things seldom go as planned.
Last year, Kerrey, a former U.S. senator and presidential candidate, publicly acknowledged that his team mistakenly gunned down more than a dozen women and children in the raid. Recently, the Vietnamese government accused Kerrey of unspecified war crimes in connection with the incident.
Kerrey has recently completed a memoir, When I Was a Young Man, in which he recounts the events of that night. He discusses the book and the raid on Thanh Phu in a Morning Edition interview with host Bob Edwards.
"We had operated in the area before," Kerrey says in the interview. "We flew and looked at the village ahead of time, so I thought I had the thing pretty well cased out. It was considered to be a Viet Cong village. But what happened was, we go in the village and we don't find (the high-level Viet Cong meeting). In fact, we don't find any men at all and we find ourselves that night knowing we'd been compromised..."
"We received fire," he says. "We returned it massively. We may have killed some of the people we went in after. But all I see... to this day is women and children being killed and, you know, it's one of those things where you just don't get the moment back. You don't get the opportunity to run the reel back and do it again."
Kerrey denies published allegations by a member of his team and a Vietnamese woman that Kerrey's squad herded together the civilians and massacred them.
"That's just how the story was told, that a Vietnamese woman said, 'I witnessed it.'" Kerrey says. "What we've learned afterwards is she wasn't just a Vietnamese woman, she was a Viet Cong soldier. Big difference... Then she changed her story and said, 'I wasn't Viet Cong, my husband was Viet Cong.' And that became a minor change in the story... I get a little angry with what I consider to be a double standard in evaluating what I saw versus what an enemy soldier would say..."
Kerrey discusses a subsequent incident in March 1969 in which he lost part of his leg when a grenade exploded at his feet. For his bravery in that incident, Kerrey received the Medal of Honor, which he initially felt he didn't deserve, from President Richard Nixon, whom he says he hated. "I blamed him for everything, I think unfairly..." Kerrey says. "There were a lot of things that happened before he came into office..."
He also recounts how the United States couldn't bring itself to quit Vietnam in 1968, even though it knew it couldn't win the war. "To win that war, you've got to go into villages where the enemy is and you've got to do terrible things and we were unwilling to pay that price... The trouble is, our political leaders couldn't reach that conclusion and they couldn't get out. And so we had five more years, from '68 to '73... You knew what was going on, this thing was not going to be won. There was not a victory in sight. When I got to Vietnam, it was even more obvious."
Previous NPR Coverage
Search for more stories about Bob Kerrey.
Other Resources
• Read a synopsis of When I Was a Young Man.
• Read "One Awful Night in Thanh Phong," the April 25, 2001, New York Times Magazine article about Bob Kerrey.
• Read about Kerrey's 60 Minutes II interview on CBS in April 2001.
• Visit Kerrey's home page at New School University, where he is president.
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