Kerrey’s Accuser
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
It is said that the classic example of chutzpah is the boy who murders his parents and asks for mercy from the court because he’s an orphan. But the genre has a new contender — the idea of a war crimes accusation being made by an official of Communist Vietnam. It happened last week, when a spokesman for the dictatorship in Hanoi, which was guilty of war crimes throughout its assault on free Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s, accused the former senator from Nebraska, Bob Kerrey, of war crimes during the raid he led on February 25, 1969, at the Mekong Delta village of Thanh Phong. Mr. Kerrey, now president of The New School, has acknowledged that his squad of Navy Seals killed 13 civilians, but he said it was a mistake — one he clearly has regretted for years.
The story of the raid by Mr. Kerry’s unit of Navy Seals on Thanh Phong was told last year in an important dispatch in The New York Times. In an earlier edition of his memoirs, Mr. Kerrey had said that he did not know of the civilian casualties until the shooting stopped. The Associated Press reports this week that he has now revised his version of the events in a new edition of his war memoir, “When I Was a Young Man.” Mr. Kerrey writes that he was aware that women and children had begun to gather as his squad searched the village for enemy Viet Cong. His men were fired upon from the direction of the women and children, the Americans fired back, and the villagers were caught in the cross fire, he said.
The war crimes allegations against Mr. Kerrey — made by a spokesman, Phan Thuy Thanh, of the foreign ministry at Hanoi — was the first time Vietnam has publicly accused Mr. Kerrey of criminal activity. The spokesman for the red regime did not specify what crimes Vietnam believed Mr. Kerrey had committed. The thing to remember about Vietnam is that the entire Communist myth of the war is so riddled with falsehood that the standing of Hanoi to enter into a discussion of morals is non-existent. Should the question of war crimes in Indochina ever come before a court, the Soviet perpetrators, the Red Chinese, the North Vietnamese and their Viet Cong puppets will be the ones to be put on the dock. As for judges, we would be happy to see the robes of justice draped on the frame of the Nebraskan who holds the medal of honor for courage under fire.
