With Kerrey being nominated by the Democrats yesterday for the Nebraska Senate seat, I thought it would be a good time to remind folks of this episode.
Ping.
I’m reading good things about Fisher today.
Any Nebraska folk want to comment/elaborate???
Where have you gone Dr Raoul??? I was at many a freeper protest with him in NYC- in fact my very first Freeper protest when he led about two dozen of use against 250,000 “peace protestors” outside the UN in February, 2003....
Great work guys!! Thank you!
They always said of Kerrey, “He talks like Ronald Reagan and votes like Teddy Kennedy.”
I wonder if Nebraska voters are stupid enough to get fooled again?
How is the good Doctor? He hasn’t posted for quite some time. Hope all is well.
DC Chapter ping
Kerrey's SEAL team first encountered a peasant house, or hooch, and killed the people inside with knives. While Kerrey says he did not go inside the hooch and did not participate in the killings, another member of the team, Gerhard Klann, said that the people killed there were an elderly man and woman and three children under 12, and that Kerrey helped kill the man. Despite the differing recollections about who actually stabbed these people, Kerrey accepts responsibility as the team leader for their deaths.
If you want Kerrey to implode, just bring up the Thanh Phong massacre. This is why he quit the Senate in the first place. He must figure the flap has died down. It never will.
Harmful Truth vs. Useful Lies
Former Senator Kerrey spent only two months in Vietnam, but he won two medals, the aforementioned Bronze Star and the Medal of Honor for another operation in which the lower part of his right leg was blown off by a grenade. He told Newsweek editor Evan Thomas that the citation for that action was written for another Bronze Star, but it was upgraded to the Medal of Honor because the Navy desperately wanted one for the Seals. Kerrey’s conscience has, by his own admission, been heavily burdened since February 25, 1969 with the terrible things he and six Navy Seals did that night. That burden could be lightened if he would heed the statement that the great writer, Arthur Koestler, made when he broke with the Communist Party. He said that he had come to realize that “a harmful truth is better than a useful lie.”
Gerhard Klann, one of Kerrey’s six men, has eased his conscience by telling the harmful truth, painful as it was for him to do so. After meeting with Bob Kerrey at his New York residence, the other five joined Kerrey in issuing a statement on April 30, that, in effect, accused Gerhard Klann of lying, even though Kerrey insists that he has the highest respect for Klann and doesn’t want to say anything bad about him. Hugh Thompson, the helicopter pilot who halted the My Lai massacre in Vietnam by threatening to use his chopper’s guns on the U.S. soldiers who were mowing down Vietnamese women and children, said on “The O’Reilly Factor” that the question of who is telling the truth might be resolved by asking all seven of them to submit to a lie detector test.
The evidence that Kerrey has covered up what happened on that night 32 years ago and more recently has lied about it has been documented in an 8,000-word article by Gregory Vistica in the April 29 issue of The New York Times Magazine and by “60 Minutes II” in its May 1 broadcast. We have relied heavily on Vistica’s information and the “60 Minutes II” broadcast in writing this report. On May 7 the Washington Post published a long story that included an account by a second Vietnamese eyewitness confirming Gerhard Klann’s report of how the women and children were shot. In addition, the Post interviewed a former Viet Cong guerrilla named Tran Van Rung, one of 11 guards assigned to protect some five Viet Cong leaders who were sleeping in a bunker about a quarter of a mile away.
Bob Kerrey’s Story
A month after arriving in Vietnam in late January 1969, Lieutenant (junior grade) Kerrey led six Navy Seals in an attack on a hamlet in the Mekong Delta called Thanh Phong. Their mission was to “take out” a Vietcong military leader and the village secretary, who, according to intelligence reports, were going to have a meeting there on the night of February 25.
Kerrey’s after-action report radioed from the Navy Swift boat that was returning his team to their base said that they had killed 21 Viet Cong. This became the basis for the citation for the Bronze Star awarded to Kerrey. He says that he told his commanding officer, Capt. Roy Hoffmann, that they had killed civilians, but Greg Vistica says Hoffmann told him that if he had known Kerrey had killed women and children he would have court-martialed him. Vistica found nothing in the written record that shows any repudiation by Kerrey of the report radioed from the Swift boat that they had killed 21 Viet Cong.
When interviewed by “60 Minutes II,” Kerrey said that he had been shocked to find that he and his men had killed “14 or so women and children clustered together.” He said his team had been fired upon and they responded by firing a barrage of bullets in the direction of the hamlet from about 100 yards away. When interviewed in 1998, he told Vistica they had taken fire, but later he said he wasn’t sure about that, saying that maybe it was only “noise.” He changed his mind again after meeting with the five members of his team that have joined him in disputing Gerhard Klann’s account of what happened. Their joint statement issued on April 30 said, among other things, that as they approached the village they received and returned fire.
Most of those “14 or so” dead women and children were boys and girls, ranging in age from a baby to 12 years old. This body count does not include the first five Vietnamese that the Seals killed. As they approached Thanh Phong, they came across a hooch that they had not noticed when they visited there two weeks earlier and questioned some of the inhabitants. Kerrey says that they thought this hooch was a Vietcong outpost. He says that Gerhard Klann and Mike Ambrose, the only two Seals on his team with previous experience in Vietnam, told him that there were five men in the hooch that had to be taken care of. He said he left that task to Ambrose and Klann and that they killed all five, using only knives. They didn’t use guns because that would have alerted the enemy. He claims he personally never saw any of those who were killed. Mike Ambrose claimed to recall seeing three men and two women in the hooch.
Gerhard Klann’s Story
Gerhard Klann tells a very different story. He told Vistica that the only man in the hooch was an elderly grandfather. The others, he said, were the grandmother and three grandchildren, the oldest of whom was about 12 years old. He said that he took the grandfather out of sight of the children and stabbed him twice, but the old man kept on struggling. He claims he asked Kerrey for help and that Kerrey held the old man down, planting his knee on his chest, while Klann slit his throat. He said the other Seals killed the grandmother and the three children.
Navy Seals are tough, but Kerrey’s claim that he left it up to Klann and Ambrose to kill five men, using only knives, and didn’t even watch to see if they needed any help, strains credulity beyond the breaking point. Klann’s admission that he needed help to kill the grandfather shows how implausible Kerrey’s version is. If there were five Vietnamese men in the hooch, ordering only two Seals to subdue and kill them would make no sense. It would make the task more difficult, more time-consuming and more risky. Unwilling to admit that he knowingly sanctioned and participated in the killing of women, children and an old man, Kerrey appears to have concocted a story that erases the memory of the grandparents and grandchildren.
The Eyewitnesses’ Stories
Klann’s version is supported by a Vietnamese eyewitness who told “60 Minutes” that she had seen what happened that night. Her description of the victims was identical to Klann’s?two grandparents and three young grandchildren. Pham Tri Lanh, the wife of a deceased Viet Cong fighter, was shown on “60 Minutes II” saying that she was attracted to the scene by cries from the hooch. She claims to have hidden behind a banana tree to see what was going on. She said the Americans dragged the old man out of the hooch and killed him by cutting his neck on each side. They then killed his wife and the three grandchildren, stabbing them with their knives.
Pham Tri Lanh could not possibly have known that Gerhard Klann had told essentially the same story. “60 Minutes” had hired a British cameraman based in Bangkok to go to Thanh Phong to get some B-roll footage, scenes that could be shown as background as the story was being narrated. Vistica says the Vietnamese had no idea why he was there. He was approached by several villagers who told him about the 1969 massacre, and he informed CBS that there were some eyewitnesses that they should interview. They sent producer Tom Anderson to do it.
Klann had told his story of the massacre of women and children at Thanh Phong 18 years ago to at least one close friend. Col David Hackworth said in a recent column on WorldNetDaily that nine years ago, when he was a columnist for Newsweek, he received an anonymous phone call about the massacre from someone who evidently described himself as a participant. Hackworth did not pursue the story. He gave two reasons: (1) the allegations couldn’t be backed up; and (2) the caller didn’t explain why he didn’t protest and stop the killing at the time or report it immediately, since military law was on his side. Klann’s story was known only to a handful of people in this country, and not to anyone in Thanh Phong.
http://www.aim.org/aim-report/aim-report-bob-kerreys-useful-lie/
You and Doc are the freakin’ best in the world.