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The Education of Lieutenant Kerrey Gregory L. Vistica by Michael Uhl
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Last spring, Greg Vistica broke the story about a massacre of some twenty women and children by a Navy SEAL team commanded by former Senator Bob Kerrey that took place over thirty years ago in Vietnam. At the urging of his agent, Vistica has now turned the article, which ran originally in the New York Times Magazine, (April 29, 2001) into a book length work, The Education of Lieutenant Kerrey. Vistica's deeper professional motive for keeping Kerrey in his cross hairs was his desire "to get as close to the truth as possible," closer presumably than in the initial expose. In the 'zine version, Vistica pits one eyewitness recollection of what took place in the hamlet of Thanh Phong on February 25, 1969 against another: Bob Kerrey alleges that the unarmed civilians were killed from a distance of a hundred yards in the confusion of a fire fight; while his fellow SEAL, Gerhard Klann, is adamant that the victims were rounded up and shot point blank. In his book, Vistica concludes without ambiguity that "Klann's is the most accurate version," and that "Kerrey is not a truth teller." In marshaling his prose over the same impressive range of sources that informed his article- not least the many interviews conducted faccia a faccia with his subject - Vistica makes clear that his revised judgment rests, not on newly minted research, but on the facts already at hand. When he first reported the massacre, Vistica was hardly alone among the media voices who chose to tread lightly in dealing with Bob Kerrey, even after Kerrey used surplus campaign funds to hire a fast track PR firm to trash Gerhard Klann, the man reported to have saved his life in Vietnam, and to spin the news toward his own version of what took place at Thanh Phong. Kerrey was, after all, a war amputee and Medal of Honor recipient, and, despite having giving up his safe seat in the U.S. Senate to serve as president of the New School University, he remained a viable candidate for national political office. So, what made Greg Vistica vary his tune from one publication to the next? Vistica concedes that he was not as objective at first as he should have been. Overawed by Kerrey's "bright and charming" personality, and his expressions of apparent remorse, Vistica initially undervalued the testimony from survivors of Thanh Phong - dismissed by Kerrey as "dupes of the Communist government"- whose unrehearsed accounts of the massacre so closely parallel those of Gerhard Klann. The book also provides added reach for exploring materials exempted from the article by space considerations. So we now have Vistica's take to compare with the sketches Bob Kerrey published six months ago in, When I Was A Young Man: A Memoir on how the scrappy, asthmatic lad from Nebraska, already grown occasionally devious by young manhood, evolved into the elite warrior and maverick politician. The reporter's lens is the more penetrating, however, exposing a subtext in the Kerrey postwar biography that might be read as a Faustian compact. In 1970, Richard Nixon, in one of many desperate acts to stem domestic opposition to the war, manufactured a hero; and so Bob Kerrey accepted the nation's highest award for valor, though he believed it undeserved, from the man he says he "hated" most in the world. Ever since Kerrey's journey through life has followed a fabled trajectory. The angry antiwar vet, who briefly damns the eyes of American imperialism, is suddenly a local war hero who bends his native talents toward entrepreneurship and makes a killing as a health club operator. Then, with a big nada on his resume of public service, he enters politics and defeats a secure incumbent for the governorship of Nebraska. The fairytale cycle continues as Kerrey conducts a highly public romance with Hollywood actress, Debra Winger, is elected to the Senate, then runs credibly as a candidate for his party in the presidential primaries. In the meantime, Gerhard Klann has been living a nightmare. And, unfortunately for Bob Kerrey, Klann relieved his heavy conscience about Thanh Phong by confessing to a naval officer, who, only years later, told the story to Greg Vistica. Sensing that the common thread still linking the two ex-SEALs was the historical event that dwarfs each man's individual experience, Vistica briefly turns his attention to the war. He has discovered since his original article that in the early 1970s many veterans testified publicly throughout the U.S. about atrocities they and their units committed as standard practice throughout Vietnam. But the war is too vast a subject to be simply appended to a book with such a narrow focus. While Vistica is well equipped to probe one man's wartime secrets, ultimately he shies from making any judgment about the wider conflict where he now suspects such dark incidents were not uncommon. What remains the central issue for Vistica is not Thanh Phong, but the fact that Kerrey, whose memory may indeed have failed him, has misplaced the truth. Vistica sees Kerrey's dissembling around Thanh Phong primarily as the character flaw of a particularly slippery politician, even as he dutifully reports the erratic behavior of a man clearly traumatized by war. And for Kerrey, who has frequently deflected criticism over recent months by claiming, "I'm no hero," add the pressure of having pretended to be one for the past three decades. If you strip away Kerrey's postwar life of storied ver-achievement, you see a man who all but fits the classic stereotype of the disturbed Vietnam veteran. Documented throughout the Vistica profile are the constant "mood swings," the sudden, unpredictable bouts of temper and nastiness, and, in his public life, Kerrey's reputation as a chronically unreliable political ally, known to his former congressional colleagues as Cosmic Bob. As an investigation of "the corrosive power of secrets"
in the life of one public figure, The Education of Lieutenant
Kerrey is a very good read that might have claimed a longer shelf
life had the author taken it a few steps farther. In the end,
Vistica has not just squandered his chances to explore more systematically
what American units did routinely in the Michael Uhl is Co-founder of Citizen Soldier, current CS Board member, and Vietnam combat veteran with the Americal Division's 11th Brigade. |
