Richard C. Paddock :
(IHT, April 30, 2001)
Vietnamese Recall 'Kerrey's Raiders' With Terror
by Richard C. Paddock
THANH PHONG, Vietnam Until Saturday, Bui Thi Luom had
never heard the name Bob Kerrey. She had no idea that he had
served as governor of Nebraska and U.S. senator and once ran
for president.
But she did know that 32 years ago, seven American commandos
sneaked into her village in the Mekong Delta and killed 15
members of her family, all women and children.
Mrs. Luom, wounded in the knee, was the only one to escape.
She was 12.
"They killed people in cold blood," she said Saturday as she
recounted the incident to journalists for the first time. And she said
she still would like vengeance for those killings.
Mr. Kerrey, now 57, was the leader of an elite Navy Seal unit that
attacked Thanh Phong on Feb. 25, 1969. After three decades of
silence, the former senator recently admitted that his team killed
innocent women and children during the raid.
Mrs. Luom and another witness from the village, Pham Thi Lanh,
said the Americans had killed 20 civilians, including 13 children
and a pregnant woman, during the two-stage attack. Mrs. Lanh
contended that three of the children had been stabbed to death.
Mr. Kerrey, then a lieutenant, was awarded a Bronze Star after
his squad falsely reported that it had killed 21 Viet Cong in the
attack.
Mr. Kerrey, president of the New School University in New
York, maintained on Saturday that most of the civilians were killed
after his unit was fired on.
And he has said that if someone wants him to return the medal he
would be glad to do so because he has never worn it and he does
not have any interest in keeping it.
"It was not a military victory. It was a tragedy, and I had ordered
it," he said this month in a speech at a Virginia military academy.
"Though it could be justified militarily, I could never make my own
peace with what happened that night. I have been haunted by it for
32 years."
Both sides in the Vietnam War committed atrocities against
civilians, but few of the perpetrators have been called to account
for them.
While the United States favors war crimes trials for the slaughter
of civilians in East Timor, Rwanda, Bosnia-Herzegovina,
Cambodia and Nazi-occupied Europe, it has never advocated the
same action for Vietnam. The killing of civilians by Kerrey's
Raiders, as his squad was known, came to light as a result of a
joint two-and-a-half-year investigation by The New York Times
and the CBS-TV show "60 Minutes II."
"To describe it as an atrocity, I would say, is pretty close to being
right, because that's how it felt, and that's why I feel guilt and
shame for it," Mr. Kerrey said during an interview for the television
program, which is scheduled to be broadcast Tuesday.
In an article in the Sunday New York Times Magazine, one
member of Mr. Kerrey's unit, Gerhard Klann, gives a version of
the raid similar to the accounts of the two Vietnamese women.
Mrs. Lanh, now 62, also is quoted in the article.
Mrs. Luom, a mother of four, said she was ignorant of the
controversy over the killings until she met with journalists
Saturday. She works on a fishing boat and returned only Friday
from a monthlong voyage, she said.
The Vietnamese government allowed journalists to visit Thanh
Phong on Saturday and to interview both women.
Thanh Phong, a hamlet of about 200 people on the South China
Sea, has changed little since the war. Farmers still eke out a living
growing rice. Many live in thatched huts, which Americans called
hooches during the war.
In 1969, the Americans believed that a Viet Cong leader was
operating in the village and Mr. Kerrey's unit planned to take him
out.
Late at night, the team arrived by boat and attempted to slip into
the village.
Things began to go wrong when the commandos came across a
hooch they had not expected. There were five people inside.
According to both Mr. Klann and Mrs. Lanh, the commandos slit
the throats of a man and woman, Bui Van Vat and Luu Thi Canh.
Then the Seals allegedly stabbed the couple's young grandchildren,
the three remaining inhabitants.
Mrs. Lanh says she hid behind a banana tree and watched as the
commandos killed the two adults. She has said that she witnessed
all the killings but Saturday she said that she had seen only the first
two.
According to Mr. Kerrey, someone fired and the commandos
returned fire, shooting off 1,200 rounds. In the darkness and
confusion, Mr. Kerrey said, the commandos killed women and
children 100 yards away.
Mrs. Luom, now 44, gave this account: She and her relatives,
including her grandmother, four aunts and 10 cousins, were asleep
in an earthen shelter used at the time to avoid gunfire.
The commandos, she said, woke them and ordered them to go
outside and to sit on the ground. Mrs. Luom, 12, was the oldest;
the youngest was about 3.
The soldiers talked among themselves, she recalled, and then
opened fire at close range.
She said she happened to be sitting close to the shelter door and
scrambled inside when the shooting started. She was struck in the
knee by a bullet or a grenade fragment, she is not sure which.
Today, she has a scar nearly the size of a U.S. half-dollar on her
left knee.
"Everyone was screaming and very frightened when they began
shooting," she recalled. "All of them were killed except me."