LEGACY OF WAR by John WilkensThis review was published in the San Diego Union-Tribune on January 19, 2003. The Vietnam War ended almost 30 years ago and we as a nation still struggle with our feelings about the conflict. It's gone from a war so hated that soldiers got harassed when they returned home to one with enough glamour that sports managers and college professors pad their resumes to claim they fought in it. Years from now, when the historians try to understand this almost schizophrenic relationship with Vietnam, they would be wise to study the experience of one man: Bob Kerrey. He went to the war a proud Navy SEAL and came home missing his right foot. He won the Medal of Honor, almost refused to accept it and then demonstrated against the war. Later elected governor of Nebraska and then a U.S. Senator, he's long been considered a hero in Washington, a man whose appearance in a hearing room prompts other senators to stand up. Yet he may also be a war criminal. All those sides of the charismatic one-time (and perhaps future) candidate for president are captured in this frequently engrossing book by Gregory L. Vistica, an investigative reporter who used to work for the Union-Tribune. At its heart is a question about what happened on a February night in 1969 in a village called Thanh Phong. Kerrey's Raiders, the SEAL team he led, went there in search of Viet Cong leaders. More than a dozen civilians, including women and children, wound up dead. There was a brief military investigation, but nothing official came of it. Kerrey and the others tucked it away in the place where dark secrets go. Carefully reconstructing Kerrey's post-service years, Vistica shows a man tormented by memory. Brick by brick, Kerrey built a wall between himself and what happened back there. But no wall could be high enough. Vistica, best known in San Diego for exposing the Tailhook scandal, got a tip about the massacre in May 1997, when he was working for Newsweek. (He eventually took the Kerrey story to the New York Times Magazine, which published it in April 2001). He writes that he initially dismissed it as "another half-baked conspiracy rumor," but the more he dug into it, the truer it seemed. He eventually confronted Kerrey. The dance the two of them do makes for the most fascinating reading here. Kerrey tries to push Vistica away from the story, calling his editors, offering him a job, throwing mud on his sources. To his credit, Vistica tries not to come across as a cynical reporter who doesn't care what happens to the people he covers. He fights hard for perspective here, talking about the chaos of war and the tricks of memory and the difficulties of finding not just facts, but the truth. He wants to "love the sinner and hate the sin." He's not always successful. Although he tells Kerrey at one point, "We didn't come to draw moral judgments," that's exactly what he's doing by the end of the book – not just judgments about Kerrey, but about the nation's new "environment of fear in which anyone who seeks to hold our soldiers to standards of conduct risks being bludgeoned as unpatriotic." The Bob Kerrey that emerges is a complicated and conflicted man. "I thought dying for your country was the worst thing that could happen to you and I don't think it is," he tells Vistica at one point. "I think killing for your country can be a lot worse. Because that's the memory that haunts." His education – and ours – is ongoing. John Wilkens is a staff writer for the Union-Tribune Return to the book reviews page. |
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