Prologue (excerpt)Page 3Nixon was now addressing the East Room audience. "This is one of those occasions that is one of the really mountaintop experiences for a President of the United States," he said. "The Medal of Honor has been described many times, and there are no words that can add to the grandeur of that medal, what it means to those who receive it. I will simply say that when we think of this great country of ours…we think of it as the land of the free. We should all be reminded that it could not be the land of the free if it were not also the home of the brave. Today we honor the brave men, the men who, far beyond the call of duty, served their country magnificently in a war very far away, in a war which is many times not understood and not supported by some in this country." The president began to decorate the other medal recipients, smile, say a few words and consecrate their bond with a handshake. Kerrey was, in a way, a modern day Jimmy Stewart...As Kerrey waited his turn, he looked like a young man at the height of his glory. But inside, he was tormented, and in his darkest moments he even thought of himself as a coward. It wasn't the loss of his leg that haunted him, but memories of his first combat action in the war. Just weeks before his Medal of Honor mission, Kerrey led his unit on a nighttime raid of a village in the Mekong Delta. Like the Bay of Nha Trang, this one also went horribly wrong-but for profoundly different reasons. "For me, what I lost in 1969 wasn't a leg. What I lost was an innocence. I had now done something that I never dreamed possible that I could do." Kerrey stiffened to attention when Nixon came to face him. As their eyes met, the president smiled, congratulated him and pinned the bright blue sash with the distinctive medallion around his neck. Their hands clasped, and in a moment it was over. Kerrey later joked that all he could remember was Nixon's bad breath. But he was now a bona fide American hero, and the first Navy SEAL to win the Medal of Honor for a combat action in Vietnam. This is not a biography of Bob Kerrey. It is a story about war, memory and the terrible corrosive power of secrets. Above all, it is about the courage to confront past sins. It chronicles the struggle of one man's search for forgiveness, and how a brotherhood of warriors, trained like few others to do battle, have lived with the legacy of one terrible night. For on that first mission, Lieutenant Kerrey and his unit committed, as he later put it, an "atrocity."
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