Great Plains Studies, Center for

 

Date of this Version

Fall 2003

Citation

Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 23, No. 4, Fall 2003, pp. 273-74.

Comments

Copyright 2003 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Abstract

Bob Kerrey's memoir begins with a promise to his dying father to find out what happened to the father's brother, lost in the Philippines during WWII. This Kerrey did, but instead of writing his uncle's story, he wrote his own, of growing up in the 1950s in Lincoln, Nebraska, one of seven children in a solid, church-going, middle-class family. "We biked everywhere," Kerrey writes. "The edge of the universe lay at the ends of the dirt roads leading to those places where the wild and wooly frontier began." The fearful things in this safe place were either abstract (Soviet and Martian invasions) or very concrete (spring floods). In the plainest of plain prose, Kerrey records his high school ambitions (to defy his asthma and make the football team like his older brother) and his years at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, where he majored in pharmacy. Although one of his college girlfriends joined the Freedom Riders in 1961, Kerrey confesses that he himself "knew or cared little about the world outside Lincoln." Looking back, he both loves his childhood and marvels at how fully he accepted its limitations. Yet a note of self-justification intrudes even when he is self-critical: he joined a fraternity with exclusionary membership clauses because he wanted to belong; but he credits the fraternity with giving him "a chance to lead" when he was elected its president. He does not ask himself whom he was leading nor toward what end.

In 1966, Kerrey received his draft notice and instead volunteered for the navy and its special forces unit, the SEALS. His attitude toward the war was passive: he could not imagine refusing to serve but hoped it would end before he had to go. Kerrey's analysis of the war is brief, superficial, and contradictory. He knew little about the conflict when he volunteered and seems not to have learned a great deal since. He is content to believe that the US intervened in the war out of a desire to secure the "freedom and self-determination of the South Vietnamese," that in the delta, where he fought, people sympathized "with whomever they feared most," and that the North Vietnamese defeated the US because "we lost the battle for public opinion not only in the United States but also in South Vietnam's countryside." He does not explain why South Vietnamese opinion mattered, if fear alone determined people's sympathies.

One dark February night in 1969, Kerrey led his team into the delta village of Thanh Phong, which, the South Vietnamese district chief had assured him, contained no civilians since the entire village was loyal to the National Liberation Front. The goal was to kill or capture high level enemy officials supposedly meeting in the village. First, the inhabitants of a house on the outskirts of the village are killed for fear they would warn the others. Kerrey "did not have to give an order to begin the killing but I could have stopped it and didn't." He leaves out who lived in the house: two grandparents and five grandchildren. Next, the team searched several houses in the village, finding no meeting and no men. Meanwhile the women and children had gathered outside the houses, talking loudly. "We had two choices: withdraw or continue to search the houses in the dark." The choice was apparently made for them: a shot rang out and Kerrey's team responded with "a tremendous barrage of fire .... " Here Kerrey hides behind the passive voice: "I saw women and children in front of us being hit and cut to pieces." At least one member of Kerrey's team has disputed this version of events, making Kerrey a direct agent in the killing of the family on the outskirts of the village and denying there had been hostile fire in the village.

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