Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly . PERSPECTIVES . Combat Ethics . June 1, 2001

Amidst the observances of Memorial Day week and the recent revelations about former senator Bob Kerrey's 1969 mission in Vietnam, RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY invited two writers to comment on war, combat ethics, and moral accountability:

The Dark Night of the Soul
by Walter T. Davis

"Who was to speak of rules and ethics in a war that had none?"

--Philip Caputo, A RUMOR OF WAR

"In Vietnam, Americanism failed. Power, innocence, purity, organization, technology, can-do optimism, heroism, the defense of civilization -- the whole myth turned in upon itself ... The resulting crisis ... is really the loss of national identity because the national story -- the national theology -- is no longer credible."

--Walter T. Davis, Jr.
SHATTERED DREAM: AMERICA'S SEARCH FOR ITS SOUL

Congress has had many chances to launch investigations into American atrocities in Vietnam and has never done so. Any investigation of Bob Kerrey and the events at Thanh Phong on the night of February 25, 1969 would be self-serving for the military and for Congress. It would make scapegoats of Kerrey and his men and once again absolve those with a far greater degree of responsibility for the mayhem wreaked on Vietnam by the U.S. during those years.

In A RUMOR OF WAR, Philip Caputo's memoir of Vietnam, he shows how soldiers are trained -- turned into killers -- and how military propaganda systematically dehumanizes the enemy to break down the normal taboo against killing. Then he describes the morass of Vietnam: the rules of war were turned on their head; the military brass demanded higher and higher body counts; women and children were fair game if suspected of aiding the Vietcong; and the line between bravery and savagery was often indistinguishable.

Caputo, a lieutenant, was court-martialed because a squad of men under his command assassinated two young Vietnamese who were suspected of being Vietcong. In the military trial, he and his squad were treated as if they were hit men who had committed murder on the streets of Los Angeles. While not denying his role in the killings, Caputo tags the trial a charade: "The war in general and U.S. military policies in particular were ultimately to blame for the deaths of Le Du and Le Dung. That was the truth, and it was that truth which the whole [court] proceeding was designed to conceal."

Gerhard Klann, who was in Kerrey's squad of Navy Seals, claims that after killing five people in a hooch outside Thanh Phong, Kerrey ordered his men to round up the people in the hamlet and gun them down point blank, even though they were all unarmed women and children. Kerrey denies this. He says that the killing of women and children was done from a distance and was unintentional. We may never know whose version of the story is correct.

Any investigation that only looks at the actions of Kerrey and his squad on the night of February 25, 1969 would be an exercise in blaming the victim. I regard the American GIs as victims -- not innocent victims, but victims nevertheless, of deception, manipulation, and scapegoating. The only kind of investigation I could support would be one that also investigates the policies and conditions of the war itself and those who were responsible for them.

War crimes should be investigated and war criminals punished. I consider it an ethical advance that the international court has brought charges against a former head of state, Slobodan Milosevic, for crimes against humanity in the Balkans. But by limiting the scope of investigations into Vietnam war atrocities and focusing only on the actions of those who pulled the trigger, our military and civilian authorities have protected their own hind sides.

What would a more adequate moral accountability look like in this particular case? For starters, Thanh Phong was a free-fire zone where villagers who did not evacuate were marked for killing. Those higher up in the chain of command, who trained and ordered the Seals to kidnap, assassinate, and "take care of" any civilian who accidentally got in their way, bear more responsibility than the men who implemented the policy. Has anyone asked for an investigation of the policy makers who designated certain areas free-fire zones? Why have the commanders who demanded high body counts and dished out medals for indiscriminate killing not been court-martialed? The greater the responsibility for policies, the greater the moral accountability for their implementation, all the way up the chain of command to Secretaries McNamara and Kissinger, and Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon. It is a double standard to prosecute President Milosevic and let our own leaders and ourselves as a nation off the hook.

Caputo put the issue clearly: "According to the 'rules of engagement,' it was morally right to shoot an unarmed Vietnamese who was running, but wrong to shoot one who was standing or walking ... it was wrong for infantrymen to destroy a village with white phosphorus grenades, but right for a fighter pilot to drop napalm on it. Ethics seemed to be a matter of distance and technology."

It is the basic rules of engagement that are ethically dubious. (And I would apply the same critique to the U.S. air war on Baghdad and Belgrade.) What I'm calling for is the concept of shared responsibility. A squad leader is responsible for the actions of those who follow his or her orders. The same should apply up the chain of command.

I don't think that much good would be served by singling out Bob Kerrey, Gerhard Klann, and the other Navy Seals for investigation and possible prosecution at this time. They are still living with the memories of their war experiences. We don't need to make those memories worse at this late date.

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Walter T. Davis is the author of SHATTERED DREAM: AMERICA'S SEARCH FOR ITS SOUL (Trinity Press International, 1994), a book on the religious dimensions of the Vietnam War. He was for many years a professor of the sociology of religion and director of advanced pastoral studies at San Francisco Theological Seminary.

On Guilt and Good Character
by Jonathan Shay

1. War is hell. There are no "rules of war" other than kill or be killed any way you can. All's fair, and anything goes as long as you win.

2. Killing innocents is always a war crime. Better to die yourself than to kill innocents. If you did kill innocents, you should be tried and punished.

These two absolutes are mirror images of righteous self-certainty. They show up in how people react to veterans who reveal that they are in moral pain about events they played a part in, and in how people have responded in recent weeks to Bob Kerrey's pain-filled account, and the competing narrative by fellow squad member Gerhard Klann, of the 1969 killing of at least 13 unarmed Vietnamese women and children in Thanh Phong.

I want to complicate things for both groups of absolutists -- those who think Kerrey didn't do anything wrong and doesn't have anything to feel guilty about, and those who think that if he feels guilty, he must have done something wrong.

The distinction between a lawful combatant (a term of art in military law) and a protected person is essential to the safety and well being of our own ground fighters, whether soldiers, Marines or Navy Seals. The classic examples of protected persons are, of course, unarmed, unresisting civilians and surrendered, disarmed, unresisting prisoners of war. A good troop leader takes care of the troops. Restraining troops from committing atrocities is taking care of them. The reasons for this are quite simple.

First, every atrocity strengthens the enemy. There were a handful of officers in the U.S. Army in Vietnam who saw this clearly at the time. These few leaders regarded the way Seal teams were employed in the Mekong Delta as an advantage to the enemy and a setup for harm to the Seals.

One of them, Colonel Carl Bernard, is a retired Army infantry officer who fought in both Korea and Vietnam. During part of his time in Vietnam, Colonel Bernard was a province senior advisor in the Delta, working for John Paul Vann, the career Army officer and critic of the war who was the subject of Neil Sheehan's book about Vietnam, A BRIGHT SHINING LIE. A few days after the Kerrey story broke, he wrote:

"This episode proves again the very old conclusion about how little Americans knew about the "Peoples War" that Kerrey and the rest of us were in. Simply stated, we did not know how to fight such a conflict at its beginning, and we learned very little during its course, in significant part because of the constant transfer of personnel [causing their knowledge and experience to be lost]. We were hurt even more by bringing the wrong lessons from Korea, and our dedicated, enduring refusal to learn anything at all from the French experience. We knew almost nothing of our enemy; we knew very little more of our supposed allies beyond our assumption of common goals. And we knew far too little of our own forces and those who manned them.

The Seal teams had no more capability to accomplish their so-called counterinsurgency missions one month (!) after they arrived in country than I have of doing brain surgery. The difference is that I know that I do not have these exotic skills, and I stay out of hospital operating rooms.

I was damned unkind a couple of months after Than Phong in restricting the activities of the Seal team in Vinh Binh, the province below the one in which [Kerrey was] operating. As I told them in some dudgeon, their activities were sustaining the Viet Cong's recruiting effort even better than the Air Force's activities."

In a "People's War," the enemy recruits the uncommitted and unmotivated in the civilian population to its side when they can entice us to respond indiscriminately or massively against the civilian population.

Second, every atrocity potentially disables the service member who commits it. When I speak here of atrocity disabling the service member, I am not pointing to that person's distant future as a guilt-ridden veteran, as important as that may be. I refer to the immediate question of whether he or she is lost to the force today because of the psychological injury incurred by committing atrocities. Sober and responsible troop leaders and trainers, who have personally "seen the elephant" and cannot be painted as cravenly "PC," are concerned about prevention of psychological injury as a readiness issue. An injured service member is lost to the force, whether the injury is physical or psychological.

The distinction between lawful combatant (who may thus be legally and morally attacked) and protected person is the bright line between soldier and murderer. The overwhelming majority of people who volunteer for our armed forces are not psychopaths; they are good people who will be seared by knowing themselves to be murderers. You do not "support our service men" by mocking the law of land warfare and calling it a joke.

Francis Lieber's 1863 "Instructions for the Armies of the United States" expressed what I believe to be the continuing consensus of serious military professionals: "Men who take up arms against one another in public war do not cease on this account to be moral beings, responsible to one another and to God." Even tough-guy gunslingers in the ground forces, and all those whose ideals includes "supporting our troops," have good reason, based on national self-interest, to respect and support the rules of war. Everyone who thinks that repeating "there are no rules" demonstrates patriotic support for the troops should think again.

I want to give equal gadfly treatment to those who simply hold Kerrey absolutely culpable because innocent civilians died. These absolutists deny even the possibility of ethical and honorable conduct in a bad war. There are a thousand variations on what people mean by a bad war. These range from condemnation of war under any circumstances by absolute pacifists, to those who saw the large-scale American aims in Vietnam to have been unwise and confused, along with large-scale policies and operational doctrines, such as free-fire zones, that were both vicious and counterproductive. Those who deplore that we fought in Vietnam and how we fought in Vietnam are often ready to blame the people who fought there. They hold Bob Kerrey to a standard of ethical responsibility that says, "If innocents died, you are to blame. End of story."

I would like to complicate their picture by pointing out that the Vietcong commander who was the target of Kerrey's team's mission was a "lawful combatant." The hamlet where he was headquartered (or merely sleeping) was deep in enemy territory.

It is morally irrelevant whether he was attacked by airplanes, artillery, or a small deep-penetration infantry team. It was not morally irrelevant for the Vietcong commander to situate his headquarters in a civilian hamlet, because to do so compromised their protected person status. Bombs and shells were then and still are crude ways of attacking a legal combatant and much more likely to cause innocent deaths than the sniper's rifle or commando's knife. The concept of Kerrey's mission had much to recommend it from an ethical standpoint -- the much sought-after "surgical strike." Had it gone off successfully, as conceived, there would have been no civilian deaths.

Here is where we get to the two conflicting accounts of what happened. Kerrey says the team was fired on in the dark. He says they returned the fire, and when they came forward to look, they found numerous dead women and children. Klann says that they got into the hamlet, didn't find their target, but did find a dozen or so women and children. Klann is quoted as saying, "Our chances would have been slim to none to get out alive" if they had left the villagers alive to call in their own forces to kill or capture the Americans during their retreat. Kerrey tells it as a horrible accident in the dark; Klann frames it as "us-or-them," and says that Kerrey gave the order.

Kerrey was in-country about a month at the time this disastrous mission took place. He understood himself to be responsible not only for the mission, but for the lives of the seven other members of the team. At the time, it was universally believed among American ground forces that the enemy kept no enlisted prisoners alive and very few officer prisoners. The rank makeup of the small number of prisoners eventually repatriated bears out this belief. So even if Kerrey had been of the saintly disposition that said, "Better I should die than shed innocent blood," what was his moral position regarding the members of his team? Would he have been blameless making the decision that they should die for them? Could he, or anyone in that position, have known the right thing to do? Even if we accept Klann's version, Kerrey's decision was not an uncoerced choice to do evil. The situation was evil. Kerrey now finds the whole incident tainting, even though in his version it was utterly an accident. I do not consider him morally or legally culpable under either version.

One does not have to be Aristotle or Bertrand Russell to see that both Kerrey's and Klann's accounts cannot be true simultaneously. Most people will then conclude that one of the two narrators, Kerrey or Klann, is lying. I confess that I am not enormously interested in this question, which is separate from the question of culpability for the actual act of killing the civilians. Can Klann and Kerrey be telling the truth? Factually, no, but psychologically, yes. The returned-fire-in-the-dark narrative may well have been created in the riverboat returning the team to base and repeated by everyone thereafter, becoming implanted as sincerely remembered "truth" by all concerned. As the most experienced person on the team, Klann himself may well have been the one to say, "Now listen up. This is what happened tonight. Got it?" Memory has a large component of social construction. Klann's greater experience at the time and (in my conjecture here) greater role in constructing the group narrative may have contributed to his being able to recall it differently than Kerrey and the other five team members whose memories correspond with Kerrey's and not Klann's. It is possible, given the way memory works, that none of them is lying, in the usual sense of knowingly telling a falsehood about what they remember from that night more than 30 years ago.

Colonel Bernard's judgment now and at the time was that this mode of employment of the Seal team in that densely populated area was wrong-headed from the start, and that the blame lies with the ignorance, negligence, and arrogance of the higher-ups who ordered these young Americans into morally impossible situations. The difference between an accident in the dark and a tragic us-or-them decision is thus a difference without a moral or legal distinction.

Innocents died, and apparently everyone involved that night feels tainted by it. The "gotcha!" journalists, who seem to believe that because Kerrey admits to feeling guilty, he must be guilty, are completely wrong. A person of good character feels moral pain -- call it guilt, shame, anguish -- after doing something that caused another person suffering, injury, or death, even if entirely accidental or unavoidable. Ethics philosopher Martha Nussbaum has made that point in her commentary on Aeschylus's "Agamemnon," pointing out that the chorus -- the voice of the moral consensus, of "what's right" -- condemns Agamemnon for his lack of anguish at having been forced to sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia, not for the fact of doing it. Even if Klann's account were correct, it would mean only that Kerrey had bad moral luck in being faced, like Agamemnon, with a choice between two courses of action, both disastrous. War creates these situations in abundance.

I take it as evidence of Kerrey's humanity and good character that the events of February 1969 -- whether accident or tragic choice -- weigh on him, not that these painful emotions are incriminating on the one hand or pathological on the other. Pioneer trauma specialist and Holocaust survivor, Yaël Danieli speaks of the "four existential functions of guilt": to deny helplessness; to keep the dead alive by making them ever present in thought; to sustain loyalty to the dead; and to affirm that the world is still a just place when someone (even if only the guilt-ridden survivor alone) feels guilt at what was done.

Is guilt, then, never pathological? Never in need of therapy? Here I speak as a psychiatrist whose only patients are combat veterans who have sought help from the Veterans Administration. If the guilt leads them to feel deserving of execution, and to arrange or try to carry out that execution, we will intervene to stop it, with involuntary hospitalization if necessary.

If guilt leads to self-destructive patterns of self-neglect, drug and alcohol abuse, danger-seeking (in the hope of "getting lucky" -- i.e., dying), we will offer education, treatment, and the opportunity to heal with and for other veterans. If guilt results in the sense that one's taint is contagious, that other people will be harmed simply by getting to know the veteran and his narrative, we offer the same treatment mix. If guilt leads to an all-too-common pattern of family life that oscillates between aggressively messing up anything good that happens and being a passive door-mat to other family members, we offer those treatments plus family or couples therapy.

But what if the guilt results in private anguish alone? What I have described above might be called medical/psychological therapies. They often help, but they are not, and should not be the only therapies available for moral pain. Religious and cultural therapies are not only possible, but may well be superior to what mental health professionals conventionally offer.

In the medieval Christian church, everyone who shed blood in war had to do penance. If you committed atrocities, you had to do more penance, but even if you wore a white hat and were a perfect model of both "jus ad bellum" (law on war) and "jus in bello" (law in war), you had to do penance. Most warrior societies, as well as many not dominated by warfare, have historically had communal rites of purification of the returning fighter after battle -- the purifications in Numbers 31: 19ff, for example, in the Hebrew Bible.

The performances of the Athenian tragic theater -- which was a theater of combat veterans, by combat veterans, and for combat veterans -- offered cultural therapy, including purification. Aristotle famously said that tragedy provides "katharsis." Scholars tell us that three meanings of katharsis circulated in Aristotle's time and would have been known to him: 1) religious purification of a ritual taint and expiation of a religious sin; 2) medicinal purgation of something unhealthy, poisonous, or impure; 3) mental clarification, removing obstacles to understanding -- the psychological equivalent of producing clear water from muddy water. The ancient Athenians had a distinctive therapy of purification, healing, and reintegration of returning soldiers that was undertaken as a whole political community. Sacred theater was one of its primary means of reintegrating the returning veteran into the social sphere as "citizen."

One of my patients, whose father was torpedoed in the World War II Merchant Marine, greeted him with a $50 bill on his return from Vietnam and the words, "Here. Get drunk. Get laid. And I want you at the union hall on Monday morning." That is not purification after battle.

Over the years, I have said to my patients (who are almost entirely Roman Catholic because of the demography of the local veteran population), "If the church's ideas on sin, penitence, forgiveness of sin, and redemption are about anything, they're about the real stuff. What the church offers is about cruelty, violence, murder -- not just the sins you confessed in parochial school."

My clinical team has encouraged many of the veterans we work with to avail themselves of the sacrament of penance. When a veteran does not already know a priest he trusts to hear his confession, we have suggested priests who understand enough about combat neither to deny that he has anything to feel guilty about nor to recoil in revulsion and send him away without the sacrament. We also recommend service to others and the doing (not simply passive consumption) of the arts as ways of living with guilt.

Have we learned nothing about the importance of judging separately a war and the people who fight it? Yes, the Nuremberg Principles on war crimes are crucial. But do we condemn an inexperienced young Navy lieutenant for not refusing an order because it could lead him into the illegal act of killing unarmed women and children if the mission failed in some particular way, but not if it went off as conceived?

Prior to all these "revelations," I admired Bob Kerrey greatly (so you can suspect me of being biased in his favor if you wish), and I continue to admire him. But now that admiration is deepened by an appreciation for how much pain he carries. The nature of the pain is a sign of his good character. He is, to use philosopher Karl Jaspers' term, a person with "high rank in being."

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Jonathan Shay, M.D., Ph.D. is a staff psychiatrist at the Department of Veteran's Affairs Outpatient Clinic in Boston and Visiting Scholar-at-Large at the US Naval War College, Newport, RI. He is author of ACHILLES IN VIETNAM: COMBAT TRAUMA AND THE UNDOING OF CHARACTER (1994, Atheneum, 1995 Simon & Schuster Touchstone paperback) and of ODYSSEUS IN AMERICA (forthcoming from Scribner, Veterans' Day, 2002).

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