Kerrey's SEAL Team Fought "Other War" Via NY Transfer News * All the News That Doesn't Fit Friday April 27 06:27 AM EDT (via Yahoo) Kerrey SEAL Team Fought Other War By RICHARD PYLE, Associated Press Writer NEW YORK (AP) - At the end of its 2,600-mile meander from the high country of Tibet, the Mekong River splays into muddy fingers reaching for the South China Sea. There, in a wide estuary of mangrove swamps and clusters of huts on stilts, the other Vietnam war was fought. And it was there, in a tiny coastal settlement called Thanh Phong, in February 1969, that then-Lt. j.g. Bob Kerrey and his six-man Navy SEAL team came to grips with that war. In a furious few minutes of red muzzle flashes and confusion, they killed a dozen or more Vietnamese civilians. Thirty-two years later, Kerrey is publicly agonizing in front of one TV camera after another over what he calls a mistake. "We fired because we were fired upon," he said Thursday. "We did not go out on a mission to kill innocent people. I feel guilty about what happened." At least one other member of the SEAL unit claims it was more than that - it was, he says, a massacre. "We herded them together in a group. We lined them up and we opened fire," Gerhard Klann says in an interview to be shown on CBS' "60 Minutes II." Kerrey, a Democrat who served as governor and senator from Nebraska and ran for president in 1992, said Thursday he doesn't know why his former colleague is making that claim. "I don't know his motive," Kerrey said. Mistake or massacre, it was the Delta war in microcosm, a war of ambiguity, where the "enemy" was everywhere yet nowhere, and solid intelligence information was sometimes guesswork in disguise. "I heard this story before, but always in the context of other SEAL operations, as the sort of thing that probably happened more often than we want to believe," said Dale Andrade, an Army historian who wrote a book about the war in the Mekong Delta. The National Liberation Front, the homegrown insurgency that fought to overthrow the central government of South Vietnam, had its roots and its greatest strength in the rice paddies and hamlets of the Delta. The yellow-and-red government flags, fluttering from shacks and fishing sampans, could mean political allegiance to Saigon - or insurance from being attacked from the air. While North Vietnam funneled fully equipped army divisions down the Ho Chi Minh Trail and fought set-piece battles against American and South Vietnamese forces in the mountains and rice plains to the north, the Delta was where the grass-roots revolutionaries known as the Viet Cong flourished, recruiting and haranguing the peasantry into embracing the communist cause. Many of the war's best-known images and catch phrases came from this fertile, lowland region, where rice grew in fields of Day-Glo-green and old women gazed stoically from under their conical hats. The "black pajamas" worn by the Delta's peasants became the uniform of the Viet Cong. Children tossed grenades from motor bikes as they rode past bridge guards. Saigon's "struggle for the hearts and minds" of the local populace was distilled to its essence here. On the first peninsula north of Thanh Phong was Ben Tre, immortalized by a U.S. officer as the town "we had to destroy ... in order to save it." To U.S. troops it was "Charlie country," a deceptively tranquil, table-flat landscape defined only by canals, paddy dikes and tree lines that sometimes provided cover for enemy ambushes. One U.S. Army division, the 9th Infantry, was deployed there as a "riverine force" to patrol inland waterways in armored scows resembling Civil War iron-clads. But Andrade said the riverine forces never reached into the Viet Cong-dominated coastal areas. For the most part, it was a war that came alive after dark. It was then that the Viet Cong invaded villages, held political rallies, proselytized and terrorized the population, and kidnapped and murdered local officials appointed by Saigon. To counter this, the United States in late 1967 devised the so-called Phoenix program, whose mission, in the bland argot of the war bureaucracy, was to "neutralize" the communist leadership, allowing the government to take local control. Neutralize could mean anything: terrorize, detain, convert, assassinate. While officially described as a South Vietnamese program, Phoenix was run by the U.S. Military Assistance Command Vietnam, with assistance from the CIA (news - web sites). Both Vietnamese and American units carried out the missions. The late William Colby, who ran the program from the U.S. Embassy in Saigon and went on to become CIA director, later told Congress that Phoenix had led to the deaths of 20,587 people by May 1971. The Navy SEALS - a crack commando force whose acronym stands for Sea-Air-Land - were perfectly suited for this kind of work. Working in small teams, their clandestine night missions took them into areas either controlled by the Viet Cong or declared "free fire zones" from which villagers had been evacuated and anyone remaining was assumed to be hostile. Kerrey says his team was not on a Phoenix mission at the time, but the purpose and effect were the same. It was that kind of mission, and that kind of place, where Kerrey's squad landed by boat on the night of Feb. 25, 1969, expecting to find a secret meeting of Viet Cong officials and came face to face with Vietnam's other war. [AP EDITOR'S NOTE - Richard Pyle covered the Vietnam War for five years and was the AP's Saigon bureau chief in 1970-73.] ================================================================= NY Transfer News Collective * A Service of Blythe Systems Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us 339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012 http://www.blythe.org e-mail: nyt@blythe.org ================================================================= nytas-04.29.01-00:07:59-26766