LA Times on Bob Kerrey Via NY Transfer News * All the News That Doesn't Fit source - Los Angeles times Wartime massacre back to haunt former US senator By Richard Paddock in Thanh Phong Until Saturday, Bui Thi Luom had never heard the name Bob Kerrey. She had no idea that he served as a United States senator and stood for president. But she did know that 32 years ago, seven American commandos sneaked into her village in the Mekong Delta and killed 15 members of her family - all women and children. Ms Luom was the only one to escape. She was 12. "They killed people in cold blood," she said at the weekend, admitting she still would like vengeance for those killings. Mr Kerrey, now 57, was the leader of an elite Navy Seal unit that attacked Thanh Phong on February 25, 1969. After three decades of silence, the former senator recently admitted that his team killed innocent women and children during the raid. Ms Luom and another witness from the village, Pham Thi Lanh, say the Americans killed 20 civilians, including 13 children and a pregnant woman, during the two-stage attack. Ms Lanh said three of the children were stabbed to death. Mr Kerrey, then a lieutenant, was awarded a Bronze Star after his squad falsely reported it had killed 21 Viet Cong in the attack. Today Mr Kerrey, president of the New School University in New York, maintains most of the civilians were killed after his unit was fired on. "It was not a military victory. It was a tragedy, and I had ordered it," he said earlier this month in a speech at a Virginia military academy. Both sides in the Vietnam War committed atrocities against civilians, but few of the perpetrators have been called to account for them. While the US favours war crimes trials for the slaughter of civilians in East Timor, Rwanda, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Cambodia and Nazi-occupied Europe, it has never advocated the same for Vietnam. Similarly, Vietnam has shown no interest in initiating a process that might focus attention on its own killing of civilians during the war. "To describe it as an atrocity, I would say, is pretty close to being right, because that's how it felt, and that's why I feel guilt and shame for it," Mr Kerrey said. In an article in yesterday's New York Times Magazine, one member of Mr Kerrey's unit, Gerhard Klann, gives a version of the raid similar to the accounts of the two Vietnamese women. Ms Lanh, now 62, also is quoted in the article. In 1969, the Americans believed that a Viet Cong leader was operating in Thanh Phong, and Mr Kerrey's unit planned to take him out. Things began to go wrong when the commandos came across a hut they had not expected. There were five people inside. According to both Mr Klann and Ms Lanh, the commandos slit the throats of a man and woman, Bui Van Vat and Luu Thi Canh. Then the Seals allegedly stabbed the remaining three inhabitants - the couple's young grandchildren. Ms Lanh says she hid behind a banana tree and watched as the commandos killed the two adults. Ms Luom, now 44, said she and her relatives, including her grandmother, four aunts and 10 cousins, were asleep in an earthen shelter. The commandos ordered them to sit on the ground outside the shelter. Ms Luom's grandmother knelt and began to plead for mercy. The soldiers talked among themselves, she recalled, and then opened fire at close range. "Everyone was screaming and very frightened when they began shooting," she recalled. "All of them were killed except me." According to Mr Kerrey's account, someone shot at the unit and the commandos returned fire. In the darkness and confusion, Mr Kerrey said, the commandos killed the women and children 30 metres away. ================================================================= 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-05.01.01-00:31:48-2976