Odysseus in America (21 page)

In the spring of 2001,
The New York Times Magazine
broke the story of the 1969 killing of at least thirteen unarmed Vietnamese women and children in Thanh Phong, in the Mekong River Delta in Vietnam.
³
The article and the news coverage that followed over the next weeks and months gave Bob Kerrey's pain-filled account, and the competing narrative by fellow squad member Gerhard Klann. Kerrey's team was inserted near this hamlet (from just such riverboats as the veterans Wiry and Farmer served on) to kill or capture an important Viet Cong commander. Here are the two competing 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”
⁴
if they had let the villagers live 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, “them.”

It would be no exaggeration to say that the guilt and remorse of such acts of war can drive veterans insane after they get home. A number of veterans I work with have suffered greatly in this regard. When other people hear these veterans speak of it—and most veterans with such things on their souls keep silent, both for fear of condemnation and fear of hurting others with their terrible knowledge—they usually get one of the following black-or-white responses:

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 are guilty.

The Viet Cong 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 this enemy leader was attacked by airplanes, artillery, or a small deep-penetration infantry team. It
was
morally relevant for the Viet Cong commander to situate his headquarters in a civilian hamlet, because to do so compromised the villagers' 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 a sniper's bullet 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.

Kerrey was in country about a month at the time this disastrous mission took place. He understood himself to be responsible not only for carrying out the mission, but also 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 for them that it was morally preferable that they should die? 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.

One does not have to be Aristotle 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 both 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. Here is my conjecture: 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) his 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.
⁵
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 thirty years ago.

Innocents died, and apparently everyone involved that night feels
anguished by it. Those “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, remorse—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'
Agamemnon,
pointing out that the chorus—the voice of the moral consensus, of “what's right”—condemns King 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.

At last, the giant whirlpool finishes the sucking down part of its cycle and vomits back up Odysseus' pathetic life raft. He gratefully eases his cramped muscles and drops to it. As fast as he can, he paddles out of the strait, casting fearful glances over his shoulder at Scylla's cave in the cliff. After ten days of drifting, he makes landfall on the island of the nymph Calypso, another honey trap, and the last stop in wonderland before the Land of the Phaeacians, where we started.

Some veterans report turning from one sex affair to another, trying, no doubt, to discover in the relationship of the sexes the meanings that war and army life had taken from their lives…. And so they go about … forever knocking at all the doors of their youth, hoping they may be admitted because they are still so young and wish so much to forget.

—World War I veteran Willard Waller
¹

The narrator, not Odysseus, tells us that the goddess Calypso kept Odysseus as a sex slave for seven years. The narrator pictures him daily

… on the headland, sitting, still,
weeping, his eyes never dry, his sweet life flowing away
with his tears he wept for his foiled journey home,
since the nymph no longer pleased. In the nights, true,
he'd sleep with her in the arching cave—he had no choice—
unwilling lover alongside lover all too willing….

(5:167ff, Fagles)

We learned above that Circe's sex-food-and-wine cure to restore Odysseus' “haggard spirits” did not lose its charm in one year, and that his shipmates had to get him moving. But seven years cooped up alone with a nymphomaniac? The eighteenth- and nineteenth-century physicians who coined this word probably had Calypso specifically in mind.

Only a direct order from Zeus springs Odysseus from captivity.
²
Calypso submits to orders and tells Odysseus she's letting him go. His first reaction is to suspect a trap:

Long-enduring Odysseus shuddered at that …
“Passage home? Never. Surely you're plotting
something else, goddess, urging me—in a raft—
to cross the ocean's mighty gulfs. So vast, so full
of danger not even deep-sea ships can make it through …
I won't set foot on a raft until you
show
good faith,
until you consent to swear, goddess, a binding oath
you'll never plot some new intrigue to harm me!”

(5:190ff, Fagles)

Although many of my current patients have withdrawn from sex as part of withdrawing from social contacts altogether, some went through periods during the first decade after returning from Vietnam when they sought out the solace that Circe and Calypso offered in sex. A few of my patients have described extended periods when they were promiscuous. For them it did not provide long-term healing. I have no way of knowing how often the sex-food-and-wine cure worked to restore “haggard spirits.” I never see the successful cures, because by definition they don't come to the VA for help.

We met Wiry, the Navy veteran of the riverine forces in the Mekong Delta, in Chapter 3. Wiry served on the sort of boat that inserted Bob Kerrey's SEAL team and recalls many such insertions and pickups. The civilian occupation Wiry pursued upon his return was a criminal career; he relished the “action.” He also craved sex with women, lots and lots of them. When I realized that I had only heard about this part of his life from scattered, indirect references, I asked him to give me a taped interview about his experience. The following are Wiry's words:

Phaeacian Court

Raid on Ismarus

Lotus Land

Cyclops

King of the Winds

Deadly Fjord

Circe

Among the Dead

Sirens

Scylla and Charybdis

Sun God's Cattle

Whirlpool

Calypso

At Home, Ithaca

You know, the difference between your wife and other women. Your wife is—that's not sex, that's something that you hold for when you need someone who will hold you. It was a different kind of sex, it wasn't rough, it wasn't—you know we had a hard time with that
because
it wasn't rough. Frustration, release—I wouldn't call it lust, just plain outright fucking, you know, that you
can
do it. I think when we came back we had such a hard time with intimacy, okay?, a whore, we were more comfortable with some slut than we were with our wives. We were afraid to do
that with our wives. I think that's an important point. You know some of the guys here, we've all been married for thirty years.

In Nam you just grabbed some broad and you fucked them. It was to let you know you're still a human being. The women probably didn't like it. We fucked anything that walked. Over there it wasn't wining and dining, it was get over here and [sexually explicit material omitted]. Sex proves you're not a fucking animal. Picture this—you come in off an operation, you just killed some people, some of your friends are dead. You helped put them together, you helped take some of them apart, you cut somebody's throat, okay? What do you do? There ain't enough booze in the world. You're fucked.

I remember in ------, it was our home base, they had a perimeter, which was a good-sized perimeter, trip flares, the whole fucking bit. We'd go through this perimeter to get to the fucking village, under the fucking trip wires, two hundred yards, to get laid. Mama-san had a whorehouse the other side of the perimeter. We're tripping flares, they're throwing grenades, we didn't give a fuck, we're going to get laid.

I remember one specific incident coming back from ------ we got the shit knocked out of us anyways, and half my boat got blowed off [killed or wounded], I was on this other fucking boat, we had the troops with us, and I remember we had the chaplain with us, guys were fucking dying, and we had the chaplain with us on the boat going back after we got the wounded into the helos. And I remember just before pulling into the base and I remembered that fucking whorehouse, and I turned that fucking boat and rammed that boat right up on the beach and dropped the fucking ramp and said, “Everybody gets laid!” [Holding his head in his hands,] the chaplain said, “Uhhhh!” All the guys went, “All
right!”
You know you stunk of fear, from sweat and fucking tension, and—you had to get laid. I just ran the fucking boat right up there with everybody on it. Booze wouldn't do it all the time.

We used to have a beer bust after an operation. Pallets of fucking beer. I have it in the movie [an 8mm movie that the veteran shot while in Vietnam, which I have seen]: Black Label, Schlitz, Ballantine, all the beer you could drink. Because they knew—I don't think they know what we would do. They knew they did well with the beer bust. Get drunk, pass out, briefing tomorrow, time to go back out again. All the beer you could drink, whole pallets on the pontoon. Take all you want and get fucking drunk. You went on your boat and went to sleep, and started all over the next day.

VD was rampant. We all knew it. You'd get the shots. And there was the black syph, incurable syph, I knew a couple guys with it. They was
shipped to the Philippines to die, and reported KIA. We all knew this shit, but we still fucked. Talking razor blades and all kinds of crazy shit. Just heard it, I never actually knew anyone who encountered it. Snakes, none of that shit scared us.