Matthieu Aikins, The A-Team Killings. Rolling Stone, 6 November 2013. “Last spring [2013], the remains of 10 missing Afghan villagers were dug up outside a U.S. Special Forces base–was it a war crime or just another episode in a very dirty war?”
April 25, 2001
One Awful Night in Than Phong, Vietnam
Gregory L. Vistica, One Awful Night in Thanh Phong. The New York Times Magazine, 25 April 2001. “Senator Bob Kerrey’s hands trembled slightly as he began to read six pages of documents that had just been handed to him. It was late 1998; the papers were nearly 30 years old. On the face of it, they were routine “after action” combat reports of the sort filed by the thousands during the Vietnam War. But Kerrey knew the pages held a personal secret — of an event so traumatic that he says it once prompted fleeting thoughts of suicide.
Pulling the documents within inches of his eyes, he read intently about his time as a member of the Navy Seals and about a mission in 1969 that somehow went horribly wrong. As an inexperienced, 25-year-old lieutenant, Kerrey led a commando team on a raid of an isolated peasant hamlet called Thanh Phong in Vietnam’s eastern Mekong Delta. While witnesses and official records give varying accounts of exactly what happened, one thing is certain: around midnight on Feb. 25, 1969, Kerrey and his men killed at least 13 unarmed women and children. The operation was brutal; for months afterward, Kerrey says, he feared going to sleep because of the terrible nightmares that haunted him.