Lt. Rob Bradley's Swift Boat patrols the waters of Vietnam in 1969 in the area where Sen. Bob Kerrey conducted his missions against the Viet Cong.

Sen. Kerrey Being Used by Liberals to Label Vietnam War as “Immoral” (Again)

Sen. Bob Kerrey's Life Was Ruined by Mass. Liberals

By Robert H. Bradley
June 2001

The Bob Kerrey incident is of more than passing interest to me. I served as an Officer-in-Charge of a Swift Boat in Vietnam, which patrolled the coastline and the Cua Dai river basin near Danang at nearly the same time that this incident took place.

My crew and I worked with a SEAL team on more than one occasion, and I have great admiration for the bravery and conduct of those men.

I do not believe that Bob Kerrey and his men executed civilians with automatic weapons at close range, although it is clear that men, women and children did die in a clandestine and undercover mission. If this incident were to turn out to be a My Lai type massacre, then Kerrey and his team would indeed be responsible for an atrocity and would need to be held responsible. But there is scant evidence that this is the case.

Bradley commanded this boat on many missions with Seals and does not believe the accusations against Robert Kerrey.

Like many Vietnamese veterans, I am tired of having to defend serving my country in an "immoral" war. Or as Senator John Kerry said in his article in the Boston Globe on April 30, in a war where there were "no rules" and which was a "mistake." In all wars, civilians in the battle zone have a bad time; and in a guerilla war, it is particularly hard.

In World War II, where there was an American consensus in favor of our participation, there were horrible incidents involving the killing of civilians. The Allied bombing of Dresden, the U.S. firebombing of Tokyo and the U.S. dropping two nuclear bombs at Hiroshima are prime examples of the deliberate use of force on civilian targets to achieve military victory. However we hear little about atrocities or war crimes. Former Secretary of the Navy, James Webb, a Marine lieutenant in Vietnam who served in I Corp as I did in 1969, wrote recently in the Wall Street Journal that one-third of the population of Okinawa was killed in twelve weeks of fighting on that island in 1945.

Rules of Engagement

In the area where our Swift Boat Division patrolled, there were clear rules of engagement. In some areas of the Cua Dai basin, our Swift boats were only allowed to fire if fired upon. In other areas, it was assumed that anyone fishing in the area was the enemy, for there were clear prohibitions on the entire population from even being there. And it was unmistakably clear to all of us that shooting unarmed people at close range, such as at My Lai, was murder.

It is clear, however, that there will be no sustained effort to investigate Senator Kerrey or even accuse him of "war crimes." After all, he is a Democrat, and liberals and their allies in the media will keep their hands off. Liberals have come to politicize everything in our culture, and this incident is no different.

It has been almost amusing to watch such media pundits as Eleanor Clift fall all over themselves in support of Kerrey. If this incident were to happen to a Republican politician of standing, this story would have legs and would kill his political future quicker even than Dan Quayle's. No, the real effort is to make this story yet another marker in the decades-long effort to label the Vietnam War as immoral and a mistake.

After all, many of the now middle-aged men who avoided serving in Vietnam, burned their draft cards and left the country want to justify their behavior. What better way than to use every incident like this to call the Vietnam war "immoral" and to pat oneself on the back for avoiding military service or protesting the war.

History Will See Victories Against Totalitarians

However, the problem is that the American people never bought into this mindset and refused for two decades to elect to national office those liberal politicians who did. Now there are books, such as Stolen Valor by B.G. Burkett and Glenna Whitley, which painstakingly examine all the myths about the Vietnam War spawned by the liberals to justify their behavior and refutes them one by one. There is little question that fifty years from now when historians look back at the Vietnam War, they will see it in a very different light than the "chattering class" and the mainstream media saw it.

Historians will look back at the 20th century as a time when the United States fought in two global conflicts. The first was against totalitarian regimes of the right, the fascists from Germany, Italy and Japan. The second was a war against the totalitarian governments of the left, the Communists. While the first was relatively short and intense, lasting little more than a decade between 1935 and 1945, the second was a protracted, tortuous affair, lasting more than fifty years. It started shortly before the Berlin Airlift in 1948 and ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

In many ways, it was America's "finest hour," to quote Winston Churchill. It was our finest hour because it took courage, conviction, financial resources and stamina over five decades. It also took the spilled blood of more than 100,000 Americans who fought abroad for the freedom of strangers in Korea, Vietnam and many other countries.

It is not an easy task for a democracy to maintain a bipartisan foreign policy for half a century, but it was achieved. It was a great victory for America and the world. Freedom reigns in dozens of countries where there used to be tyranny, corruption and death. Although the war is not yet completely won (brutal Communist regimes such as Cuba, North Korea and China remain), democratic capitalism continues to spread across the globe.

Victory Nearly Aborted by Failure of Liberals

This national consensus which existed from the 1940's through the 1980's was nearly aborted by the failure of nerve of the liberal elites, who came to power in American society in the 1960's - the best and the brightest as chronicled in Halbertsam's book of that title about Vietnam. And the consensus came very close to being shattered by the narcissism of a vocal minority of babyboomers, who were not willing to sacrifice in this great war and who tended to blame America first for most problems.

But the majority of the American people saw it through and then in the 1980's embraced the leadership and moral vision of Ronald Reagan who saw global communism as "an evil empire" and went to Berlin to tell Gorbachov to "tear down this wall." President Reagan, who was loathed by most in the media and by the liberals, who were horrified by his calling the Soviet Union an evil empire, was re-elected in 1984 by every state in the union except Minnesota - Mondale's home state.

During this fifty-year war, the U.S. sought first to contain communism and ultimately to vanquish it. It was often a cold war, but it was punctuated by hot spots. And there were many chapters. Some were incidents like the Hungarian revolution in 1956 and Russia's crushing of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Others were confrontations between the U.S. and the Soviet Union like the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. But where America paid the biggest price in blood and sacrifice were the wars in Korea and Vietnam.

From the vantage point of the 21st century, the war in Korea and the war in Vietnam will not look so different. In both cases, over 50,000 U.S. troops were killed. In both cases, Communist countries, supported by Russia and China, tried to take over by overt aggression people who desired to be free. In both cases, American fighting men were sent to far-off Asian countries to counter aggression and to spill their blood. They did their duty with courage and honor.

In Korea, they fought to a draw, and in Vietnam they withdrew, having been defeated in the streets of U.S. cities but not in the jungles of Vietnam. The result was a critical breathing space for nations throughout Asia and the Pacific Basin to develop independently, free from the threat of the need to accommodate the communist powers. By the 1980's, democratic capitalism under the leadership of President Reagan and Prime Minister Thatcher was ascendant, and the "evil empire" had disintegrated, helped by the remarkable spiritual leadership of Pope John Paul II and the unwillingness of the Russian leaders and military to turn its weapons on its own people any longer.

But the similarities between the U.S. role in the Korean war and in South Vietnam end there. The Korean war was started by North Korea in a clear act of aggression. In it, U.S. enlisted men and officers fought with valor and courage for three long years. The war was finally ended by an armistice in 1953, and the Korean peninsula divided into the same two countries as before - North Korea and South Korea. The Korean War, while not popular, was seen by the American public as necessary and was fully supported. American soldiers were welcomed home joyously as heroes as in previous wars.

The Vietnam War was an outgrowth of the French war in Indochina. During the eight years when this war was fought between 1946 and 1954, the Vietnamese Communists under the iron fist of Ho Chi Minh defeated the French, in large part due to the ability of the Vietnamese Communists to cloak themselves as "nationalists" fighting an imperial France. The U.S. under the wise leadership of President Eisenhower resisted American entry into the war on the side of France, although the U.S. did fund the majority of France's war after the outbreak of the Korean war in 1950.

With the defeat of the French, several million Vietnamese moved to the new South Vietnam in order not to live under the totalitarian North Vietnamese regime. And the U.S. encouraged, through covert means and through a small U.S. advisory team, the establishment of South Vietnam, which would be a fledgling democratic state.

When President Kennedy was elected, the U.S. presence in Vietnam was on the backburner. But not for long. During his administration, Kennedy committed ever-greater amounts of American financial aid, supplies, helicopters and U.S. advisors to the growing conflict. By October 1963, there were 30,000 Americans in South Vietnam, and the conflict was going badly.

Then, one of the greatest U.S. foreign policy errors of the 20th century was committed by President Kennedy. His administration was informed of and was complicit in a coup d'etat by several South Vietnamese generals against President Diem. Following the coup, Diem was assassinated (to which the U.S. never agreed). But the damage was done. The leadership that followed President Diem was much worse, and the U.S., having tolerated the coup, had few options left, having been partially responsible for the state of affairs. Within a month, President Kennedy was assassinated. Vice President Johnson, working closely with the major foreign policy actors in Kennedy's administration, committed the U.S. ever more deeply to the war.

Democrats Never Got Consensus Before War

If a democratic nation like America is to make war successfully, three pre-conditions must be met: The war must be just and seen by the nation to be just; it must be in our national interest; and there must be a full national dialogue about the war so that the American people can support it or vote it down, based upon an informed public policy debate.

In South Vietnam, the war was just. From historical records and interviews, it is now unmistakably clear that the war was waged on the South Vietnamese people for several decades by a determined cadre of Communist party and military leaders in North Vietnam. As with Korea, it was clearly in our national interest to contain communism and to provide a strong and confident military presence in Asia to counter the military aggression of Russia, North Korea, China, and North Vietnam.

Unfortunately, there was never a great national debate. During the 1964 Presidential election, Republican candidate Barry Goldwater was ridiculed by President Johnson for his hawkish views on the war in South Vietnam. Johnson promised that, "Your boys will never be called to fight a war in Asia." Three months after Johnson's victory, he did exactly what he said he would not do. He sent 200,000 troops to fight in South Vietnam in 1965. By the time Richard Nixon assumed the Presidency in January 1969, Johnson had sent over 500,000 troops to South Vietnam.

Because U.S. national consensus about the Vietnam War was never built, the society was pulled apart when the war began to go badly in 1968 - or at least was perceived to go badly. Then all the questions about the war came flooding out. Was it the right war in the right place? Or was it the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time? Weren't the enemy just agricultural reformers? Weren't our Allies, the South Vietnamese, anti-democratic and corrupt? Why didn't we let the South Vietnamese fight the war?

Naturally there were many young protesters, who wouldn't have wanted to fight in any war and who were ready to grasp at any excuse to avoid serving. So the fact that Presidents Kennedy and Johnson had committed American lives to fight in a major conflict without having a major national debate and a Congressional vote became a huge liability for our country.

For when things got tough, the American people could rightly claim that they weren't given all the facts. The anti-war protestors and their leaders were given a ready platform on which to stand, because the liberal elite, who committed America to the Vietnam war, did not go through the difficult process of educating and persuading the American people. This did not mean that the war was immoral or that the war was not in our national interest. It only meant that the American foreign policy consensus, which was rock solid from 1945 through 1968, disintegrated. Tragically it led to the abandonment of an ally and a decade of retreat in the 1970's.

Parenthetically, Pres. George Bush learned this lesson well in 1991 in the war against Iraq. A national debate was held, and a vote was taken in the Senate before we joined the fray. (Most Democratic liberals voted against the U.S. taking part in the war against Iraq to liberate Kuwait, a fact which they hope most Americans will forget.)

Nixon Elected to End War, Not Abandon Allies

So President Nixon was elected to end the war in 1968, at the time when the bi-partisan consensus about our war against global communism was in shreds. It was his job to end the mess that Presidents Kennedy and Johnson had gotten us into and to do it in a way which did not abandon our allies, the South Vietnamese, who were fighting for their lives. It says something about the foreign policy skill and leadership of President Nixon and Secretary of State Kissinger that they were able to disengage the U.S. from the war. His administration reduced U.S. troops in Vietnam from more than 500,000 when he took office to approximately 30,000 in January 1973, when the Paris Peace Accords were signed.

President Nixon brought our POWs home and achieved peace with honor. He was re-elected with 49 states voting for him, which gives an idea of the suicidal public policy approach of the liberal Democrats.

But by this time, the wheels had fallen off the society. This was the period of the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., the burning and looting of U.S. cities and the student protests at our colleges and universities. The left spread many myths about Vietnam, and they were endlessly recycled in the mainstream media. So, unlike the Korean war, when the boys came home, they were not greeted as heroes. They were made to feel ashamed. Courage, honor and duty, in serving America, were not upheld but were scorned.

Democratic Congress Stops Aid to S. Vietnam

Two years later, after President Nixon chose to resign rather than drag the nation through the impeachment process, the Democratically controlled Congress cut off supplies and financial aid to South Vietnam in one of the greatest betrayals of an ally in American history. Shortly thereafter, the North Vietnamese, in a massive conventional military attack, conquered South Vietnam in April 1975. The history of the U.S. abandonment of our South Vietnamese allies in Saigon is etched in our mind in the helicopter scene in Goodbye Saigon.

On the night of South Vietnam's surrender to North Vietnam, former Senator J. William Fullbright [Editor's note: Bill Clinton's mentor] announced that he was "no more depressed than I would be about Arkansas losing a football game to Texas." After the genocide in Cambodia and Laos where two million or more citizens were killed, the countless South Vietnamese forced into concentration camps and the deaths at sea of hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese as they fled the horrors in small boats, one wonders if Senator Fullbright and the liberals like him ever changed their minds. If they did, most of them were never willing to say it for anyone to hear.

Instead, they have ceaselessly put forth in TV documentaries, in movies, in books and editorials in the New York Times a flood of revisionist history which justifies their own behavior during the 1960s and 1970s. One of the marvelous features of the movie, Forrest Gump, was that it was the first major movie in thirty-years which actually had a neutral view of the Vietnam war and negative view of the war protestors. Every other major movie, whether it was Apocalypse Now, The Deer Hunter or Platoon, showed American soldiers who were engaged in an immoral and unjust war.

But it won't wash. The Vietnam war was not unjust and was not immoral. It was not a mistake. It was just another awful war where terrible things happen. In the end, the Vietnam War was just one piece in the fifty-year mosaic of the war against Communist totalitarianism. It was not a pretty piece. In fact, it was a war where our nerve almost failed, as we doubted ourselves and our moral vision. But the innate common sense of the American people trumped the elites, and Reagan was elected President to the great consternation of liberals, who still hate him. Eight years later, the fifty-year war was won. The Soviet Empire collapsed and the Berlin Wall came down.

Yes, many in our generation did our part in this war, and we are proud of it. In Stolen Valor, the authors note that two-thirds of the veterans who served in Vietnam were volunteers, compared with only 40% who volunteered for military service in World War II. When polled whether they would volunteer again for Vietnam, more than 75% said that they would do it again, if asked to serve there. Senator Bob Kerrey served his country honorably, and it is up to him and his former teammates to make peace with their conscience and their God about what happened at Thanh Phong.

Robert H. Bradley served as a Lieutenant in the U.S. Navy in Vietnam in 1969-1970. He is President of Bradley, Foster & Sargent, Inc, an investment management firm, and lives in Wellesley.