The Pity of War

(2 of 2)

One version of the first mission has already been told. In 2001 the New York Times Magazine published an article by Gregory Vistica, alleging that a platoon led by Kerrey slaughtered unarmed women and children during a night raid in the Mekong Delta. Kerrey had not spoken publicly about the assault before the Times story and challenged some of the interpretations that were put upon his conduct. Those seeking the definitive account of the attack will not find it here. Kerrey says, quite plainly, "I remember very little of what happened in a clear and reliable way." What he does remember, however, is anything but self-serving; after hearing a shot, he says, he and his men unleashed a "tremendous barrage of fire." He continues: "I saw women and children in front of us being hit and cut to pieces... After that night...I had become someone I did not recognize."

Kerrey lived, of course, and those in the village did not. But it is impossible to read his book without a sense that war can be almost as terrible to those who survive it as to those who do not. Throughout When I Was a Young Man, Kerrey quotes from Wilfred Owen, the greatest poet of World War I. Owen's subject, he once wrote, was "war, and the pity of war." That is Kerrey's subject too, and he has added magnificently to the long canon of literature on it.