[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 147 (2001), Part 5]
[Senate]
[Page 6280]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]



                   SENATOR ROBERT KERREY OF NEBRASKA

  Mr. KERRY. Madam President, I want to share a couple of thoughts 
regarding some reports that have appeared in the media in the last few 
hours regarding our colleague, Senator Bob Kerrey.
  Some reports have been written during the last 24 hours about an 
incident that took place in Vietnam in February 1969, several weeks 
prior to Senator Kerrey receiving the Congressional Medal of Honor for 
the secret mission on which he served. I read a couple of those 
reports. I want to express my personal concern about the approach of 
the media to this issue, and express my personal support for Senator 
Bob Kerrey, particularly for the nature and the circumstances of the 
mission which has been written about.
  It is my hope that the media is not going to engage in some kind of 
32-year-later binge because there is a difference of memory about a 
particularly confusing night in the delta in a free fire zone under 
circumstances which most of us who served in Vietnam understood were 
the daily fare of life in Vietnam at that point in time.
  I served in the very same area that Bob Kerrey did. I served there at 
the very same time that he did. I remember those free fire zones. I 
remember our feelings then and the great confusion many people felt 
about the ambiguities we were automatically presented with then by a 
military doctrine that suggested that certain areas were wholly and 
totally ``enemy territory,'' but nevertheless to the naked eye we could 
often perceive life as we knew it in Vietnam being carried on in those 
areas.
  Inevitably, there were older citizens, women, children, and others 
who were often, as a matter of strategy by the Viet Cong, drawn into 
the line of fire and put in positions of danger without regard, I might 
add, for their side as well as ours.
  To the best of my memory, most people worked diligently--I know 
Senator Kerrey did as well as others--to avoid the capacity for 
confusion or for accidents. I know certainly within our unit there was 
a great deal of pride on many occasions when orders were changed on the 
spot simply because perceptions on the spot made it clear that there 
was the potential for innocents to be injured.
  I fully remember what it was like to ``saddle up'' for a nighttime 
mission with no Moon, with no light, trying to move clandestinely and 
trying to surprise people. The confusion that can ensue in those kinds 
of situations is not confusion that lends itself to a 32-year-later 
judgment.
  There were occasions in Vietnam, as everyone knows, when innocents 
were victims. There wasn't a soldier there at that time, or who has 
come back to this country and home today, who doesn't regret that.
  But I also know it is simply a disservice to our Nation and to the 
quality of the service and a person such as Bob Kerrey to have 
condemnation after the fact which does anything to diminish the quality 
of service, or the unit's service, or the service of so many others who 
spent their sweat and blood and youth in that particularly difficult 
battlefield.
  So it is my hope that in the next days people will understand the 
appropriate perspective and put this issue in its appropriate 
perspective. Bob Kerrey served with distinction. He obviously feels 
anguish and pain about those events, but I do not believe they should 
diminish, for one moment, the full measure of what he has given to his 
country and of what he represents. It is my hope that he personally 
will not allow it to.

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