The Navy will name a new warship after former Senator Robert Kerrey, the first Navy SEAL to be awarded the Medal of Honor in Vietnam. After the Navy, Kerrey went on to a long political career as a governor, U.S senator and one-time candidate for President.
The USS Robert Kerrey will be an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer, built around the Aegis radar system designed to defend Navy battle groups from air attack. The Kerrey will be the third Arleigh Burke-class ship named for a SEAL.
Kerrey, who has gone by Bob throughout his life, spent a long career in public service which began with three years in the Navy, leading SEAL teams on missions to capture or kill officers and other leaders of Viet Kong forces. Then-Lt. Kerrey was awarded the Medal of Honor in 1970 after being grievously wounded in a nighttime SEAL raid on an island in Nha Trang Bay, South Vietnam. Kerrey also was in command of an earlier raid that ended in over a dozen civilian deaths, a mission he has spoken publicly about as “haunting” him.
Later as a politician, he was a Democrat in the U.S. Senate who worked often with Republicans and, as governor of Nebraska once threatened to order the state’s National Guard to stop a federal train carrying nuclear waste from entering the state.
A night raid gone bad
In March 1969, as a lieutenant junior grade, Kerrey led a raid that went badly outside its plan but resulted in a Medal of Honor award. With intelligence from a Special Forces team, he divided his SEAL team into two groups, leading one up a 350-foot cliff to surprise a sleeping enemy force.
Instead, the enemy had just broken camp and spotted the SEALs as they approached, opening fire.
“They were sleeping in two different groups,” Kerrey said in an interview available via the Library of Congress. “The second sleeping group — we got there a bit too late. They had broken camp and were on the move, and they made contact with us.”
A grenade exploded near Kerrey, badly injuring his right leg.
“I felt down and felt on my leg and it was mashed up pretty good and bleeding pretty good,” Kerrey said. “I tried to stand but couldn’t.”
With a tourniquet on, Kerrey radioed the team’s second element to coordinate supporting fire and directed the team’s movements to higher ground.
The team captured several of the enemy before Kerrey was evacuated by helicopter. His injuries led to his right leg being amputated below the knee and he spent eight months in a Navy hospital in Philadelphia.
“That’s where I saw heroism,” he said in the interview. “Our heroes are nurses, our heroes are the volunteers who came in and laid a hand on you to tell you it’s gonna be ok, who went above and beyond to let you know they loved you.”
Kerrey was the first Navy SEAL awarded the Medal of Honor in Vietnam.
Civilian deaths
Kerrey’s war record came under close scrutiny in 2001 when details of a raid he led In February 1969 emerged that implicated his team in the deaths of over a dozen civilians.
Kerrey’s SEALs raided Thanh Phong, a village in the Mekong Delta, looking for enemy leaders. Gunfire erupted in the darkness as the team approached and in a close-quarters firefight, roughly 14 civilians were killed, according to an investigation by The New York Times and 60 Minutes.
No military investigation or punishments came out of the raid, but Kerrey acknowledged that the operation had killed civilians. According to The Washington Post, Kerrey told a group of ROTC candidates in 2001 that “it was a tragedy, and I had ordered it. Though it could be justified militarily, I could never make my own peace with what happened that night. I have been haunted by it for 32 years.”
Governor and Senator
After the war, Kerrey returned to Nebraska where he went into business and then entered politics. He was elected the state’s governor from 1983 to 1987.
In 1986, Kerrey made national headlines during the federal government’s clean-up of Three Mile Island, the nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania that had suffered a major accident.
Federal authorities planned to ship nuclear waste from the accident to a storage site in Idaho, but Kerrey learned of the shipment — that would cross Nebraska by train — only at the last minute.
According to the New York Times coverage, Kerrey threatened to close the train line at the Kansas border by having the Nebraska National Guard park a tank on the tracks. The train stopped 10 miles short of the border as officials defused the stand-off, and continued after federal officials promised Kerrey that state authorities would be notified in advance of future shipments, according to the New York Times.
Kerrey launched a campaign for President in 1992, but faltered early in Democratic primary contests, finishing third in New Hampshire. He won the South Dakota primary, but soon left the race as then-Governor Bill Clinton rose in the contest on his way to the White House.
In his interview with the Library of Congress, Kerrey discussed the close ties combat produces.
“There are some rare people who don’t appear to have any physical fear at all,” he said. “I don’t happen to be one and most of us aren’t. Soldiers know that oftentimes death doesn’t come quickly, it can be as painful as can be, it can be disfiguring. And you set it aside on behalf of the guys you are with. I hear people say ‘well we all fought for the flag.’ Well, I didn’t give a damn about the flag, but I cared deeply about the guys I was with. I would protect them and fight for them and I wouldn’t have thought for a second if I had to put myself between live fire and one of my men to do it.”
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