“No,” Kerrey replied abruptly.

“Not once?” I asked.

“Not once,” Kerrey said.

During our conversation, Kerrey brought up his friend Robert Sparr, a World War II veteran with whom he worked at a hospital pharmacy after his return from Vietnam. Kerrey said that he had never discussed combat with Sparr, either. Although I found it hard to believe that Kerrey had never discussed his wartime experiences with either man, I didn’t press him. I didn’t know that the day before our conversation took place, Kerrey had disclosed in a speech to the Virginia Military Institute that he had killed civilians in Vietnam. Press accounts of Kerrey’s story say that on February 25, 1969, Kerrey led a squad of Navy SEALs (Sea-Air-Land commandos) into a “free-fire zone” in order to surprise a Viet Cong conclave. They came under fire and returned it. When the shooting stopped, Kerrey discovered that he and his men had killed at least 14 civilians in a hut.

Kerrey’s version of what happened is contradicted by Gerhard Klann, a member of Kerrey’s squad who participated in the mission that night. Klann says that the SEALs rounded up civilians from around the village and slaughtered them, fearing that if they didn’t, the civilians would tip off the area Viet Cong to the squad’s presence.

I learned about Kerrey’s disclosures Wednesday, April 25, from my father, Jerry Gitell. My father, a veteran of US Army Special Forces, served in Vietnam in 1965 and 1966. He took on missions similar to the one Kerrey performed that February night 32 years ago — seeking out the Viet Cong in the canals between Vietnam and Cambodia in what was then called the Seven Mountains Region. After hearing the various accounts of Kerrey’s story, my father wanted to talk about which parts of Kerrey’s story made sense and which didn’t.

Like Kerrey, my father often went out on operations deep into the wilderness with small attack parties. The main difference in their experience is that whereas Kerry went on his operation with a group of six other American SEALs, my father usually worked with one other American and a slightly larger group of Vietnamese troops. His service took place during an earlier period of the war than Kerrey’s, when the Pentagon hoped to use Americans to lead and organize native soldiers. Nevertheless, the pre-raid tensions were the same. “You’re laying there,” my father remembers. “You can’t talk. You can’t speak. You can’t sneeze. During the night everything takes on an unreal aspect — animals moving through the jungle, snakes slithering — things that aren’t even there. [Kerrey’s men] could have heard any sound. It could have been any sound. Somebody opens fire and somebody else opens fire.”

One telling fact acknowledged by all sides in the Kerrey incident, says my father, is that the seven-man team collectively fired more than 1000 rounds of ammunition that night. This means that each member of the group fired about 150 rounds, much of it with automatic weapons that fire multiple shots in one burst. That fact points to two conclusions: Kerrey was inexperienced, and Klann’s version of that night’s events has inconsistencies. Firing so many rounds suggests that Kerrey and his men were undertrained and overwhelmed. “They were obviously very frightened,” my father says. “To fire those kinds of rounds at something that wasn’t even there shows that these guys had very little fire discipline.” Even worse, if there had been a real VC unit lurking nearby, Kerrey’s men, having expended almost all their ammunition, would have been dead ducks.

But the high bullet count seems to buttress Kerry’s version of events. The fact that his team fired so much ammunition argues against the account that the SEALs rounded up the civilians and shot them at close range, as Klann says they did. “If they brought these people together it would have required one bullet or two bullets” to kill each civilian, my father points out. They simply would not have unloaded 1000 rounds into a small group of people huddled together. If, on the other hand, Kerrey believed that shots were being fired from the hut, as his story suggests, unloading a full fusillade into the hut, while showing what my father calls a “lack of fire discipline,” makes more sense.

Another disturbing question raised by this story involves Kerrey’s Bronze Star. How could the Navy have given Kerrey a decoration for an operation in which civilians were killed? During a press conference Thursday, Kerrey said he filed an operational report that indicated civilians were killed and that his superiors were aware of it. Yet the citation accompanying Kerrey’s Bronze Star says that 21 Viet Cong were killed, two huts were destroyed, and two enemy weapons had been captured. How does Kerrey’s claim today that he reported the death of innocent civilians make sense in light of the Bronze Star citation?

My father had a similar experience of filing a report noting that civilians had been killed, only to have higher-ups change the details so that the report said Viet Cong had been killed. At this time, my father’s overall mission — and that of the Special Forces or Green Berets in his region — was to win over the “hearts and minds” of the local fishermen. To that end, in addition to conducting military patrols, the Americans also circulated among the Vietnamese, giving out medical treatment and working with them to gain their trust. After about four months, my father believed this work was having an effect. The Americans were beginning to be on good terms with the fishermen and vice versa. Then, one day, as a group of fishing boats headed down the canal, somebody reported that Viet Cong were approaching and called in an air strike.

Alarmed by the prospect of an enemy attack, my father climbed to the top of the observation tower and saw ordinary fishermen in the boats — the very people they had been trying to win over — and radioed the pilot to call off the attack. “Friendlies, friendlies. Do not fire,” he said. “Roger. Out,” the pilot replied and then dropped napalm on the fisherman anyway. My father still remembers the coolness in the pilot’s voice: he went out with a job to do and performed it without interference. Meanwhile, my father knew almost immediately the ramifications of the action. Hoping to mitigate the damage, he raced out to the site and found a terrible scene — scores of civilians on fire and canisters of American napalm nearby. He is still haunted by the cries of the people injured by the napalm. “Choi oy! Choi oy!” (Oh my God! Oh my God!)

When he filed a report on the incident, he noted that these had been friendly-civilian casualties. When his report made its way through the system, the number of dead was increased and their identity changed to Viet Cong. During the next several weeks he continued to record friendly deaths from the incident to see if the higher-ups would budge. They wouldn’t. The inconsistency was finally put to rest only after my father was called in by his superiors, reprimanded, and ordered to stop “causing trouble.”

TODAY, MY father says he’s in no position to judge Kerrey, who announced April 26 that he would hold on to his Bronze Star. I certainly don’t feel that I’m in a position to judge any of this. It’s hard to see how anyone who’s never faced combat can judge Kerrey’s actions. And there’s a lot about this particular war that remains hard to fathom. For instance, how could military superiors have counted civilians deaths as enemy kills — as happened to my father and seems to have happened to Kerrey? And how could Washington bureaucrats have evaluated the war and determined how to fight it by statistical measures such as body counts?

In the end, I think that men like my father, Kerrey, and other veterans of their day are simply casualties of the Cold War — they fought a twilight struggle that was neither total war nor peace. For men like John Wayne’s character in The Green Berets, matters were simple. But for men like my father and Kerrey, there was nothing simple about the Vietnam War.