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COPYRIGHT 2001 Las Vegas Review-Journal
BYLINE: KEITH ROGERS REVIEW-JOURNAL
They came to talk about it on the outskirts of Boulder City, where thousands of graves of Nevada veterans line the landscape.
A group of Vietnam War veterans -- three draftees and one enlisted man -- with 30-year-old memories of combat still fresh on their minds, imagined they were in Bob Kerrey's boots that night in 1969.
That's when Kerrey, a Navy SEAL officer who later became a Medal of Honor recipient, Nebraska senator and presidential candidate, led his squad on a mission to capture a Viet Cong leader at Thanh Phong. But the mission went haywire, and when the stabbings stopped and the bullets quit flying, more than a dozen villagers, most of them women and children, lay dead.
"It's a shame that that happened," said Jim Bell, an Army sergeant who made 57 kills with an airborne ranger team that went on sniper and reconnaissance missions in a different part of the Southeast Asian jungle, a place they called Viet Cong Valley.
"When you pull a mission where everybody in a village is an NVA (North Vietnamese Army) or VC, you got to realize the enemy has kids the same as we do. Their kids could be caught in a crossfire," Bell said.
"War is a touchy situation;...
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