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COPYRIGHT 2002 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
On October 17, 1944, John Kerrey, an American soldier serving in the Philippines, died for no particularly good reason. That morning, Kerrey, who had survived the fall of Bataan and two and a half years of guerrilla fighting on Luzon, had set out with four other servicemen from their command post to rendezvous with an American submarine on Dibut Bay. Kerrey's companions travelled by land and made it safely to the submarine, but Kerrey chose to go in an outrigger with a Filipino guide. It is unclear whether he was killed by his guide, or fell to the Japanese, or simply drowned in the rough sea beyond the bay.
At the start of "When I Was a Young Man" (James H. Silberman/ Harcourt; $26), former Senator Bob Kerrey explains that he intended in the book to tell the story of his uncle John, whose very existence was kept hidden from him until he was ten years old. But things didn't work out that way: instead of being about John and the Philippines, the book is about Bob and Vietnam. Kerrey offers several explanations for the shift in focus, but he never mentions the obvious reason--the first lapse in a book whose subject turns out to be not meaningless death but guilt and evasion.
For many years, Bob Kerrey seemed the ideal hero for a non-ideal war; for a brief moment in 1992, it even appeared that this might be enough to carry him to the White House. In serving his country, Kerrey had suffered terribly--he lost half his right leg to a Vietcong grenade--and in recognition of his bravery he had been awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. Yet he never liked to talk about what had happened to him. This reticence was taken as evidence of his reservations about Vietnam--he eventually came to oppose the war--and it allowed him to be embraced both by those who had supported American involvement and by those who had protested against it. It now appears, however, that there were other reasons for his diffidence.
Kerrey's tour of duty as a Navy lieutenant lasted only a couple of months, and during that time he completed just two missions. The...
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