As I watched Kerrey and Klann, tears came to my eyes. I remembered another incident just after the 1968 Tet offensive when I interviewed a young Marine who was about to be court-martialed. One night, he had been so courageous, calling friendly artillery on his own position to beat off a North Vietnamese attack, that his commanding officer was going to nominate him for a Silver Star, the nation’s second-highest medal for heroism. But during the next two days, the corporal led his squad of Marines on a security patrol into a hamlet on the outskirts of Hue, where they encountered a group of farmers in black pajamas, carrying rice. Without an interpreter or any evidence, the Marines mistakenly concluded the peasants were Viet Cong. In two different locations, they tortured, dismembered and summarily executed the unarmed Vietnamese in broad daylight. One farmer had been hanged and, before dying, his throat was slashed and his heart was cut open. Five women were widowed and 26 children were left without fathers.

I revisited the hamlet 26 years later to find that, while the bitterness had diminished, the memories had not. One widow showed me her husband’s grave in a nearby rice paddy. When I asked about another grave nearby, she explained it was that of her teenage daughter who had been killed by a Marine artillery shell. She turned to me and we held hands. “War is terrible,” she said. “It causes so much heartache.”

Writing in the young man’s defense, a Marine captain explained that days before the battle in which he acquitted himself so courageously, the accused corporal and his men had discovered the body of their former platoon leader, a lieutenant who had been executed with his hands bound by barbed wire, his penis cut off and stuffed in his mouth. The young soldiers were mortified.

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-may-07-me-60504-story.html

Just some random article. Felt foreshadowy today.