THURSDAY, JUNE 6, 2002 — No sooner did former Nebraska senator Bob Kerrey release his memoir, When I Was a Young Man (Harcourt Inc., 270 pages) than an official of the Vietnamese government took the opportunity to charge Kerrey, a former Navy SEAL, with a war crime. Kerrey, as has been reported, took part in a 1969 raid on the village of Thanh Phong that killed Vietnamese civilians. In the memoir — unlike in his interview with a New York Times Magazine reporter last year — Kerrey acknowledges that women and children occupied an area between his armed party and a shooter, "trapping them [women and children] in the crossfire."

"Whatever Mr. Kerrey says cannot change the truth," said Phan Thuy Thanh, a spokeswoman for Vietnam’s Foreign Ministry. "Mr. Kerrey himself has admitted that he was ashamed of the crimes he committed."

Vietnam’s charges are ill-timed and bizarre. Given the preponderance of atrocities committed in the name of the North Vietnamese government, Vietnam’s decision to accuse Kerrey makes no sense. After all, the point of the reconciliation engaged in by America and Vietnam since the early 1990s is just that: reconciliation, pursued in the spirit that both sides will let bygones be bygones.

Kerrey’s first and most vocal defender since Vietnam issued its allegation has been Massachusetts senator John Kerry, who himself earned a Silver Star for his Naval service in Vietnam. "As someone who has worked hard with John McCain — and, indeed, Bob Kerrey — to make possible true healing with Vietnam, I think I’ve earned the right to say this is not a productive effort," says Kerry in a statement to the Phoenix. "Everyone needs to understand that the faults in Vietnam were those of the war, not the warriors. Anyone who thinks heaping blame and words like ‘war criminal’ on someone like Bob Kerrey, who has struggled to come to terms painfully and publicly with his experience and with the accusation of a fellow soldier which contradicts the position of his other fellow soldiers, forgets — or perhaps can never really know — what Vietnam was."

Maintaining the same position he espoused in a Phoenix profile I wrote about him last April, Kerry does not back away from the question of atrocities committed by the enemy in the war. (Remember, he was an activist with Vietnam Veterans Against the War, and talking about enemy atrocities was not common practice.)

"I could spend a lifetime recounting acts of brutality I witnessed committed by the Viet Cong — but it wouldn’t bring back a single friend lost or erase a single memory of that period," he says. "What we need to do is continue down a path of healing, focusing on a future our two countries can define rather than a past none of us can change."

Bob Kerrey, the Nebraskan, is right to make peace with his history in his memoir. John Kerry, the Massachusetts senator, correctly talks about healing the wounds of the Vietnam War. As for the government of Vietnam, its members ought to be thankful that they’re not under investigation for some of their actions during the conflict. But as Kerry says, that’s what reconciliation is all about.