Kerrey in the Mire; Heywood Jablome, 41, Manhattan Real Estate Agent

All last week, SEAL Gerhard Klann's allegations?that he participated in a 1969 massacre of civilians in the Mekong Delta led by ex-Sen. Bob Kerrey?were masticated in the press. Ninety percent of the supposedly peacenik-infested media joined Kerrey's Senate colleagues in enjoining us to leave the guy alone. CBS' 60 Minutes II special aired. Kerrey himself assembled all of his former SEAL teammates (except for Klann) to New York, where they issued a joint statement. And not one scrap of any of this has made it more likely that Klann's claims are false or Kerrey's denials true.

In fact, the manifesto signed by all the SEAL team members (again, except Klann) raises more questions than it answers. In the very first paragraph, Kerrey and his teammates assert that what happened on Feb. 25, 1969, has been "up to this point a private memory." This notion, that soldiers have a sort of copyright on the historical record, is repellent at first sight. But rather than share their private memories, the SEAL team goes on to stonewall for the entire rest of the letter, leaving us with a version of events that is less detailed than the one Kerrey gave to CBS and The New York Times' Gregory Vistica. In this light, the letter is not an explanation or a clarification at all. It's worse than a nondenial denial. It's a show of force, a way of saying to the public and the media: We're sticking together on this one. Up yours. There are a few points that journalists and investigators might want to probe:

(1) "One of the men in our squad [Klann] remembers that we rounded up women and children and shot them at point-blank range in order to cover our extraction. That simply is not true." Whether in good faith or bad, the Kerrey-aligned SEALs have used an old Clinton trick here: to render the proposition to be denied so complex that if any constituent part of it is disproved, the whole ball of wax can be denied.

(2) "We know that there was an enemy meeting in this village." Do we? Not according to anything we've heard from either the Klann side or the Kerrey side.

(3) "We know this meeting had been secured by armed forces." No, we don't. We don't even know that there was a meeting. Show us that there was a meeting, and then we can begin to talk about an armed guard.

(4) "In the Vietnam War gender and age distinctions were not always reliable indicators of who was a threat to your life." The p.c. language here covers up what is basically a confession.

(5) "No order was given or received to execute innocent women, old men and children as has been described by some." See point 1 about the Clinton hyper-complexification of what is to be denied. The passage quoted at point 4, as well as Kerrey's persistent claim that in a free-fire zone everyone can be assumed to be Vietcong, implies that the SEALs did not believe?even at the shallowest metaphysical level?that the people killed were "innocent." Therefore, this assertion about no order being given could be made "honestly" even if everything Gerhard Klann says is true.

At this point it's worth returning to what has up to now been considered the weakest point of Gerhard Klann's story: Why did the soldiers think that shooting these people would help them escape? This is the one aspect of the story that Vistica himself is uncomfortable with. "While Klann's version accounts for why the women and children died in a group," he writes, "it, too, suffers from inconsistencies. It is not clear, for example, why the squad thought that noisily gunning down 13 people in a settled area would improve their prospects of making their retreat undetected."

The New Republic's Gregg Easterbrook raised the same point in more detail, in a letter to Slate's Tim Noah: "If you wanted to kill civilians so they wouldn't give you away," Easterbrook asks, "why would you spend a full minute firing six assault weapons, which is what Klann claims they did? That would make a racket that could be heard for a mile or more under rural circumstances? Maybe you would think you had to kill the witnesses because you were in such a state of confusion and panic that you couldn't think straight. But the circumstances don't sound like ones so horrible they would keep soldiers from thinking straight. Maybe they did it because they were zombies who were trained to get a body count on every outing and only later thought, My God, what have I done. But even Klann doesn't say that. He says they wanted to cover the retreat, and this basically makes no sense."

It's true that opening up with 1200 rounds would make enough noise to alert VC (and others) across a great distance. But even granting that, Klann's story makes perfect sense. In that kind of jungle-river-canal-dike-rice-paddy terrain, you can disappear into the bushes in about 10 seconds (as those who fought the Vietcong learned). Now, that night, either there were VC close by or there were not. If they were close by, the SEAL team was going to have to shoot its way out of Thanh Phong anyhow. If they were far away, then by the time the VC heard the noise of gunfire and reached the village, the SEALs would have gotten away.

What Vistica and Easterbrook forget is that simply "getting away" from the village does the SEAL team absolutely no good. It still leaves them isolated and vastly outnumbered behind enemy lines. They must reach a prearranged rendezvous point with their "swift boat." If they don't, they die. Presumably they've trained with maps and compasses and know one route to that boat. We can assume they know not a single thing else about the surrounding countryside, which is, according to their operational assumptions, 100 percent hostile. So the single biggest threat to their lives is not the prospect of the VCs learning of their presence. (They'd find that out almost immediately anyway if the women were left alive.) The biggest potential threat to the SEALs was a word-of-mouth communication that would expose their route out. You don't need to resort to a zombie state or to "confusion and panic" to explain the lengths to which Kerrey's squad went to eliminate that threat.

A second piece of information the SEALs didn't want exposed by chattering villagers was their troop strength. Clearly it was preferable that the VC not know that the team consisted of just seven guys, young, shit-scared and lost in the jungle. Here, making a big racket in killing the women might actually help. If earshot is all the VC have to go by, then firing 1200 rounds (and maybe a couple of rockets) would have protected the SEALs' retreat by leaving the Vietnamese under the impression they'd have a whole company to pursue.

This kind of survivalist thinking is exactly what was so sickening about the war. But if one follows that line of thinking, murdering the women?and murdering them that way?would have been a rational move.

I.P. Daily

As those who follow Jim Romenesko's media-gossip website realize, last Tuesday's New York Post was marked by a priceless howler. In the paper's "New York Pulse" section, a credulous reporter named Neil Graves went out to do man-on-the-street interviews for an article about investment brokerages that double as espresso bars. Under the unfortunate headline "Get a Cuppa Joe & Check Your Dough?New Bank Cafes Want You to Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is," you can read the following: "Heywood Jablome, 41, a Manhattan real estate agent, agreed. 'This is a nice-looking store, but I don't see people coming in here to trade,' he said."

Heywood Jablome! The oldest dirty sixth-grade pun in the book! Since the man who presented himself as "Mr. Jablome" probably gave his real age, we can assume it goes back at least to the time when 41-year-old Heywood himself was in sixth grade, back in 1971. Perhaps the myth of journalists as hard-bitten, been-around-the-block, street-smart types can finally be consigned to the attic.

One would say, given the dweebish profile of most contemporary journalists, that it's amazing that more hoaxes like this don't occur, that man-on-the-street pieces aren't regularly sourced by Heywood Jablome, or I.P. Daley, or Dick Hertz (from Holden). But in fact, they are. This stuff happens all the time. A "Heywood Jablomy" (he must have come from the branch of the family that changed the spelling) had a letter-to-the-editor published in the San Diego Union-Tribune four years ago. ("Move the Chargers to another city!" was Jablomy's lament.) One Haywood Jablome (must be a cousin) told interviewers at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution last summer that Mission: Impossible II had "excellent action and amazing plot twists." The funniest caper ever pulled by the Jablome family appeared in Colorado's Grand Junction Daily Sentinel three years ago, where the quoted scion (who spells his name "Haywood Jablomi") was remarked as "chuckling with his two friends" during an interview at the Mesa County Fair.

My favorite such story, though, appeared in The Boston Globe in 1997. Staff writer Brian MacQuarrie was sent to heavily Irish South Boston to report on a police crackdown on teenage drinking. This required interviewing some tough kids, but finally, MacQuarrie found one kind enough to talk to him. "One of the youths arrested," MacQuarrie wrote, "17-year-old Pat McGroin?"