Kerrey, the former senator from Nebraska, told his version of the incident in advance of a New York Times Magazine article Sunday and a 60 Minutes II report tonight. The Times quoted one source as saying the slaughter was deliberate. Kerrey insisted it was a tragic accident, but questions have surfaced concerning the true nature of an action for which he was honored with a Bronze Star with a citation that referred to ''21 Viet Cong killed.''

It is jarring to see dead women and children listed as enemy soldiers, yet Kerrey would probably have known that headquarters, defining progress by corpses, routinely added dead civilians to its military body count. Among the Vietnamese dead, the United States often failed to observe the distinction between combatant and noncombatant. What about among the living?

The Kerrey disclosure should be an occasion for the United States to more fully face the truth of what it did in Vietnam, waging a war that was consistently, not exceptionally, a war against civilians. In his 1995 memoir, Robert S. McNamara cited a 1967 memo in which he put the figure of US-killed or seriously injured civilians at 1,000 per week - a shocking admission, but the number, on average, was certainly far higher than that. The unreckoned moral issue has less to do with the actions of on-the-ground fighters like Kerrey - I believe most American soldiers worked hard to avoid deliberate killing of noncombatants - than it does with the indiscriminate killing of Indochinese carried out by American pilots from the air. The air war in Vietnam, spilling into Laos and Cambodia, was mass murder pure and simple.

The historian Sven Lindqvist, in his recent book ''A History of Bombing,'' reminds us what the air war involved:

During World War II, the Allies dropped 2 million tons of bombs. On Indochina during the Vietnam War, the United States dropped 8 million tons of bombs.

During World War II, 70 percent of bombs were aimed at individual targets, while 30 percent were dropped in ''areas,'' a designation of territory in which distinctions between civilians and military were meaningless. In Indochina, where ''carpet bombing'' and ''saturation bombing'' dominated, 80 percent of bombs fell not on individual targets but on ''areas.''

Napalm makes no distinction between civilian and military targets in the area on which it falls, which is one reason why its use was relatively less before Vietnam. During World War II, 14,000 tons were used. During Korea, 32,000 tons. During only part of Vietnam (1963-71), 373,000 tons of napalm were used. That is why napalm became a flashpoint for the antiwar movement.

B-52 bombers, flying at extreme altitudes from distant bases, pulverized whole ''boxes'' of territory in Vietnam, killing everything that moved in multi-square-mile rectangles. In South Vietnam alone, 10 million bomb craters could be counted after the war. This strategy involved not even the pretense that the distinction between combatant and noncombatant on the ground was being observed. The ultimate paroxysm of this slaughter occurred with the so-called Christmas bombing of Hanoi in 1972. For 11 days and nights, beginning on Dec. 18, B-52s and other US war planes pounded the city with 100,000 bombs, the highest concentration of the war. It was a savage act of mere revenge, since our war was all but over; the United States would cease combat operations a month later. That the United States should have concluded its misbegotten, 10-year-old campaign with such a blatant war crime was in fact a fitting end to the American phase of the war.

Last week, Senator John McCain, defending Kerrey, asked the American people to see the disclosures of the killings at Thanh Phong in ''context'' - the context of Kerrey's subsequent heroism. But the far more relevant context in which to judge this terrible instance is the overall character of the US war itself. As the shocked conscience of the nation reveals this week - 13 or more civilian victims horrify, but what about the untold multitude? - we have barely begun to plumb the depths of the physical abyss into which America dragged Vietnam, the moral abyss into which America jumped.

James Carroll's column appears regularly in the Globe.

© Copyright 2001 Globe Newspaper Company

###