Whole seas, one feels, could not contain the tears that humanity must shed at the knowledge of the horror at My Lai. As one goes over the event yet another time—as one rereads Seymour M. Hersh's brilliant, pitiless account My Lai 4, published last year—one has to try to insulate one's self from the details of the massacre, protectively conjuring up visions of other atrocities, saying to oneself: “Keep thinking of Bengal, of the murder of the Huguenots, the sack of Magdeburg, of Lidice, Malmédy. Isn't this only what men have always done to other men?”
Near them [writes Hersh] was a young Vietnamese boy, crying, with a bullet wound in his stomach….The radio operator then stepped within two feet of the boy and shot him in the neck with a pistol. Blood gushed from the child's neck. He then tried to walk off, but he could only take two or three steps. Then he fell onto the ground. He lay there and took four or five deep breaths and then he stopped breathing. The radio operator turned to Stanley and said, “Did you see how I shot that son of a bitch?”
* * *
Nineteen-year-old Nguyen Thi Ngoc Tuyet watched a baby trying to open his slain mother's blouse to nurse. A soldier shot the infant while it was struggling with the blouse, and then slashed at it with his bayonet.
* * *
Nguyen Khoa, a thirty-seven-year-old peasant, told of a thirteen-year-old girl who was raped before being killed. G.I.’s then attacked Khoa's wife, tearing off her clothes. Before they could rape her, however, Khoa said, their six-year-old son, riddled with bullets, fell and saturated her with blood.
Until recently America had by luck or through divine providence been saved from being a truly militaristic nation, but it has in the past been a bloodthirsty one. Such passages as those just quoted therefore do not so intolerably rend the heart merely because they describe atrocities at the hands of wholesome American boys—these clean-cut American boys, after all, butchered the Indians and inflicted tortures on the Filipinos—but because just as we grieve for its victims we grieve for an America which, twenty-six years after the end of a war to save the world for democracy, finds itself close to moral bankruptcy—the criminal nature of its war in Southeast Asia symbolized by the My Lai carnage and by its flyblown principal executor, First Lieutenant William Laws Calley.
For this reason Calley commands our most intense interest. Banal, stunted in mind and body, colorless, lacking even a native acumen, with an airless, dreary brain devoid of wit—he is not the first nobody whose brush with a large moment in history has personified that moment and helped define it. One thinks of Eichmann. Almost all comparisons between America and Hitler's Germany are strident and inept, but here the analogy seems appropriate. Both of them, the Nazi functionary and the loutish American officer, attempted exculpation of their enormous crimes through insistence that they were merely cogs in a great machine, that they were only carrying out orders, that the true guilt lay with others. Both of them finally, in their rancid ordinariness, symbolized the historic moment more dramatically than the flamboyant leaders they served.
Thus, as the Nazi concentration camps recede into the past, Eichmann seems to embody their memory, and even that of the entire Nazi regime, more significantly than does a Goebbels or a Himmler. It would slander the young men who have been forced to fight and die in Vietnam to say that Calley is an archetype of the soldier in this war. He may in the perspective of time, however, become more archetypal of the war's total moral degeneracy than its actual perpetrators—miscreants of the White House and the Pentagon too well known, too numerous, and enjoying at the moment too much exposure to need naming here.
This is not to assume that on lower levels of authority there are not those who share in Calley's guilt. It is spelled out in Hersh's book, and one's conviction that other officers were criminally involved is reinforced by Richard Hammer's The Court-Martial of Lt. Calley, an excellent, straightforward piece of reporting which pursues the theme of Calley's individual guilt with almost puritanical zeal but which cannot help leaving the impression of the culpability of others. It is difficult to believe, for instance, that Lieutenant Colonel Barker, the task force commander who was whirling over the area in his helicopter as Charlie Company went about its bloody work, was not aware of the true nature of what was happening and should not have stopped it; but this can probably never be proved, for Barker was killed in another action.
But to focus upon the guilt of others is largely begging the question when it comes to judging Calley, for, as Hammer points out, we do not exonerate a criminal merely because his accomplices in the crime had the good luck to escape justice. Military life may be a repugnant notion to most of us; but the idea commonly nurtured by those civilians who most detest, or misunderstand, or indeed admire the military as an institution—that because it is engaged in killing it is an amoral place, or a place in which ordinary considerations of morality are irrelevant—is tempting and romantic but false. Despite the paradoxes involved, the military may remain our most intransigently “moral” institution;* and it was an unawareness of this fact on the part of those millions of Americans who thought Calley was persecuted, or considered him a sacrificial lamb, that led to their confusion.
Much, for instance, has been made of Calley's “orders.” Is it not the first duty of a military man to obey orders from a superior? The answer is yes, but a strictly qualified yes. Calley and other witnesses contended that at Captain Ernest Medina's briefing the night before the assault, the captain ordered the company to “kill everything.” Medina and still other witnesses have disclaimed such an order, maintaining that by “kill” or “waste” or “destroy” he did not mean unarmed men, women, and children. This issue, in detail, remains obscure.
Yet the point is that if Medina did indeed give an order specifying the wholesale murder of helpless civilians, it was an illegal order, which Calley—especially as a commissioned officer, whose very commission implies that he is supposed to know better—was obliged to refuse to execute. His own orders to his troops to kill and the alacrity with which he himself sprang to the slaughter, on the other hand, in contrast to those of the men who declined to join the bloodletting, illustrate dramatically how there existed that morning at My Lai the element of choice; and this is another dimension by which Calley must be judged and condemned.
It is a lamentable fact—though one perhaps not too surprising—that some of the GIs under Calley's orders embarked on private orgies of murder that defy words. But others of those “grunts” so ably depicted in Hammer's book drew back in shock and shame. Those white and black dogfaces from places like Holyoke, Massachusetts, and Providence and New Orleans, the deprived or the semideprived with their comic books and their bubble gum and their grass, these melting-pot types bearing names out of a patriotic World War II movie, Dursi and Maples and Grzesik—they were benumbed by the horror and they refused to kill; and their presence at Fort Benning as they bore witness against Calley brought out perhaps more than anything else the lieutenant's fathomless dereliction.
If this were not sufficient, there was the testimony of a fellow officer, Lieutenant Jeffrey LaCross, the leader of the third platoon, who said that he neither heard Medina give the command to kill everyone in the hamlet nor did he himself assume that anything should be done to the civilians other than to employ the usual practice of gathering them together and submitting them to interrogation. Having done just this on that day, he too demonstrated by contrast the measure of his fellow platoon leader's irresponsibility; and his testimony was badly damaging to an already brutally damaged Calley, who, it seemed plain as the trial drew to an end, had got his name entered on the rolls of history's illustrious mass murderers.
But what of Calley himself? Hammer's book is an honest, penetrating account of a crucially significant military trial; but his loathing for Calley is manifest on every page. Surely, one thinks, there must be some extenuation, some key to this man's character which will allow us a measure of compassion or at least of understanding so that despite his crimes some beam of warmth or attractiveness will flow out—some tragic or, God knows, even comic dimension that could permit us to mourn a little over this good ole boy from Florida gone wrong. Hammer stalks Calley so relentlessly that, despite resistance, one begins to feel the sweat of Christian charity being coaxed from one's pores. We therefore turn with eagerness to Lieutenant Calley: His Own Story, as told to John Sack, hoping for that ameliorative detail or insight that might help cast a gentler light on the transgressor.
Alas, it is a vain hope, for Calley's whole identity—as recorded, according to his Boswell, “on five hundred thousand inches of magnetic tapes and a fiftieth ton of transcripts”—impresses the reader as being one of such stupefying vacuity, of such dwarfishness of spirit that one is relieved that his account does not yield us the luxury of even a fleeting affection. Furthermore, the book is an underhanded, self-serving document, one of those soulless apologias that have emanated many times before from base men. Simulating honesty, it attempts a cheap vindication, and in so doing, more firmly ratifies the guilt.
In his preface, after anesthetizing us with more statistics (“I talked to Calley for a hundred days. I asked him somewhere near ten thousand questions, or one question for each three-fourths of a sentence here”), Sack tells us how impressed he became with Calley's sincerity and appeals to the reader not to lose sight of it. One reader lost sight of it after about the tenth and a half page, although in fairness to Calley this may in part be the fault of the style, or technique rather: those five hundred thousand inches of magnetic tape ending up on the page as indigestible splinters and strips—one feels choked on acetate.
That a tape recorder, in proper hands, can be an effective amanuensis and collector of thoughts and voices was proved by the late Oscar Lewis, whose guiding intelligence brought an almost Balzacian sweep to his works of social anthropology. But Sack's intelligence does not guide. This lapse, in conjunction with the boyish squalor of Calley's mind, gives the book a fragmented, groping, almost hysterical quality, as if spoken by a depraved Holden Caulfield. There is an irresistible temptation to believe, in fact, that Sack, perhaps without knowing it, is bent upon hanging Calley on the gallows of his own “sincerity.” Otherwise, it is hard to make sense of such a remarkable passage as that which comes near the beginning of the book, in which Calley describes his reaction to the news that he is likely to be prosecuted for the murders:
I thought, Could it be I did something wrong? I knew that war's wrong. Killing's wrong: I realized that. I had gone to a war, though. I had killed, but I knew. So did a million others. I sat there, and I couldn't find the key. I pictured the people of Mylai: the bodies, and they didn't bother me. I had found, I had closed with, I had destroyed the VC: the mission that day. I thought, It couldn’t be wrong or I’d have remorse about it [italics Sack's].
Here in these few lines, which are fairly typical of the book in both style and substance, Calley manages to reveal at least three appalling facts about himself: that he is still unaware, or pretends to be unaware, of the difference between a massacre and lawful killing in combat; that he is still unmoved by the effects of his butchery at My Lai, when others who were there had been gruesomely haunted by the sight for months, at least one of them driven to the brink of mental breakdown; and that he is a liar. He is a liar, we see, because it is impossible that so many months after the event he still thinks that the victims of his slaughter—old men, women, and children—had been really his enemies, the Vietcong.
Or what is one to say about a truly flabbergasting passage in which, at the very height of the carnage at My Lai, Calley describes how he rushes to prevent a GI from forcing a girl to perform a sexual act, and then asks himself rhetorically why he had been so “saintly”?
Because—if a GI is getting sex, “he isn't doing his job. He isn't destroying communism.” Calley's puzzlement over moral priorities and options seems typically in the American grain, for he then goes on to brood:
Of course, if I had been ordered to Mylai to rape it, pillage, and plunder—well, I still don't know. I may be old-fashioned, but I can't really see it. Our mission in Mylai wasn't perverted though. It was simply “Go and destroy it.”
Or this episode, a few pages later, describing his encounter at My Lai with a defenseless civilian (apparently a Buddhist priest), whom he was convicted of murdering:
You sonofabitch. And bam: I butted him in his mouth with my M-16. Straight on: sideways could break the M-16. He had frustrated me!
Sack should have been advised that sometimes sincerity does not appear to be a winning virtue. Yet, if indeed sincerity were a truly consistent component of this book, we might be able to accept at least part of it. The story is, however, implausible when it is not being greasily devious, and it is dominated by two tendentious themes. One of these themes—Calley's fear that civilians, whether they be old men or women or children, are really the enemy in disguise—pervades, indeed saturates, the narrative. It is allied with another theme—his hatred of Communism, which he cheerfully admits as a “run-of-the-mill average guy” that he doesn't understand—and together they form a linked motivation which even a very unperceptive reader would begin to perceive he is going to use to rationalize his crimes at My Lai.
Page after page is filled with his animadversions, if such they may be called, on the Communist menace. These passages alternate with those which express his terror of the civilian populace, his frantic suspicion that each innocent-appearing Vietnamese may in truth be a Vietcong concealing a weapon or ready to throw a bomb.
Curiously, when describing his fear, Calley is sometimes rather effective. His fear is certainly real enough, and understandable; and in his reflections on this fear and on the omnipresence of death amid the Vietnamese landscape he achieves on one or two pages, almost as if by accident, a kind of slovenly eloquence. Surely no one acquainted with the demoralizing character of the war in Vietnam would deny the legitimacy of such a fear.
Yet long before the book's halfway point—where Calley in his inimitably charmless way has even begun to invoke General Sherman's tactics in Georgia to justify atrocities against civilians—his tone has become so hectoring, so shrill, that we simply know he is out to hoodwink us into believing that he honestly thought the Vietcong were his victims that day at My Lai. It is an ineffably shabby performance; and by the time we arrive at the end, cringing as we observe Calley try to discredit the witnesses who had appeared against him at Benning, we are able to see why he inspired in Richard Hammer such healthy revulsion.
Certainly the loathsome and festering nature of the war in Vietnam provided fertile ground for such a catastrophe as My Lai. It is a particularly iniquitous war, this criminal venture which has implanted in the hearts of our apple-cheeked young warriors such a detestation of “slopes” and “slants” and “gooks.” That there have been other atrocities and other My Lais may be painful to accept but not difficult to believe. To those numerous letters he received from other servicemen confessing to their own atrocities, Calley points with distorted pride, failing to realize—just as millions of people have failed to realize—that one outrage does not expunge another. Neither does the obvious culpability of others in this horror absolve Calley, whose trial and conviction may be one of the most critically significant events of recent times, in that it has been able to show in vivid outline the extent of the degeneracy to which this war and its leaders have brought us.
Mankind is sick nearly unto death of warfare, but until that remote day when its abolition is achieved, the wars our folly leads us to will have to be fought within the framework of those sometimes inadequate but necessary laws we have shaped to govern their course. In abstract, at least, it is obedience to this principle which has so far prevented our reaping the whirlwind of nuclear destruction. It is the depth of moral stupor to assume that in the pursuit of war, barbarous as it may seem to be, we must not be bound by rigorous codes.
Few of us may be enamored of the military, but the military is both a fact of life and an institution; and like any institution—like law or business or government itself—it must stand guard against the venal, the felonious, and the corrupt. Thus to ignore the lesson of Lieutenant Calley is to ignore a crucial reality: that war is still steadfastly a part of the human condition, and that our very survival as human beings continues to depend on accommodating ourselves to ancient rules of conduct.
[New York Times Book Review, September 12, 1971.]
* The reduction of Calley's sentence from life to twenty years, probably influenced by President Nixon's sympathy for the lieutenant, and which occurred after this review was written, tends to undercut any such venerable premise about the military service, and may simply be an indication of how corruptible it has really become.—W.S. (1982)