Individual Responsibility in War: William Calley, Jr. and the Vietnam War
William Calley Jr. mugshot for charges involving the My Lai massacre.
William Calley (“United States v. William L. Calley, Jr.”) represented the Vietnam War as almost no one else did. During the period of his imprisonment, I recall a huge banner hung from a building in Bridgeport, Connecticut that read: “Help Free Calley.”
Calley died in Florida on April 28, 2024 (New York Times, July 30, 2024).
As a war resister to that war, and eventually a veteran, but not of the Vietnam War, but of the Vietnam era, I recoiled at how enough support could be generated to produce and sponsor a message such as the one noted above that flew in the face of everything that had been learned as a result of World War II and an individual’s responsibility in wartime to refuse orders that involved the murder of civilians and the gross immorality of attacks against civilians in war.
An untold number of war resisters countered the Vietnam War, perhaps as many as over 100,000 men and women.
Rumors of mass atrocities in Vietnam were common before William Calley led his men into My Lai and perpetrated a massacre that was only different from others in Vietnam by its magnitude. I found that Four Hours in My Lai (1993) covered the massacre in detail.
Seymour Hersh’s investigative reporting in “The Massacre at My Lai” (New Yorker, 1972), on the massacre and Calley’s role in it was groundbreaking! Calley’s half-assed apology decades later could not begin to address the mass atrocity he led in Vietnam. His, and his men’s actions that day, were a reflection, but not a defense of, the demand for “enemy” body counts by senior commanders however those counts were achieved. If the helicopter pilot Hugh Thompson (The Forgotten Hero of of My Lai, 2014) had not intervened in that massacre, the death toll of women, children, and old men would have been greater.
The massacre at My Lai was made even more prominent by the massacre of unarmed students at Kent State and Jackson State in May 1970. Those protests were in answer to Richard Nixon’s ongoing war in Cambodia. The US was willing to do stateside what it had done in Vietnam on a lesser, but lethal scale. It was after those massacres that I became a war resister. I knew that the Nuremberg Principles, the Geneva Conventions, and the UN Charter banned the kinds of war crimes that were carried out in the mass hysteria of anticommunism that pervaded the US and the Cold War during the Vietnam War. That those crimes were sanitized by Ronald Reagan with his “noble cause” rhetoric only worsened the wounds left by the Vietnam War era and its mass atrocities.
As if the death of unarmed students did not soothe the US mass psyche for revenge against protesters, the mass beatings of protesting students on Wall Street and beyond four days after the Kent State massacre, as recounted in The Hardhat Riot (2020) by David Paul Kuhn, demonstrated that no amount of bloodletting was enough.
The Winter Soldier Investigation (1971) testimonies by veterans and later writing about atrocities during the Vietnam War such as are depicted in Nick Turse’s Tiger Force (2006) and NPR’s “‘Anything That Moves”: Civilians And The Vietnam War” revealed additional information about US conduct in that war. That no formal attempt was ever made to address these facts of atrocities tells much about militarism here and this nation’s and government’s absence of interest in any kind of honest assessment of the grotesque lack of adherence to any rules of engagement in Vietnam.
Perhaps it is a cliché, but the lessons not learned from the mass murder at My Lai and beyond were repeated in differing degrees and places.
By Mike Heuer
July 30, 2024
William Calley (pictured in 1969) was convicted in 1971 for his role in the My Lai Massacre during the Vietnam War. File Photo courtesy of the U.S. Army
July 30 (UPI) -- Former Army Lt. William Calley Jr., 80, died of natural causes Sunday at a hospice center in Gainesville, Fla., decades after being convicted of leading the infamous My Lai Massacre.
Then-2nd Lt. Calley on March 16, 1968, led his Army platoon into the My Lai village in the Son Tinh District near the central coastal area of what then was South Vietnam and initiated a massacre of hundreds of civilians.
Calley's platoon had recently sustained heavy losses during the 1968 Tet Offensive and had orders to search for and destroy members of the Viet Cong who might be operating in the area.
The Viet Cong were expert guerrilla fighters for North Vietnam and had led the attacks during the Tet Offensive.
The U.S. military says Calley and his men killed 347 villagers during the massacre, but Vietnam records indicate 504 were murdered.
Calley allegedly followed an order by U.S. Army Capt. Ernest Medina, who witnesses said in a mission briefing ordered Calley and others to kill anything "walking, crawling or growling" because they were all believed to be members of the Viet Cong.
Witnesses said Calley radioed Medina on the morning of the My Lai Massacre and was ordered to kill all of the civilians and said it was OK to "wipe the place out" before continuing the mission searching for Viet Cong soldiers.
Medina later denied giving that order, but witnesses said Calley and another soldier started shooting civilians after talking to Medina.
Army Maj. Gen. Samuel Koster was accused of trying to conceal the massacre.
Calley was convicted of murdering at least 22 civilians and was sentenced to life in prison.
A Buddhist monk who was praying and a young boy who crawled out of a ditch were among those Calley was accused of murdering by shooting them.
Army photographer Ronald Haeberle documented the events with his camera and provided photos that were used to prosecute Calley and others during their respective court-martial trials.
Calley was the only person convicted of the massacre on March 29, 1971, after undergoing one of the longest court-martial trials in U.S. military history.
He served only three years for the massacre, most of them while confined at home.
Calley in 1976 moved to Columbus, Ga., and married a woman whose family owned a local jewelry store.
In 2009, he made a public apology and said he was remorseful for the Vietnamese civilians he killed and for the U.S. soldiers who became involved in the massacre.
No comments:
Post a Comment