NEVER AGAIN ?

BEHAVING FOOLISHLY

The 16th March 1968 was not a good day. I have included here parts 1 & 2 of a BBC documentary about My Lai, Vietnam and what happened there 43 years ago today.

It does not make happy viewing, but it does show some of what can happen to young men who are supposedly trained and sent to war without any understanding of what it is they are meant to be about. The fact that young American soldiers could behave it the way they did, or indeed any soldier from any country could behave this way, is not surprising given the circumstances of what they had to cope, far from home, under the leadership of people who knew no more than they did, and who were suffering from the same delusions and paranoia.

What is more disturbing is the reaction in the United States once the incident was discovered and at least one of the officer's responsible was found guilty at a Courts Marshall.

Calley…………………..…….Medina…………………………....…Koster

Calley stated during his trial: "I was ordered to go in there and destroythe enemy. That was my job that day. That was the mission I was given. I did not sit down and think in terms of men, women and children. They were all classified as the same, and that's the classification that we dealt with over there, just as the enemy. I felt then and I still do that I acted as I was directed, and I carried out the order that I was given and I do not feel wrong in doing so."

Calley was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment and hard labour at Fort Leavenworth. He did not serve out this sentence. After the conviction the White House received over 5000 telegrams where the ratio was 100 to 1 in favor of leniency. In a telephone survey of the American public 79% disagreed with the verdict, 81% believed that the life sentence Calley had received was too stern and 69% believed Calley had been made up into a scapegoat.

Not everyone behaved badly, and those that did not, did not fair all that well.

Hugh C. Thompson, Jr. was an Army helicopter pilot during the Vietnam War. He is chiefly known for his role in stopping the My Lai massacre. When news of the massacre publicly broke, Thompson repeated his account to superior officers during their official Pentagon investigations. In late 1969, Thompson was summoned to Washington DC and appeared before a special closed hearing of the House Armed Services Committee. There, he was sharply criticized by Congressmen, in particular Chairman Mendel Rivers (Democrat-South Carolina), who were anxious to play down allegations of a massacre by American troops. Rivers publicly stated that he felt Thompson was the only soldier at My Lai who should be punished (for turning his weapons on fellow American troops) and unsuccessfully attempted to have him court-martialed. As word of his actions became publicly known, Thompson started receiving hate mail, death threats and mutilated animals on his doorstep.

Only some others were outraged not at Calley's guilty verdict, but that he was the only one within the chain of command who was convicted. At the Winter Soldier Investigation in Detroit organized by Vietnam Veterans Against the War, January 31-February 2, 1971, veterans including 1st Lt. William Crandell of the199th Light Infantry Brigade, Americal Division expressed their outrage:

We intend to demonstrate that My Lai was no unusual occurrence, other than, perhaps, the number of victims killed all in one place, all at one time, all by one platoon of us. We intend to show that the policies of Americal Division which inevitably resulted in My Lai were the policies of other Army and Marine Divisions as well. We intend to show that war crimes in Vietnam did not start in March 1968, or in the village of Son My or with one Lt. William Calley. We intend to indict those really responsible for My Lai, for Vietnam, for attempted genocide.

Nothing came of this, so far as I can tell.

On August 19, 2009, while speaking to the Kiwanis Club of Greater Columbus, Calley apologized for his role in the My Lai massacre. According to the Ledger-Enquirer] and a blog maintained by retired broadcast journalist Dick McMichael. Calley said: There is not a day that goes by that I do not feel remorse for what happened that day in My Lai. I feel remorse for the Vietnamese who were killed, for their families, for the American soldiers involved and their families. I am very sorry....If you are asking why I did not stand up to them when I was given the orders, I will have to say that I was a 2nd Lieutenant getting orders from my commander and I followed them—foolishly, I guess.

I am not sure that is a sufficient explanation, but it's one we've heard so many times before, and so often we have enquiries that lead to nothing more than someone saying "Never again". When the majority of citizens are so against holding 'our brave boys' to account, how can we expect them to behave decently, no matter what the circumstances. We have already had several examples of appalling behaviour in the middle east. Must it continue? When will will ever reach never?

Perhaps I'm just being foolish. Watch the video if you can. It's not essential.