Lt. Calley has apologized for leading the My Lai Massacre, where a lot of unarmed civilians were gunned down by American soldiers who'd apparently gone berserk through the pressures of war on their minds, disregarding all rules of warfare. The lieutenant, unfortunately, evidently got caught up in something over which he lost all control, except to lead his platoon down the road to perdition for them and death for the villagers, women and children included.
He's remorseful.
He's repentant.
He won't do it again.
He hopes, no doubt, that we, America, won't either. I hope so, too.
I'm sorry, he says.
That's very good, actually.
I can remember discussing the massacre over dinner with friends, relatives, actually, after the story broke.
He should be left alone, was an argument I heard, as he's an American soldier placed in a dirty job in a dirty war.
We have to be held responsible for our actions, even during war, was a thought that occurred to me. Nuremburg, I recalled. Following orders doesn't cut it. We have rules.
***
Editorial about Lt. William Calley, now 66, held responsible for the My Lai massacre in Vietnam during the American War we brought there, in today's NYT:
My Lai Haunts the Lieutenant
The nation has finally heard a note of personal regret from William Calley 38 years after he became the sole American soldier convicted in the My Lai massacre of hundreds of Vietnamese civilians.
“There is not a day that goes by that I do not feel remorse for what happened that day in My Lai,” Mr. Calley, a former lieutenant who now is a 66-year-old graybeard, told the Kiwanis Club of Greater Columbus, Ga. His appearance this month came after decades of no comment. “I feel remorse for the Vietnamese who were killed, for their families, for the American soldiers involved and their families,” said Mr. Calley, who was defended as a dutiful soldier by many when the slaughter was disclosed.
His remarks are an important reminder for a nation again at war of the considerable risks to honor and truth that can undermine troops caught in the frustrations and fears of the battlefront. The slaughter was conducted in March 1968 by platoons of American soldiers who shot and abused more than 300 victims — mainly women, children and elderly peasants — in a murderous frenzy.
After an 18-month cover-up, the story was broken by Seymour Hersh, the relentless reporter who pried truth firsthand from Mr. Calley and other perpetrators. The massacre sparked world outrage and helped unravel support for the Vietnam War, but it left still-gaping holes in the need for full justice up the military chain of command.
“I gave them a good boy, and they sent me back a murderer,” an American mother told Mr. Hersh of the guilt haunting My Lai veterans. There was small comfort in pleading they had to follow orders and shoot victims fleeing for their lives and cowering in an irrigation pit. Twenty-six soldiers eventually were charged, but only Mr. Calley was convicted. Ranking brass separately accused in the cover-up were acquitted.
Mr. Calley endures as a
***
My reaction on reading this editorial this morning was "Salem."
In 1692, something went horribly wrong in that Massachusetts Bay Colony village, settled by Puritans and their descendants beginning 1620 give or take.
The daughters in the troubled household of the Rev. Samuel Parris took to falling into what seemed to be some sort of a fit or convulsion. The trouble in the household was that as pastor of the local frontier church at the edge of the wilderness in the new world, surrounded by Indians with whom the settlers had recently been at war, with winter coming on, was being fired from his post by his congregation. They wanted someone else. They were refusing to support him any longer. He'd have to give up the church-owned house which he said was his. They refused to pay his salary in corn or wheat, meaning bread, and firewood. He'd be homeless, he'd freeze, and he'd starve. His house was unsettled. His life was coming apart. The teenage daughters reacted badly, taking fits which the parents could do nothing about except to call the doctor.
Dr. Griggs, the town doctor, in 1692, probably knew little about germs, not that we think these played a part, and may not have known or considered the body of information that was all around him had he been a modern police detective, lawyer, or psychologist with a license to investigate, say for a trial.
Instead, he came in, took a look around, asked what was going on, heard that the parents saw the girls taking this fit, and look, here's the girl now, taking a fit. What do you think is wrong doctor?
Why, they're bewitched, obviously, anyone can see that. Look at how they appear stiff, etc. Back then any child knew how it was to be bewitched. It was a child's game, the way we, to scare the kids, may say, "Whooo...a ghost...!" and hold up our hands like claws. To scare the kids. We teach it to them and they give it back to us. It's a game. Now. Not then.
Back in those days, if you were a witch, meaning having the power to cause injury by hurling curses such as "God damn you!" (now where have I heard that before?) you could really scare people. I know of a family today, Palestinian, Christian, who became most upset at a former family member who said she'd put a curse on them. So much trouble ensued that the curse seemed real. That's the trouble with curses, something bad always happens later and when you look for the cause, well, there it is, the curse. Whoever uttered that curse must be a damned witch, deserving to burned or hanged. A curse followed by mischief was the formula for a witch-hunt and execution.
The problem with being deemed a witch was that it meant you'd made a deal with the Devil while everyone else was cozying up to God, or trying to. The proof on women was a mark in a private area that was said to be where she allowed the Devil to suck. Pretty sexy, right? Letting the Devil have a little? Or a lot? Climbing into bed with the Devil? Bad, very bad. Deserve to die, right? Right. Like being called a Commie when I was a kid. My mom expressed, more than once, the concern that in choosing a college that I not choose City College of New York as she'd read that there were lots of communists there. She was relieved when I went to Wagner College in my hometown of Staten Island, N.Y. So was I. No commies there, you can be sure. In an economics class with Prof. Charles Kramer with whom I'd taken several, we were discussing Comparative Economic Theories, including capitalism, socialism, and mixed, as in Yugoslavia, when they had a Yugoslavia. Charlie, a conservative with a dog-eat-dog laissez faire market economy view of the world ("Let the Negroes of the South move to the North if they want jobs," was his position, and back from Detroit if they didn't like it there! Easier said than done.)
Going back to the witches, being in bed with the Devil, obtaining his power, and using it against your neighbors' children was the worst form of child molestation, far worse than today's child sex abuse, as to which we don't hang you, merely imprison you for hundreds of years whether you can serve all that time or not.
Nineteen people in all were hanged and another, Giles Corey pressed to death for failing to enter a plea.
Eventually a few people in the nearby large town of Boston became alarmed at what seemed even to them to be the outlandish activity occurring in Salem (renamed Danvers, today) and looked at the evidence, which was suspect, if not non-existent, and concluded it was nonsense, the convictions, over a hundred additional, were unfounded.
After that, when an accusing girl again opened her mouth she was ignored or shushed.
The affair ended when the new governor, Phipps, shut down the special courts he'd set up to handle all the witch cases. Why did he do this? Because after his wife expressed sympathy for some of the condemned women who'd led legally blameless lives, she was accused of being a witch herself, sort of like talk radio today.
Why did Lt. William Calley's mea culpa bring this on?
Because years later the participants in the massacre in Salem themselves realized that they had falsely accused and caused the death of innocent neighbor women and one man. The magistrate, one of them, apologized to the congregation helped lead. One of the girls wrote out a confession and apology, blaming the false accusation, which she recognized, on the Devil.
When dealing with craziness, sometimes all you can do is resort to a little "reverse psychology," also called "paradoxical intervention."
The example that comes to mind is the attendant in the mental hospital who is trying to get the intransigent patient, who thinks he's Napoleon, to clean his room. How? Not by telling Napoleon to clean his room but by advising that all good generals keep their quarters clean.
One of the ways the Salem Massacre was brought to a halt was by recognizing that the Devil, being so tricky, would never allow the girls to point out the real witches, so they must be pointing out innocent witches to let the guilty remain free, as the recurrence of the fits showed.
Others pointed out the weakness of relying on spectral (or "ghost") evidence that only the complaining witness, the young 'afflicted' girl, claimed to be able to see, despite the graphic detail.
Something terrible had gone wrong in Salem resulting in the massacre of innocents.
Likewise at My Lai.
Sincere, abject recognition and apology followed in each case.
Sometimes that's all that is that is left to do.
The Holocaust. The slaughter of innocents in numbers almost beyond the capacity of the mind to comprehend, except we've all see the images.
What can Germany do? They've apologized, made reparations, pursued the perpetrators, and taught their children that certain ways of speaking and teaching lead down the wrong road.
That's all anyone can do in an imperfect world populated by imperfect people who do terrible things they cannot repair or restore. This is not to ignore the fact that we sometimes try to bring the people who did the terrible things to justice, but not always. No one went after the young girls, or the doctor who misdiagnosed, or the magistrates and ministers (who were sometimes one and the same) or the constables or jurors. The problem must've seemed so diffuse, with enough blame to go around, that the only scapegoats for the societal madness, or the individual madness seen to be societal, were the innocents who were hanged. The community was purged of its witches, although not necessarily of its demons.
I'm glad to see that Lt. Calley has seen the light, publicly apologized, and to that extent redeemed himself in American society. I can't imagine what any surviving family members of his victims, the villagers, might think. Or the people who blew the whistle on him in our society and paid a price for condemning one of our own.
Sophocles, Euripedes, Aeschylus, wrote of such doings.
The Eumenides is the story of revenge in which we ask who has the right to kill in revenge. The answer suggested by the Tragedy is that none of us does, that it is up to society to determine what is punishable, or not.
Society, unfortunately, being composed of people, doesn't always get it right, but neither does it always get it wrong.
