Thoughts on My Lai

Last week I watched the PBS American Experience documentary about My Lai. For those who don’t know, it was the most notorious war crime of the Vietnam War (although not, as the book Tiger Force recounts, the only one): A group of U.S. soldiers led by William Calley entered a Vietnamese village and killed men, women, children as potential hostiles, regardless of the lack of opposition or weapons. Reflecting on it and the reaction it sparked in the U.S. when the truth leaked out, I find myself with two thoughts.
1)One of the reactions I noticed browsing several websites after watching was to brush My Lai off with assertions that “atrocities happen in every war.” No argument here; I’m not suggesting Vietnam-era soldiers were more prone to it than any other army. But that doesn’t make it any less an atrocity.
And what I frequently notice whenever the topic of war comes up—at least when U.S. soldiers are the target of criticism”—is that “X happens in every war,” whether X is collateral damage, atrocities or whatever. The point being, this is par for the course, so it’s no biggie.
I think we should be learning the opposite. It’s perfectly true collateral damage and unfair deaths of civilians happen in every war. That’s all the more reason not to go to war lightly. And by “lightly” I mean the decision to attack Iraq despite the complete lack of any reason other than a large number of right-wingers (then-Vice President Dick Cheney among them) wanted our former ally Saddam disposed of. We didn’t have to fight that war, but because we did, thousands of Iraqis were killed, maimed or tortured, and a smaller but substantial number of U.S. soldiers suffered death or crippling injuries.
It’s also no reason not to at least make an effort to cut back on collateral damage. The Obama administration has gone the other way, increasingly ordering drone strikes, even when we haven’t identified the targets by name. And it’s now official administration policy (as noted here) that anyone killed in a drone strike is classed by the US as a “militant” and therefore not a civilian death. Talk about shifting the goal posts.
•Some of the complaints made about Calley’s conviction (it generated enough protests that Nixon shortened his sentence to only a few months) were that the prosecution didn’t go high enough: That the real culprits were the people running the war and Calley was just a sacrificial lamb. Much the way some bloggers noted that the convictions for the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib only covered people who were actually hands on-involved, not the people who gave them orders.
That’s bad. But it’s not an excuse for not prosecuting the hands-on people, any more than you let off a Mafia thug because you can’t prosecute a gang boss.
A couple of decades back, New Republic ran a column discussing Janet Reno’s declaration that she took full responsibility for the disaster at Waco (a raid on a supposedly dangerous cult’s compound), and Reagan’s claim, a decade earlier that he accepted full responsibility for the bombing of a U.S. Marine baracks in Beirut. Commendable … except the “I take blame” came with an added declaration that therefore Reno and Reagan didn’t want any in-depth investigations, anyone under them being single out or punished.
I agree with the magazine, as a practical resolution, that reeks. Sure, they may have made mistakes, but it doesn’t therefore follow that everyone else carried out their function perfectly (I’ve heard detailed criticism of the guys in charge at Waco). So were Reno and Reagan—who, after all, didn’t suffer any penalty themselves—really taking the rap? Or just covering up?