He died last April, but the news just came out this week. The delay was weirdly reminiscent of the delay between when the My Lai Massacre occurred (March of 1968) and when, thanks to the reporting of Semour Hersh, the news broke (November 1969).
William Calley - Lieutenant William Calley - has died.
Calley was the only American convicted of the crimes committed at My Lai, when Charlie Company, the unit he was leading, slaughtered over 500 unresisting Vietnamese civilians - mostly women, children, and elderly men. Bayoneted while they begged for their lives, the lives of their children. Blown to smithereen by grenades tossed by GI's who a few months before were tossing baseballs around back home. Mowed down by the M16's the soldiers carried - and those M16's might well have been manufacturred in my hometown of Worcester. Many of the women and girls were gang raped.
Calley - whose defense that he was just following orders (where have we hear that before?) - was sentenced to life, but only spent a few days in prison. With the intervention of Richard Nixon, Calley spent a few years under house arrest, and went on to live an uneventful, unremarkable life as a small town jeweler and real estate agent in Georgia.
In 2009, speaking at a Kiwanis Club meeting near Fort Benning, Georgia., Calley apologized.
"There is not a day that goes by that I do not feel remorse for what happened that day in My Lai," Calley said, according to an account of the meeting reported by the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer. "I feel remorse for the Vietnamese who were killed, for their families, for the American soldiers involved and their families. I am very sorry." (Source: NPR)
Calley was, of course, the fall guy. A hapless, undertrained soldier boy just a notch up from the lowliest grunt, carrying out the wishes from the top (where madmen whose sons weren't going to 'Nam made the high level decisions) down through a chain of command where, the closer things got the front lines, the more apparent it was the no one had a clue what was going on, other than knowing that this was a war that we weren't winning. SNAFU. FUBAR. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot.
By the time the My Lai story broke, I was already against the war, and didn't need further convincing.
I was a news junkie from childhood on, and by late high school, natural lefty that I am, I was leaning against our involvement in Vietnam. My first trip to NYC (April 1967) coincided with a major anti-war demonstration. I observed, but didn't participate. Most of what I remember was the a lot of the demonstrators carried daffodils. And that, when I got home, I wrote a poem about what I'd seen - possibly the only poem in the history of the English language that used the word "shibboleth."
But during the fall of 1967, now in college, my anti-war consciousness started to get raised (as we used to say). I heard Noam Chomsky speak. I read Howard Zinn.
I didn't look at both sides. I wasn't listening to William Westmoreland, to Henry Kissinger.
I started participating in anti-war conferences, teach-ins, marches.
In November 1969 - right about the time we were learning about My Lai - I rode to DC on an unheated, uncomfortable school bus to attend (along with half a million others) the Moratorium March, where Pete Seeger led us in singing "Give Peace a Chance."
Even to those of us who hated the war, who thought it was beyond terrible, were shocked by My Lai.
Sure, we all knew that war was always beyond terrible, that it caused people to do the unthinkable, the unspeakable, didn't think of "our boys" as capable of the unthinkable, the unspeakable. Atrocities were for the Japanese Imperial Army in Nanking. For the Germans in Oradour (France), in Lidice (Czechoslovakia), in Babi Yar (Ukraine). Surely not the boys next door.
Because, make no mistake about, the men/boys who went to Vietnam were the boys next door, especially if you lived in a blue collar Irish Catholic neighborhood in Worcester, Massachusetts.
I didn't know anybody in Charlie Company. I didn't know William Calley. But I could have.
The Time's Calley covered asked the question "Who Shares the Guilt?"
The answer may not be "all of us," because that's way too glib. And if everyone's guilty, no one is. But the answer is and should be lots of people.
Peter, Paul, and Mary were at that November 1969 Moratorium March.
Did we sing Pete Seeger's own anti-war anthem, Where Have All the Flowers Gone?
I don't remember, but I'd bet that we did.
When will they ever learn, oh, when will they ever learn?
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