Word: american
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...important to remember that the U.S. in Viet Nam faces an unusually brutal enemy who uses terror deliberately (see box, page 29). But that certainly is no excuse for American behavior at My Lai. It is also small comfort to the U.S. that other Western nations have been guilty of wartime atrocities. The French executed some 15,000 Moslems in the long Algerian war of the 1950s. At Amritsar in India's Punjab, British Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer marched 50 of his soldiers toward a menacing mob of Indians in 1919 and, without warning, they killed 379 people with rifle...
...deliberate national policy of genocide is not the same as the unlawful actions of groups of soldiers running amuck. The U.S. as a nation bears no guilt equivalent to that of Nazi Germany, though perhaps the individual soldier in the American Army who commits an atrocity should be judged more harshly than a storm trooper. All the sanctions of his state, his education, his training were brought to bear on the Nazi soldier to obey any order, including the killing of civilians; it was more difficult for him to disobey. An American butchering non-combatants must act against...
...Somehow, American outrage at the My Lai massacre seemed slow to gather. It took time, as the images and confessions multiplied, for the horror to sink in, the pain and revulsion to spread. Has the national consciousness been so bludgeoned by public deaths and political astonishments, so amazed by the impossible triumphs of technology, that it has developed some kind of natural defense against surprise? Against powerful emotion...
...Marshall McLuhan, "is indifference." In the same way, the cost of constant excitement, of a persistent and violent rearrangement of one's sense of order, results in surfeit. The mind is overcome by a kind of compassion fatigue. The events of the '60s have profoundly disturbed the American sense of reality. The longest war in the nation's history, with the American combat dead and wounded last week passing 300,000, seems at once horribly strange and grimly familiar. All too accustomed to daily deaths in Viet Nam, Americans needed time to grasp the fact that these...
Former Captain Fred Brown of Tacoma, Wash., knew Calley for six months while he was on duty in Viet Nam and liked the lieutenant. "He was sort of an all-American boy, a real nice guy. The only hang-up he had was the same one everybody there had, to stay out of the line of fire until you could get home." Says William Thomas, who was dean of boys when Rusty was attending Edison High School: "He was just an average American...