Word: calley
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...first glance, the most distressing response has been the enshrinement of Calley as a hero: the "Free Calley" rallies, buttons, and bumperstickers, the pro-Calley songs, the flimsy Calley magazines. But the response of most liberal media has been at least as wrongheaded: journals such as Time (always the most reliable index of what mistakes the country's liberal center is making) have from the start portrayed Calley as a half-mad, sub-normal robot, a kill-crazed misfit who took out all the frustrations of a life of failure and rejection on the people of one South Vietnamese hamlet...
...people, as we have noted, are not impressed: thousands have rallied to his defense, and many who haven't--those who do not support the proto-fascist pro war movement led by Carl MacIntyre and George Wallace--still feel that Calley has gotten a raw deal, and that his courtmartial was not a good idea. It is the children of the poor and of the lower middle class who fight the war, die in it, and bear its scars; the people who sympathize with Calley do so, in large part, because they have known men who have been faced with...
...fact, it seems that everyone but the liberal center understands that the Vietnam war is massacre and senseless slaughter: that what happened at My Lai was a product of many decisions and historical forces, and that, whatever Calley's contribution, it was small indeed, compared with what had gone before...
...millions, Calley became slaughter, the American way of war. He was the last, enfeebled exemplar of the tradition of George Armstrong Custer and the other missionaries who civilized North America, Hawaii, and the Philippines by killing as many of the original tenants as it took to keep them quiet. That he was not of heroic stature--that one could be, at most, ambivalent about him--fit in with the antiheroic age in which we seemed to be trapped...
...powers that had created My Lai gladly left Calley to symbolize their way of war. The Army which fights with nauseating gas, white phosphorus, napalm, fragmentation bombs, and dum-dum bullets tried and convicted Calley. Medina was acquitted, Koster was reprimanded, Henderson will get off: Johnson, Rostow, Bundy, and MacNamara are above suspicion. In the center is Rusty Calley...