Word: calley
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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LEUT. WILLIAM CALLEY'S secretary, Mrs. Shirley Sewell, had just come back to his apartment with the 1971 tags for Calley's Volkswagen and motorboat. Calley had just got up from a nap when Captain Brooks Doyle Jr., his young deputy military counsel, walked through the door. "They've got a verdict, Rusty," Doyle said. Calley stopped in his tracks, his face a mask of fear, his right fist pounding into his left palm. "So they're finally ready," he mumbled, turning into the bedroom to don his Army greens. Half an hour later, Calley walked shakily before...
...Ashen, Calley marched off to the Fort Benning stockade. The next afternoon he was back before the court-martial to make a final statement before sentencing. Choking back tears, occasionally gasping for breath, Calley spoke first strongly, then in a breaking voice. "Yesterday you stripped me of all my honor. Please, by your actions that you take here today, don't strip future soldiers of their honor." Captain Aubrey M. Daniel III, 29, Calley's brilliant, tenacious prosecutor, followed. "You did not strip him of his honor," Daniel told the jury. "What he did stripped him of his honor...
...though the verdict had finally brought the ultimate horror of My Lai home to Americans, and acceptance of that horror was agonizing. The widespread initial reaction to My Lai?that no American soldier could have done such a thing?in many cases changed to the notion that Calley had only been doing his duty. In a new book called Sanctions for Evil, the title of one chapter sardonically sums up the horrendous confusion: "It Never Happened and Besides They Deserved It." With an astounding, indeed sickening distortion of moral sensibility, many Americans tried to turn Calley into a hero. Many...
Much of the sympathy for Calley seemed to be centered in the South and in the Midwest, and some...
...other view, that Calley only did his duty, is equally untenable. It is one thing to sympathize with him or to hold that others are culpable as well; it is quite another to deny the difference between killing an armed guerrilla and mowing down old men, women and children. Even amid horror, distinctions must be made?that is the essence of law, morals and therefore survival. Not to make them is a form of moral blindness. That blindness and the attendant glorification of Lieut. Calley may well be the ultimate degradation of the U.S. by the Viet...