Word: calley
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When U.S. District Court Judge J. Robert Elliott abruptly ended the 35-month confinement of Army Lieut. William L. Calley Jr. last week, the judge observed that he saw "no likelihood" that Calley would flee. Why should he? Under the terms of his sentence, he was comfortably confined to his $111-a-month, two-bedroom apartment at Fort Benning, Ga., where he passed the months watching television, building model airplanes, boning up on oceanography and ancient history through correspondence courses, growing vegetables and flowers in his backyard, and talking with his pet mynah bird. Calley, 30, has also enjoyed almost...
...William Calley at My Lai was free-willed, responsible, culpable and individually guilty. There, I said it. True, as you say in your review of my book The Man-Eating Machine [Oct.22] I wrote: "Calley was nothing but a brass instrument that it [the massacre order] was trumpeted through." But the sentence states that it seemed that way to Calley...
...reject-and Calley does too, now-the philosophy that in our technological system we are less responsible for My Lais. I say, quite dissimilarly, that in our system human beings are intolerable intrusions that-by inches usually, or with dispatch, as at My Lai-we choose to eliminate...
Sack enters Galley's head at crucial moments to deliver other thoughts that often seem inconsistent with the man-is-only-a-cog theory that permeates the book. Calley decides to tell the truth at his trial, says Sack, because "a lie violated the inner consistency of what every soldier did in Viet Nam." He is thus viewed as a loyal robot unable to make moral distinctions, while at the same time Sack tells us about Calley's intelligence and honor. Few readers are likely to swallow such contradictions. Despite Sack's intent to exculpate Calley...
Sack never actually denies either the need for or the possibility of free will and individual guilt and responsibility. Instead he slides into the sticky, popular claim that "We are all William Calley." The preposterous implication being that none of us cogs can be guilty of anything. "To absent oneself is the only innocent act," says Sack sententiously, "to accept uncertainty, to trust oneself and to walk quietly out on the great dictator, the incontestable expert, to undo every organization and let every organism turn to the rhythms within." For a man who apparently operates very well within...