Word: calley
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Nature abhors its vacuums, and man cannot abide free-floating guilt. But scapegoats are getting harder to find these days (vide Richard Nixon and his Watergate problems). After My Lai, the U.S. Army thought they had a pretty good sacrificial offering in Lieut. William Calley-until corrosion began eating its way up the chain of command. The Army's containment plan was not helped by Journalist John Sack, who moved in with Calley for one of those total immersions that have become the baptismal rites of the New Journalism...
Sack, also the author of M, was not out to hang little "Rusty" Calley with his own words. Quite the opposite. The intention was to show that Calley was what Sack now calls a "brass instrument" through which the order to execute My Lai villagers was trumpeted. The blame is then pinned on The System, of course...
Chic Anarchy. Finally Sack trots out Calley again, this time interviewed before his trial while he was playing tourist in New York. Dressed in a brown tweed suit with a credit card in his wallet, Calley glues himself to a telescope atop the Empire State Building and looks for sunbathing girls. Downstairs it's a four-Bloody Mary lunch and reminiscences about Asian whores. "Normal, normal," says Sack, "like sugar in water, he had been dropped in a city street scene but he didn't displace anything." It is a little late in the century, though...
...group of clergymen, led by Yale University Chaplain William Sloane Coffin Jr., has suggested a strange linkage between Calley and the young Americans who evaded the draft-a "new jubilee" in which amnesty would be extended to both Calley and draft resisters, in which all would be forgiven, regardless of individual guilt or degree of turpitude...
True, one may suspect that it is unjust for Calley to be the only man imprisoned for the My Lai affair. True, one may wish that clemency eventually be shown to the draft evaders. One may wish, in addition, that both the righteous right and the righteous left soften their positions. Yet the Coffin proposal smacks as much of an ill-considered trade-off as it does of Christian forgiveness. The two situations are really unrelated, both legally and morally. Each therefore deserves to be judged on its own merits, not as part of a jubilee...