Word: calley
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...bungling in Viet Nam (1967), though her later Hanoi (1968), likewise based on firsthand reporting, suffered from a Lincoln Steffens I-have-seen-the-future-and-it-works naiveté. In Medina, her third short book of war reportage, she turns an account of the acquittal of Lieut. William Calley's immediate superior into a disquieting meditation on the meaning...
Sometimes bitterness leads her into overstatement. She acknowledges that the U.S. is probably the only country that would have brought a Lieut. Calley to trial. But then she baldly states that with Calley's sentence reduced and everyone else involved in the massacre and the ensuing cover-up either acquitted or not even brought to trial, "mass-murders have been welcomed back into the population." She adds: "Now any member of the armed forces in Indochina can, if he so desires, slaughter a reasonable number of babies, confident that the public will acquit him, a) because they support...
McCarthy is at her best and most disturbing when she argues that the Medina proceedings were doomed from the start. Since Calley's judges concluded that he acted on his own rather than on orders, Medina's prosecutors could scarcely argue that Medina was the culprit after...
Consider, for example, the case of helicopter pilot Thompson, who landed his craft in the midst of the slaughter by the Americal and who had his machine gunner train his weapon on Lietenant Calley. Calley was made to abstain from shooting 10 women and children whom Thompson whisked away to safety in his helicopter. Even though he had initially filed a report with superiors which condemned the killings, Thompson submitted another statement that the rescued civilians were hiding in a bunker "located between friendly and hostile forces engaged in a heavy fire fight." Thompson won the Distinguished Flying Cross, even...
...Just as Lieutenant Calley was guilty of the Mylai incident himself," he added, "whatever was done here is the fault of the people...