Word: calley
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What is the nature of what Calley did at My Lai on one specific day? To Calley--and to Sack, who wrote an earlier book, M, on the conduct of the American infantry during operations against the people of Vietnam--it is nothing exceptional. In the book, Calley states that when he was first called in and told that he was under investigation for his actions at My Lai, he thought that the Army was referring to an operation he had taken part in six months later. If we can believe him and Sack, what we have come to think...
Certainly many thousands of Vietnamese died from American actions on March 16, 1968--from bombs, defoliants, mines, aerial fire and artillery shelling: from mechanized attacks fully as monstrous and illegal as Calley's actions. But, as Hammer's book makes clear, the Army made every effort to consider Calley's actions as if they took place in a vacuum: as if Task Force Barker had taken off from a landing zone in a serene Vietnam to guide it, and only the Nuremberg principles to go by. The Army's prosecutor Capt. Aubrey Daniel, asked the judge early in the courtmartial...
...pretentious but useful book, Hammer documents the failure of Calley's defense to discuss meaningfully any of the other circles of guilt which surround the hamlet of My Lai 4. Defense lawyers alternately argued that everyone else had done the same thing, that artillery and bombs had done the real killing, that Calley had been following orders that he believed to be lawful, that Calley really hadn't killed anybody, that Calley had killed people but that he was not responsible for his actions. Except for a few small victories (such as getting into the record the fact that every...
...curious one. The prosecutor, a brilliant young lawyer just starting his career, had never been to Vietnam. The jury, however, was wholly made up of high-ranking veterans of our criminal war, men who had been at home with free-fire zones, zippo squads, and search and destroy. That Calley was found guilty is certainly a sign that, influenced by an eloquent and implacable prosecutor, they decided that Calley had gone too far. But it was also a sign that they were under tremendous pressure to do something about the massacre, to show the American people that, though we might...
Perhaps. And such is the tawdry relativism to which life in the United States has pushed us that we can neither approve Calley's imprisonment nor favor his release: for to him has been assigned a measure of real guilt, though he was tried under a law that was never observed and found guilty by a court of lunatics...