Word: calley
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...fact, it seems that everyone but the liberal center understands that the Vietnam war is massacre and senseless slaughter: that what happened at My Lai was a product of many decisions and historical forces, and that, whatever Calley's contribution, it was small indeed, compared with what had gone before...
...millions, Calley became slaughter, the American way of war. He was the last, enfeebled exemplar of the tradition of George Armstrong Custer and the other missionaries who civilized North America, Hawaii, and the Philippines by killing as many of the original tenants as it took to keep them quiet. That he was not of heroic stature--that one could be, at most, ambivalent about him--fit in with the antiheroic age in which we seemed to be trapped...
...powers that had created My Lai gladly left Calley to symbolize their way of war. The Army which fights with nauseating gas, white phosphorus, napalm, fragmentation bombs, and dum-dum bullets tried and convicted Calley. Medina was acquitted, Koster was reprimanded, Henderson will get off: Johnson, Rostow, Bundy, and MacNamara are above suspicion. In the center is Rusty Calley...
John Sack's book focuses on Calley the individual, and it helps to dispell some of the more comforting liberal myths about the man. If we can believe that Calley is sub-normal, retarded, and robotic, we can comfort ourselves that his decisions were aberrations and that we could never be led to be like him. Sack interviewed Calley on and off for more than a hundred days, and he has constructed this book out of fragments of Calley's own sentences. Sack says in his introduction that "I liked being with Lieutenant Calley. To me he seemed sensible, intelligent...
Unfortunately, Calley is not eloquent enough--nor is the editing skillful enough--to allow the book to serve the only useful purpose it could have. Calley as an individual is not all that important in the story of the Vietnam war: but Sack's book could have helped us grapple with My Lai if it had more definitely killed the Calley mystique, and made it clear that Calley is wholly within the American experience. The book as it stands is still readily susceptible to willful misreadings such as that of Styron, who saw it as further evidence that Calley...