Word: generale
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Precisely what happened next will be the subject of multiple investigations by the U.S. Army, committees of Congress and the South Vietnamese Senate. It will presumably be microscopically examined?and argued?in more than one U.S. court-martial. But enough participants have spoken up to make the general outline painfully clear...
...some 20 bodies he found at the scene were those of civilians caught in advance shelling and crossfire between U.S. and enemy forces. He dismissed Vietnamese claims of unnecessary killings as "common Viet Cong propaganda technique" and reported his findings orally to the commander of the Americal Division, Major General Samuel Koster, now superintendent at West Point. This "conspiracy of silence," as one participant terms it, kept any official alarm from reaching Washington for many months...
...excuse for American behavior at My Lai. It is also small comfort to the U.S. that other Western nations have been guilty of wartime atrocities. The French executed some 15,000 Moslems in the long Algerian war of the 1950s. At Amritsar in India's Punjab, British Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer marched 50 of his soldiers toward a menacing mob of Indians in 1919 and, without warning, they killed 379 people with rifle fire. The Germans bombed and machine-gunned to death 1,600 people of the tiny town of Guernica, Spain, in 1937, rounded up and shot...
...until he proves that the order was illegal at his subsequent court-martial. Disobedience in combat is even riskier. More than one soldier who has ignored an order in battle has been executed on the spot, though this practice is nowhere authorized in the military code. A prominent U.S. general often recalls that as a platoon leader during the Normandy landing he shot to death a G.I. who had broken from the unit and run down the beach. Says he: "You can't have your men running under fire...
...late, however, Washington has come to life with a special Nixonian flavor. Spiro Agnew has become a walking oratorical event, exhaling sulphurous prose on behalf of the Great Silent Majority. Attorney General John Mitchell's dour podsnappery as Southern strategist and antidissenter cheers the forces of law and order and dismays liberals. Mitchell himself has remained as invisible as before. But his wife Martha has emerged as one of the dominant figures on the Washington scene, and her tart tongue has enlivened a lot of cocktail parties (see box, page...