Word: lai
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...which the young soldier sees all Vietnamese as threatening. When he is also weary from hours of trudging through swamp and jungle and then sees a friend killed beside him ? and friendships are highly emotional bonds in combat ? a soldier can easily go wild. At My Lai, however, the rampage was a group affair rather than individual breakdowns, something much harder to understand...
...bother those who were not there ? the mounting shame, and the relentless exposure at least testified to the still-active conscience of America. The guilt of My Lai has to be shared by the nation that raised the soldiers, by the Army that trained...
Somehow, American outrage at the My Lai massacre seemed slow to gather. It took time, as the images and confessions multiplied, for the horror to sink in, the pain and revulsion to spread. Has the national consciousness been so bludgeoned by public deaths and political astonishments, so amazed by the impossible triumphs of technology, that it has developed some kind of natural defense against surprise? Against powerful emotion...
THERE is little in the life of William Laws Calley Jr., whom G.I.s of his old Americal Division now refer to noncommittally as "that lieutenant." to suggest that he would become the focal figure of controversy in so horrible a nightmare as the My Lai massacre. To his hometown friends in Miami, he has always been known as "Rusty," for his reddish-tinged brown hair. He was born in Miami 26 years ago, and grew up with his three sisters in a two-story stucco house in the city's northeastern section. Mrs. Arnold Minkley, who lived across the street...
...thought seriously of making the Army a career?"until this happened." Bearing a charm bracelet for his youngest sister, a ham for his father and a couple of bottles of liquor for his buddies, Calley returned home on leave from Viet Nam last Christmas.This was nine months after My Lai. Tony Massero, a high school friend, says: "He didn't seem like he was nervous or in some sort of shock." To Smith, "he looked like the same old Rusty...