Word: martialled
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Towards the end of Soldier Blue, Honus, having survived the dry heaves, is being led away to a court martial for insubordination, Candice is throwing her lot in with the handful of remaining Indians, and a narrative voice-over is carrying on about a government investigation that declared the whole incident an outrage. (Again, shades of My Lai. That the government could find fault with specific acts that its own policies are calculated to support is the real outrage.) Honus and Candice smile sweetly at each other. You can just sense their Inner Peace. Honus fingers the love beads. Candice...
With those stark words, Sergeant Charles Hutto told an Army investigator what he had done at My Lai. He followed orders, Hutto said; the orders, by all accounts, had been to kill every living thing in the small village. The defense at Hutto's court-martial last week never refuted the statement. The prosecution was unable to buttress it with eyewitness testimony. But the precise facts concerning Hutto's actions seemed almost academic. Rather the issue became one of perception and intelligence at the bottom of the chain of command...
...matter of orders has become the central theme in the defense of those charged in the March 1968 massacre. In Hutto's court-martial and in the separate trial of Lieut. William Calley, the emphasis was on passing the buck upward toward the commanders who directed the assault on My Lai. The names of superiors, among them Company Commander Ernest Medina, Task Force Commander Frank Barker (who was killed three months after My Lai) and Brigade Commander Oran K. Henderson, were mentioned on the witness stand...
...which Colonel Henderson urged his brigade officers to "go in there aggressively, close with the enemy and wipe them out for good." Henderson has been charged with dereliction of duty. Medina has undergone the Army's equivalent of a grand jury investigation that could result in a court-martial, but no formal charges have been announced...
With Meadlo's testimony, the prosecution rested its case. Defense Attorney George Latimer continued to call witnesses to corroborate evidence against the chain of command. He also succeeded in getting several previously confidential documents entered into the record of Galley's court-martial. One was a combat-action report filed by Barker after the incident. It claimed 128 "enemy casualties" and described problems of "population control and medical care of those civilians caught in the fire of opposing forces." The overwhelming burden of testimony has shown that there were neither enemy forces nor hostile fire...