Word: oneness
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Primary Allegiance. Serious legal problems also confront the Army in its case against Lieut. Calley and Sgt. Mitchell, the only active servicemen thus far accused of crimes at My Lai. For one thing, Army lawyers fear that detailed press interviews with potential witnesses may permit the accused to claim that they cannot get a fair trial. Almost surely, moreover, both Calley and Mitchell will argue at their trials that they acted under "superior orders," a legal defense that gained respectability in the 19th century when military officers extolled iron regimentation and insisted that superiors could do no wrong...
...world wars changed all that. The Nurnberg Trial of 22 Nazi leaders after World War II revived one of the great tenets of Western thought: that a higher law sometimes requires men to give their primary allegiance to humanity rather than the State. Although the Nazi defendants pleaded "state orders," 19 were convicted and ten were hanged. To skeptics, Nurnberg proved mainly that losing a war had become a crime under international law. Nevertheless, the supremacy of civilized rules of behavior was enunciated in a U.N. report: "The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his government...
Many nations soon incorporated that principle into their military codes. One of the last to do so was France, which wrote a new military code only after its junior officers blindly obeyed rebellious generals in Algeria...
Despite the rules, Americans have committed a disturbing number of atrocities in Viet Nam-and prosecution has often been prompt. In the I Corps area last year, for example, seven Marines summarily hanged a Viet Cong suspect and shot two others to death. At a court-martial, one defense lawyer argued that his client had gone through "hell" after seeing Marine bodies "burned and tortured, some with their testicles cut off." Nevertheless, all seven Marines were convicted and imprisoned, one for life...
...drill sergeant's most basic lesson-instant obedience. Under military law, in fact, a man who refuses to follow an order is presumed guilty of this offense 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...