Word: slaughtering
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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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...
...important because it was a human act, one committed by individual human beings with M-16s, bayonets, and grenade launchers, confronting a group of Vietnamese on the ground. Horror though it was, the massacre was more palatable than the real horror of the war, which is the mechanization of slaughter, the progressive removal of any elements of the human will from the act of killing. To confront Charlie Company was to confront a group of men who had been faced with decisions and made them badly: to confront the B-52 and the electronic battlefield was to realize that America...
...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...
...killings, but only two instances could be firmly established. Medina had shot a woman when she started to move in a paddyfield and he had fired two shots over the head of a prisoner. Otherwise, Eckhardt could only claim that Medina's failure to stop the slaughter amounted to criminal negligence. Bailey retorted that Medina's guilt could not be proved beyond a "reasonable doubt." Under the circumstances, he asked the jury in his summation, "What would you have done...
Violated Conventions. Eventually, claims Hammer, the outgunned defense tried to turn the court-martial into a near trial of Galley's commander, Captain Ernest L. Medina. The defense produced soldiers who claimed that Medina had ordered the slaughter of civilians. Calley, it was argued, had no choice; he could not disobey his superior. Medina denied giving such orders, and the Army's young prosecutor, Captain Aubrey M. Daniel III, was able to draw from a surprising number of defense witnesses the admission that they had disobeyed Galley's order to fire into the assembled groups of civilians...