The My Lai Massacre & the Court-Martial of Lt. William Calley

7iefi]&m as /1eaphor the My Lai Massacre and the Court-Martial of Lt. William Calley D&ireii Øn September 5, 1969, America heard for the first time about an alleged massacre of South Vietnamese civilians. The public information office at Fort Benning, Georgia reported that First Lieutenant William L. Calley,Jr., who was scheduled for discharge the next day, was being retained pending an investigation. The press re lease revealed little beyond the formal charge: violation of Article 118 of the Uniform Code of MilitaryJustice murder.’ Five days later, the news reached millions of Americans when NBC broadcast the story on the Huntley-Brinkley evening news show2 Over the ensuing months, as new details continued to surface, the full extent of both the massacre and the US Army’s efforts to cover it up captivated the nation. By April 1971, when a militaryjury sentenced Calley to life imprisonment for the murder of at least twenty-two civilians, the significance of the case in the eyes of America had gone well beyond the individual particulars of Calley the soldier or My Lai the event.3 Historians have often noted the power of certain landmark trials or Court decisions to attain symbolic significance in relation to their histori cal context. The Dred Scott case, for instance, was important not for the impact it had on the individual litigants, but because it became symbolic of the nation’s sectional divide on the eve of the Civil War.4 Other famous cases, including the Chicago Haymarket bombing, the Scopes “Monkey” tria], and Brown v. Board of Education, have likewise become salient historical episodes largely because of their symbolic properties.5 Yet most historians of the Vietnam War have ignored or diminished the symbolic importance of My Lai and the court-martial of Lt. Calley within the overall context of the war.” Those who have not, most recently Michal Belknap, discovered what many contemporary observers perceived in the aftermath of My Lai: the massacre and the subsequent court-martial of 13$ ©IPf Lt. Calley became a potent metaphor for the tumultuous national debate over American involvement in Vietnam as a whole.7 Though they often disagreed on the reasons, all sectors of American society politicians, ci vilians and the military itself read into It’Iy Lai their perceptions of what was wrong with America’s war effort, for opponents of the war, My Lai was simply the most publicized, and perhaps the most horrifying event in a stream of reports documenting the impact of the US war effort on the Vietnamese civilian population. for some proponents of the war and/or supporters of the military and Nixon Administration, My Lai was wrong, but somehow not as wrong as the anti-war movement undercutting the fabric of America. for other hawks, war was hell; events like My Lai were, if not necessar at least excusable. Over time, the Vietnam anti-war movement coalesced in opposition to the very same issues at the heart of My Lai and the court-martial of Lt. Calley. Namely, anti-war activists protested the moral implications of both a war strategy that, from their perspective, made little distinction between military and civilian targets and a political and military leader ship that consistently mislead the American public through dissimulation, misinformation, and haif-truth. Throughout the early stages of US intervention in Vietnam, the vast majority of Americans supported US policy Nonetheless, a small but vocal minority protested the war from its outset. In 1960, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) brought together members of the Old Left and the emerging student-driven New Left. SDS issued a policy manifesto in 1962 known as the Port Huron Statement. While primarily concerned with domestic issues such as civil rights and poverty, the Port Huron Statement decried the Cold War and America’s “military indus trial complex,” a not-so-subtle reference to US police action in Vietnam.8 The next year, SDS sponsored the first substantial organized protest against the war. By 1965, the anti-war movement had attracted a significant following on college campuses, but remained marginalized in larger circles. This was due in part to the fact that American commitments in Vietnam remained limited. After all, by the end of 1964 less than 24,000 American military personnel were in Vietnam and only 190 US soldiers had died. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara had assured Lyndon Johnson in October 1963 that “the boys will be home by Christmas.”7 While McNamara’s prediction proved false, the anti-war movement was clearly in need of a catalyst if it was to broaden its appeal beyond the radical student left. In February 1965,Johnson provided that catalyst when he approved a plan for the pacification of North Vietnam and the South Vietnamese countryside, through massive and sustained aerial bombardment, known as Operation Rolling Thunder. Rolling Thunder signaled a marked escalation of American intervention and had a dramatic impact on the DAREN SALTER e]PF I39 American public’s perception of the war in Vietnam. Officially, all of the targets were military. Yet for Americans opposed to the war or those still straddling the fence, it was increasingly evident from a variety of press reports emanating from Vietnam that US aerial targeting was in fact in discriminate and that civilians were dying in large numbers. In June 1965, Jack Langguth reported the saturation bombing of Quang Ngai and estimated as many as 500 civilians had perished.’0 Charles Mohr reported a similar scene in September 1965, adding that “few Americans appreciate what their nation is doing to South Vietnam with airpower . innocent civilians are dying every day in South Vietnam.” w York Times correspondent Harrison Salisbury broke the story on a national scale in a series of dispatches from Hanoi in late December 1966. Salisbury reported that US bombing had killed eighty-nine civilians, injured 135 more, and destroyed 240 homes in a Christmas day raid on the North Vietnamese town of Namdinh. Over the next several days, he documented further incidents of heavy civilian casualties inflicted by American bombers. “Whatever the explanation,” Salisbury fumed, “one can see that United States planes are dropping an enormous weight of explosives on purely civilian targets. Whatever else there might have been in Namdinh, it is the civilians who have taken the punishment.”° Salisbury added that Namdinh was not an isolated inci dent; American bombers had been inflicting civilian casualties “for some time past.”3 For many Americans, Salisbury and others were doing more than questioning military strategy. In documenting the human toll of US bombing they were exposing the immortality of American involvement in Vietnam. The initial civilian casualties reports touched ofT a chain reaction in the American press and public, as story after story documented the terrible consequences of the US war effort for Vietnamese civilians. “The bombing of the North has proved of little value,” the J’Iew York Times editorialized two days after Salisbury’s initial dispatch. “Moreover, steady escalation of the bombing . is now bumping against a ceiling which cannot be replaced without inflicting heavy civilian casualties.”4 A Massachusetts physician wrote to the New York Times to congratulate them for placing Salisbury in Hanoi: “[H]is dispatches reveal both the immorality of our bombing policy, resulting in the death of hundreds of civilians, and the uselessness of this policy, which has resulted in little or no interruption in the flow of goods into North Vietnam.”5 Likewise, traveling through Quang Ngai province in 1967, journalist Jonathan Schell observed the “overriding, fantastic fact that we are destroying, seemingly by inadvertence, the very country we are supposedly protect ing.”° The Akron Beacon Journal published a soldier’s letter home in March 1967. It described how another soldier had pulled a Vietnamese man away from lois hut and prepared to throw a grenade inside. The man “started jabbering,” but the soldier could not understand him. He threw Vietnam as Ivletaphor r4o the grenade and after the explosion found a mother two children, and an almost newborn baby lying dead. “That was what the old man was trying to tell us!” the soldier observed.’7 The Pentagon and White House vehemently defended its military strategy and called reports of civilian deaths “grossly exaggerated.”’5 Johnson claimed he had “no reaction as such” to reports of excessive casualties and insisted that bombing had never been authorized on any thing but firm military targets. Furthermore, he declined to initiate an investigation into the subject. When pressed by Critics about whether or not the distinction between authorized targets and those actually hit had been made clear, Johnson deferred to the Defense Department, a move interpreted by the media as evasjve.’9 For its part, the Pentagon also denied deliberately targeting civilian populations, though it admitted that mistakes happen and wiil “happen again.” Pentagon spokesmen attributed most civilian deaths to bomb fragments or “secondary explosions” after the primary targets had been struck.2° Rare instances of candor offset such official denials. In one such instance, New York Times correspondent Neil Sheehan asked a senior US Army general in 1966 if he was worried about reports of excessive civilian casualties. “Yes, it is a problem,” the general conceded, “but it does deprive the enemy of the population doesn’t it?”2’ In the face of seemingly overwhelming eyewitness evidence from reporters around the nation, denials or prevarications from the White House and Pentagon only underscored the public’s premonition that it was being misled by the nation’s leadership. The anti-war movement reacted to military escalation, news of ci vilian casualties, and official denials by stepping up protests around the nation.

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