The Normandy American Museum and Memorial, which overlooks Omaha Beach, where many of the men buried in its cemetery fell, is a stirring symbol of the debt we owe to the common American soldier. In some ways, it is more symbolically potent than Arlington National Cemetery, even though more men lie at Arlington, representing multiple conflicts dating back to the nation’s founding. D-Day represents our gladdest idea of ourselves as Americans. Its myth is a democratic myth, a rousing of the courage and patriotism not of great but of ordinary citizens who found that greatness had been thrust upon them.
As we know from contemporary reporting, the stories of D-Day were various. Some soldiers displayed astonishing bravery; others, inevitably, stayed in the shallow surf, afraid to press forward under fire. Many died before their bravery was even tested, killed by German machine guns the moment the doors of their landing craft dropped. D-Day has been sanitized by retelling and representation in popular culture. Even Steven Spielberg’s epic Saving Private Ryan (1998), with its intense dedication to a sanguinary and chaotic realism, ultimately leaves our essential understanding of the American experience in place. We fought a necessary war and we won it.
In March 1968, less than 25 years after Normandy, a US Army company was dropped by helicopter into the village of My Lai, which was located in Quang Nai province in central Vietnam. Charlie Company had been in Vietnam for about six months. They were, as one veteran later described them, “a fairly good cross-section of middle class American boys.” Combing the jungle in the previous months, hoping to engage the enemy, the unit had suffered significant casualties from booby traps and sniper fire. They were exhausted, frustrated, angry, undisciplined, and badly led. They were entering a region known colloquially as “Pinkville,” because it was believed to contain many Viet Cong sympathizers. And they had been given orders to kill.
* * *
Interviewed by news crews in 1970, the participants at My Lai, by then out of the Army, seemed numb. They related the events of that day (“I shot the mother and the baby”; “Some rapes did happen, yes”) without any apparent sense of the moral implications of what they were saying. Some even smiled, either from camera shyness or perhaps relief. (PTSD probably played a role in their strange affect.) If you take very young men of modest educational status, from the morally thin environment of American adolescence, and you give them weak and unprincipled leadership, then apparently this is what you get. In A Rumor of War (1977), the Vietnam veteran and memoirist Philip Caputo quoted one NCO thus: “One of the most brutal things in the world is your average nineteen-year old American boy.”
By the time PBS Frontline revisited the My Lai incident in 1989, however, these same soldiers had changed. The memories of what they had done bore down upon them in their nightmares. Most abandoned the “following orders” line and now seemed to admire their few comrades who’d had the courage not to do so. (Evolutionary biologists would want us to note that the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for judgment and impulse control, does not fully develop in men until they reach their mid-twenties.) Featured in the Frontline episode was a soldier from Jackson, Mississippi, Varnado Simpson. Simpson, who did not deny killing civilians at My Lai, experienced uncontrolled tremors as he faced the cameras, despite prescription medication meant to reduce his anxiety. Asked when he thought he might make peace with what he had done, he said, “When I commit suicide. Yeah, that’s it. When I eventually commit suicide.” Eight years later, he did just that.
Tom Vallely served in the Marine Corps in Vietnam in 1969 and was awarded the Silver Star. He later went on to play a leading role in the postwar effort to normalize relations between the United States and the unified Socialist Republic of Vietnam. He has said, “I knew where the line was between what was right and wrong in war. I didn’t need to get that from the Marine Corps. I got it from Sunday school.” It would be nice to think that all the young Americans who went to Vietnam got their values from Sunday school. But many, especially the conscripts who did the bulk of the fighting from 1967 onward, represented a cross-section of relative disadvantage and had gotten their values from less salutary sources. They did need their service branches and their commanding officers to tell them where that line was.
Almost to a man, My Lai veterans remarked on the weakness and moral idiocy of Lt. William Calley, the platoon commander who led the operation. That Calley was selected for and graduated from Officer Candidate School—his previous Army post had been as a typist—speaks to the Army’s desperation in a period when it could not even fill its incoming classes at West Point. By contrast, Calley’s superior, Sgt. Ernest Medina, who was tried and acquitted for his actions at My Lai, was a decorated and respected officer. And up the chain from Medina were seasoned World War II veterans, including Major-General Samuel Koster, who later became Superintendent of West Point. (Koster was not on the ground at My Lai. He was accused, but never charged, with covering up the massacre.) My Lai was a comprehensive failure, and it implicated men thought to be among our best.
A degree of humility is required here. “Here’s what I would have done in that situation” is the weakest moral claim there is. I am not at all certain, for example, that the 19-year-old version of me would not simply have followed the strongest figure to emerge amid the chaos. An unbridgeable gulf lies between those who have seen combat and the far greater number of us who have not. At the same time, a reluctance to judge that grades into relativism in time becomes destructive. Some things simply cannot be permitted. Watching those interviews with Varnado Simpson, one feels pity above all else, for a young man whose life might have been much different. And yet he should have been in prison, and the fact that he was not, and Sgt. Medina was not, is a blow to our national self-conception. (Only Lt. Calley was convicted. He served 18 months of house arrest before President Nixon pardoned him.) If we will tolerate plain murder in service of our geopolitical objectives, then we cannot also claim to be a force for good in the world.
Most of our elected representatives—those who decide when we go to war, how long we stay, and what objectives we fight for—are not themselves veterans. It is therefore worth the rest of us making the effort to understand, with as much specificity as possible, what we are asking our soldiers to do. Given the immense technological proficiency of the US military, we are now asking our fighters to bear the risk of moral injury much more than we are asking them to bear the risk of death. American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan also killed civilians, typically under more ambiguous circumstances than My Lai. It was in the nature of these conflicts that such things would occur. Of course, they were living under different moral norms; they were doing what they were trained to do, what we had asked them to do. We had absolved them in advance. That is cold comfort to the man sitting on his back porch in Pennsylvania or Indiana with a bottle in his hand, trying as hard as he can to forget. What he tells himself, perhaps, is that others did worse.
* * *
We hold two apparently contradictory beliefs about war. The first is that our need to form tribes and fight our enemies can be found in our deep history as a species and is, to that extent, beyond judgment. The second that is combat somehow reveals character—that is, teaches the soldier things about himself that might otherwise have remained hidden. How can these ideas be reconciled? It might be the case that My Lai revealed defects in the characters of the men who participated in the killing and unexpected strengths in those of the men who refused to do so. It might also be that character is a civilizational construct that does not survive contact with the enemy. Most of us embrace just about as much morality as we can comfortably afford. What lies beyond those limits is something we prefer not to consider.
What did My Lai reveal about the American soldiers who did the raping and killing there? We cannot know what would have become of Varnado Simpson, who was a 19-year-old sophomore at the University of Tennessee when he joined the Army, if he had taken the deferments afforded to other young students. Lt. Calley and Sgt. Medina went home to ordinary, anonymous lives, not obviously criminal or antisocial. Some of the 120 soldiers of Charlie Company did not participate in atrocities at My Lai despite having been ordered to do so; they wandered into the surrounding jungle while their comrades did the killing. Hugh Thompson Jr., an Army helicopter pilot tasked with supporting Charlie Company’s mission, intervened to stop the violence. He succeeded in evacuating a number of Vietnamese civilians, reported what was happening to his superiors, and later testified against Lt. Calley. Thompson Jr. and his two door gunners were later awarded the Soldier’s Medal. Thompson was also ostracized as a rat throughout the remainder of his Army career.
Every US soldier in Vietnam carried a laminated card entitled “Nine Rules For Personnel of US Military Assistance Command, Vietnam.” The rules were just what one would want them to be: “We make no demands and seek no special treatment … Treat women with politeness and respect … Reflect honor upon yourself and the United States of America.” The messages those troops received from their squad leaders, however, tended to elide the difference between civilians and enemy combatants, as did the conditions of guerrilla warfare themselves. In the more intelligent and morally astute soldier, this probably created a troubling cognitive dissonance. For the less scrupulous, it created a moral vacuum that some filled with violence—including violence that was sometimes directed against their own officers.
Philip Caputo describes the psychological journey that can carry a soldier, exhausted, demoralized, having lost friends to enemy fire, from the secure ground of international law and rules of engagement to the moral wilderness of expediency and a desire for revenge. Caputo himself felt that he lost his bearings. Senior officers, as Caputo and others have described, subtly encouraged ruthlessness and boundary-breaking. His own commanding officer, Caputo writes, “wanted bodies.”
My Lai reveals much about the nature of the US war effort in Vietnam as of March 1968. Just two years before My Lai, Vietnamese civilians would have met spirited and disciplined American soldiers, mostly volunteers who had enlisted out of patriotic duty and perhaps ideological conviction. No later than October 1966, however, Secretary of Defense McNamara had privately concluded that the war could not be won. It probably was not long after that that the men in the field must have begun to sense that the objectives they had been given were not achievable. The consequent erosion in their discipline was captured by one My Lai survivor: “The first time they came, they played with the children and gave them sweets. The second time, they drank the water we gave them and said nothing. The third time, they killed everyone in the village.”
The American war effort reflected the biases and blind spots of the technological superpower we had become. Our war making powers were enormous, and we brought them to bear with increasing ferocity on our enemy. Over time, the bombs and the fighter jets and the helicopters became the logic of our position. When dropping bombs in the north didn’t work, we dropped more in Cambodia; when we doubted the South Vietnamese Army’s capabilities, we gave them more tanks. Technology culture tends to elide what Graham Greene elsewhere called “the human factor.” In the Vietnam War, we ignored the human factor on both sides. We ignored the motivational gap between our Vietnamese allies and our Vietnamese foes. We also ignored the increasing demoralization and lawlessness of our own troops. I will never believe that My Lai represents America or the American soldier. But we can connect the dots between who we were as a nation in that period and the failure of our war effort.
* * *
To be an American is a complex fate, and it gets more complex as time passes. More and more history builds up behind us, like water gathering behind a dam. That history has to be recorded, reconciled, assimilated into a larger narrative. We will do a great deal to protect the privilege of believing ourselves to be special—a nation and a people called by history, as the men who fought the Revolutionary War felt themselves to be. We give ourselves considerable license, believing that license to be justified by our good faith and the force of our convictions. One of the conditions of that good faith must, however, be a willingness to face reality.
We train our soldiers to be killers, and that is just what, under the appropriate circumstances, we expect them to be. One might argue that everything else—the funeral pomp for returning KIAs, the sonorous speeches about duty and honor, even the Army-Navy football game—is an effort to cloak this fact in euphemism. I do not entirely believe this. I believe that, even accepting the facts of My Lai and Abu Graib and Kandahar, the United States Army has been a net force for good in the world. At the same time, I think that loose talk about “heroism” and “bravery” disserves that Army. Those are words to be invoked rarely. They are not meant to be thrown like a blanket over what is indefensible or embarrassing to us. We cannot honor those who defend us if we cannot see them as individuals.
When the Paris Peace Accords were signed in 1973, formally ending US military involvement in Vietnam, I was three years old and still home with my mother. I have no memory of the war. And yet I, like others of my age, have lived with Vietnam my whole life. The war has darkened our self-image as a nation, shadowed our politics, led to division in families and communities. My father was not among the roughly 2.5 million men that served (along with women who served in sometimes dangerous non-combat roles), and yet the war and its legacy are, in a sense, my patrimony. Was the war fought for a righteous cause? Did that cause justify the price that was paid? We still cannot seem to agree. What happened at My Lai is, however, beyond serious debate. Whether we choose to think about what it means is up to us.