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Yet a deliberate national policy of genocide is not the same as the unlawful actions of groups of soldiers running amuck. The U.S. as a nation bears no guilt equivalent to that of Nazi Germany, though perhaps the individual soldier in the American Army who commits an atrocity should be judged more harshly than a storm trooper. All the sanctions of his state, his education, his training were brought to bear on the Nazi soldier to obey any order, including the killing of civilians; it was more difficult for him to disobey. An American butchering non-combatants must act against all he has been taught.
Some of the men of Charlie Company say that their act was no different from bombings carried out by high-flying pilots—and for peasants the outcome is often deathly similar. This argument raises a troubling ethical question about the nature of war; yet it clearly takes greater savagery to kill a defenseless human being when one looks into his face than when one never sees him.
In an attempt to face and understand My Lai, some contributing causes help explain, if not condone. There is, unfortunately, a racial element. To the G.I., the Vietnamese, both North and South, "slant." is a "gook," "dink," "slope".; The terms, often used unthinkingly, tend to shift the object into a thing rather than a person — and hence something that it is easier to kill.
There is the frustration of guerrilla warfare in a hostile countryside, where the enemy wears no uniform, strikes from ambush, and where women do fire rifles and a ten-year-old selling pop by day may be a demolition expert by night. Kids in Quang Ngai have been known to profiteer in land mines: they can get 200 piastres from the V.C. for planting one, then disclose its location to the G.I.s for a bigger sum.
Something
Those conditions breed fear and paranoia, in which the young soldier sees all Vietnamese as threatening. When he is also weary from hours of trudging through swamp and jungle and then sees a friend killed beside him — and friendships are highly emotional bonds in combat — a soldier can easily go wild. At My Lai, however, the rampage was a group affair rather than individual breakdowns, something much harder to understand.
That is why some of the parents of the men of C Company found their deeds so incomprehensible. "Why did they have to take my son and do that to him?" asked Mrs. Myrtle Meadlo, mother of Paul David. "I raised him as a good boy, and they made a murderer out of him." Paul's father, Tony, had a more forceful view. "If it had been me out there, I would have swung my rifle around and shot Calley instead — right between the goddam eyes. Then there would have been only one death." Others prefer not to face up to the implications of the affair. Says the company's Corporal William Kern: "I can't figure out why everybody is so upset. Especially Ridenhour, who wasn't even there. How can it bother you if you're not even there?"
Sharing the Guilt
It can and it did bother those who were not there — the mounting shame, and the relentless exposure at least testified to the still-active conscience of America. The guilt of My Lai has to be shared by the nation that raised the soldiers, by the Army that trained and