North Viet Nam cannot defeat or humiliate' the United States. Only Americans can do that.
—Presidential address, Nov. 3
IN a terrible way that he did not mean or likely imagine, those words of Richard Nixon's came true last week as the nation grappled with the enormity of the massacre at My Lai. A young Army first lieutenant, William Laws Calley Jr., stood accused of slaying at least 109 Vietnamese civilians in the rural village in South Viet Nam, and at least 25 of his comrades in arms on that day in March 1968 are also being investigated. It will be for the courts-martial judges to determine whether Calley or anyone else is individually guilty. But that America and Americans must stand in the larger dock of guilt and conscience for what happened at My Lai seems inescapable.
Only a shadow of a doubt now remains that the massacre at My Lai was an atrocity, barbaric in execution. Yet almost as chilling to the American mind is the character of the alleged perpetrators. The deed was not performed by patently demented men. Instead, according to the ample testimony of their friends and relatives, the men of C Company who swept through My Lai were for the most part almost depressingly normal. They were Everymen, decent in their daily lives, who at home in Ohio or Vermont would regard it as unthinkable to maliciously strike a child, much less kill one. Yet men in American uniforms slaughtered the civilians of My Lai. and in so doing humiliated the U.S. and called in question the U.S. mission in Viet Nam in a way that all the antiwar protesters could never have done.
As more and more facts about that dark day came to light last week, even staunch defenders of U.S. policy in Viet Nam and longtime supporters of the armed forces expressed their dismay. A White House statement called such a massacre "abhorrent to the conscience of all the American people." Defense Secretary Melvin Laird said he was "horrified." Secretary of the Army Stanley Resor termed the story "appalling." Mississippi Senator John Stennis, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said he was "shocked."
Killing at Close Range
After Secretary Resor showed color photographs of massacre victims to the Senate and House Armed Services Committees, none doubted that an atrocity had been committed. Pennsylvania's Richard Schweiker described the affair as "a simplistic, deliberate act of inhumanity—one of the darkest days in American history." Near tears, Ohio's Stephen Young said he had seen a young woman begging not to be shot while a child clung to her neck and scenes of "youngsters who had been killed at close range, with their insides hanging out." He called it "an abominable atrocity."
Inevitably, there were those who, while not denying the deed, felt it would be better left untold. After a G.I. witness described on television what he had seen at My Lai, Colorado Senator Peter Dominick asked: "What kind of country do we have when that kind of garbage gets put on the air?" A more pertinent question was raised by William Fulbright, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. "This incident can cause grave concern all over the world," he said, "as to what kind of country we are." Countless U.S. citizens, whether foes or critics of the