The Nation: The Clamor Over Calley: Who Shares the Guilt?

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denied under oath giving Calley and his men orders to "waste" the village of My Lai. Calling the Calley verdict "very harsh, very severe," Medina announced that if he is acquitted in his own court-martial, he will resign, because the My Lai incident—although not his own actions—disgraced the uniform. He added: "You can't apply the standards of World War I and World War II to the war in Southeast Asia. If you're going to try to convict an infantry lieutenant and an infantry captain, and you apply the same standards as Nuremberg, then we should take a hard look at the situation. The guilt will have to go all the way up."

Just how far up the guilt must go —or just how widely across the nation —is indeed the central question raised by the Calley case. Along with it come a host of other questions, many of which may seem like ghastly, hairsplitting attempts to measure the unspeakable, to calibrate degrees of horror. Yet precisely such questions must be answered in any attempt to reach moral conclusions. Calley, for one, was notably ill-equipped to cope with these issues. At his trial he testified that he had never been instructed that he should refuse to obey an illegal order.

The Laws of War

Amid the furor over Calley's sentence, few Americans were clear about the "laws of war" under which he was convicted. Many found the phrase absurd. War, after all, sanctions acts that civilians label crimes—arson, murder, kidnaping. "The soldier who kills a man in obedience to authority is not guilty of murder," wrote Gratian, the 12th century founder of canon law. Still, this immunity has to be regulated. All armies have at times stooped to atrocities: the Germans (Lidice), the Japanese (Nanking), the French (Algeria), the British (India, Ireland in 1916), the Americans (against Indians and Filipinos), the North Vietnamese (Hue) and the Viet Cong (Dak Son). As C.P. Snow once remarked: "More hideous crimes have been committed in the name of obedience than have ever been committed in the name of rebellion."

For at least 800 years, men have tried to control war's excesses by transforming the rules of knightly chivalry into modern prohibitions against needless military cruelty. The laws of war, first codified by the U.S. Army in 1863, were used against Confederate Captain Henry Wirz, who was hanged in 1865 for letting nearly 14,000 Union prisoners die in Andersonville prison camp. In one of the early prosecutions of a U.S. officer, Brigadier General Jacob Hurd Smith was tried in 1902 for ordering a My Lai-style massacre during the Army's anti-guerrilla campaign in the Philippines—an era when troopers sang "Damn, damn, damn the Filipinos, civilize them with a Krag."

The laws of war were strengthened by the multi-nation Hague and Geneva conventions (safeguarding prisoners and noncombatants), both of which are U.S. law by virtue of Senate ratification. The key theme is proportionality: armies may not go beyond strict military requirements. The purpose is practical as well as humane: indiscriminate killing demoralizes armies, turns civilians into guerrillas, and endangers soldiers captured by an incensed enemy. According to U.S. Army Field Manual 27-10 (The Law of Land Warfare), the law "requires that belligerents refrain from employing any kind or