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Legal Orders
Is it realistic to expect combat soldiers to make moral choices? Every recruit learns the Army's basic rule: instant obedience, a lifesaver in battle. Under military law, in fact, a man who refuses to follow an order is deemed guilty of that offense until he proves the order was illegal at his subsequent court-martial. The defense rarely succeeds. Disobedience in combat is even riskier: more than one soldier who has defied an order in battle has been executed on the spot, although this practice is not authorized by the military code.
Still, difficult though it may be, the serviceman does have a moral choice, as well as a legal duty, to question unlawful orders. Surely officers in particular are expected to understand and enforce the laws of war. Calley claimed that Captain Medina gave orders to kill all My Lai villagers, presumably including women and children. Medina flatly denied this. Whatever the facts, Calley's claim gets short shrift from Columbia Law Professor Telford Taylor, who served at Nuremberg as chief counsel to the prosecution, with the rank of brigadier general. Writing in this week's LIFE, Taylor comments: "Such an order would be so flagrantly in violation of the laws of war, to say nothing of common humanity, that Calley could hardly have taken it as seriously intended unless it was in keeping with his prior military experience. If it was in keeping, he might well have done as he did without any explicit instructions from Medina. If not, the order should have at least puzzled and disturbed him, which plainly was not the case." Colonel Robert Rheault, former commander of U.S. Special Forces in Viet Nam, makes a different point. "Calley is guilty of murder," says Rheault, himself a onetime (never tried) murder suspect in the famous 1969 Green Beret triple-agent case. As an expert on anti-guerrilla warfare in Viet Nam, Rheault told TIME last week: "Nobody ever had a policy of mowing down women and children. Our policy was to protect women and children as much as possible."
Still, the colonel concedes that "perhaps the policy wasn't strong enough." Therein lies the problem: in Viet Nam, a man of "ordinary sense" may often be unclear whether his orders are legal or illegal. To be sure, every G.I. arriving in the country receives a wallet card listing forbidden war crimes and related acts, including torture, looting and mutilation. At the time of My Lai, those orders insisted: "All persons in your hands, whether suspects, civilians or combat captives, must be protected against violence, insults, curiosity and reprisals of any kind."
Despite the rules, distinctions between lawful conduct and atrocities tend to blur in a no-front war against guerrillas who look exactly like civilians —and are sometimes women or even children armed with hand grenades. The tension of being feared and hated in a remote, racially different Asian country has pushed many Americans toward a tribalistic logic—all "gooks" are enemies and therefore killable. To Calley, for example, the civilians who were massacred were not real people. A psychiatric report, never seen by anyone but the judge and the defense during the trial, described