"War Criminal or Scapegoat?" Topic

…Calley was the only U.S. service member convicted for participating in what would be remembered as the 1968 My Lai Massacre, which saw American soldiers brutally and indiscriminately slaughter more than 500 Vietnamese civilians in what's often referred to as "the most shocking incident of the Vietnam War." He would spend only three years in prison, and, after leaving the Army, he avoided the limelight until his death on April 28, 2024, in Gainesville, Florida, at age 80…

Military: link

The answer can be yes to both. He was a moron, shouldn't have been in command of anything, and was following orders. However those orders were evil and immoral and from eye witness accounts it sounds like he enjoyed carrying them out.

It was pretty well established in the US Army that "I vas chust following orders!" was unacceptable.
I don't care how stupid he was. What he was doing was reprehensible.

I would like to think that I would have acted morally, but…
It's like saying that I would not have turned in Ann Frank.

Yep – both.

He certainly was scapegoated to cover what was the de facto policy of that time. But should have been sentenced to life or indeed death [though I oppose the death penalty on principal.] So should many others who took part or created the culture that made massacres like My Lai inevitable.

There's plenty of damning evidence about this massacre and many others. The cover up was staggering and reached to the very highest levels.

I recommend Nick Turse's book 'Kill Anything That Moves'. Grim reading.

Draft youngsters against their will to fight an unpopular war.
Frustrate them with confusing leadership.
Give them plenty of destructive capability
Give them a guerilla war where they can't tell friend from foe.
Give them nebulous objectives

Bad things are going to happen.

Speaking of my own experience I think the military has learned these lessons. It is the political oversite that sometimes still gets confused.

As others have said, he appears to have been a young man put in a bad position. He made a morally bad choice. I doubt he was the only one.

Not sure he was drafted?

Wikipedia says enlisted.

But many of the men under his command who committed the rapes and murders were draftees.

Extra blame falls on leaders in these situations.

But Calley was the highest ranking person charged and as such was a scapegoat for those above.

Ergo – both a war criminal and a scapegoat.

Agreed.

I do, however, dispute this:
"the most shocking incident of the Vietnam War."

Ask the teachers, police officers, doctors, librarians, and other assorted intellectuals living in Hue when it was captured in '68. Mass graves of anyone who might oppose the worker's revolution.

Funny, all stories like this tend to concentrate on our failings and ignore the evil of the other side.

Dn Jackson, that's because we consider them war crimes and the communist considers them act worthy of commendation and metals.

Too true Col Durnford. The problem is that it's our press writing the stories!

Pz, don't know his particulars but officers were never pure draftees. If you were drafted after college you could either enlist or add a year commitment and go through OCS. I am guessing he is the later.
Jackson, agree there is a double standard but that is what makes us the good guys. : )

Joe

LOL, agreed.

The ROK Marines never prosecuted any of their troops for atrocities in VN.

An Army friend of mine met Calley in VN after he was relieved of his command. He said the guy did not seem very bright.

Wolfhag

Two important points: one, Calley didn't just follow orders and have his platoon kill people: he physically did so himself, and it was reasonably well established that he killed women and children (one reason he was probably pardoned was the post hoc doubt around his conviction that was raised when F Lee Bailey got Michael Bernhardt to say that he would lie to secure Ernest Medina's conviction). Two, he didn't say silent: he collaborated in a memoir with a ghostwriter, published eventually as "Body Count."

The Peers Report is a real accomplishment, not least because it helped to establish the occurrence of a second massacre committed the same day by a platoon from 4/3 Infantry that was also a part of TF Barker. The platoon leader in that case, 2LT Thomas Willingham, was charged but never prosecuted, probably because in the second massacre, the circumstances were very different.

Willingham was a brand new platoon leader on his first mission, and the accounts I have seen suggest that a lot of the killing was carried out by a small group of hyper-aggressive soldiers in the platoon known as the "point" (essentially a self-selected permanent advance guard squad), several of whom were killed and wounded within days of the massacre. The others were discharged when the inquiry began- and virtually all of them declined to talk to investigators, who had limited options in those days as a consequence of the decision in "Kinsella v Kruger," which effectively left a jurisdictional hole until Congress plugged it in the ‘90s.

It also went unwitnessed, and one of the ugliest elements of the whole My Lai story is the way the Army sat on evidence very courageously obtained by WO Hugh Thompson, who saw the killing from the air and landed his helicopter to stop it. When the famous "Pinkville" letter alerted Congress and the Army to what had happened, it put the spotlight on a platoon full of men who knew Calley well and were only too happy to testify against him.

When I passed through Benning in the ‘90s he was still working at V-V-Vick's jewelry store, and some people went there, out of morbid curiosity I suppose, but I never did.

One other comment- the company commander, CPT Ernest Medina, was charged as well, but they couldn't get a conviction (he had the good sense to retain F Lee Bailey for the defense, and Bailey got him off). The other officer in the direct chain of command who would almost certainly have been charged had he been alive was the TF commander, LTC Barker. He wasn't charged because he was dead, killed in a helicopter accident in Vietnam.