Page 1 of 2 DISPATCHES FROM AMERICA From My Lai to Lockerbie
By Nick Turse
A week ago, two convicted mass murderers leaped back into public consciousness
as news coverage of their stories briefly intersected. One was freed from
prison, continuing to proclaim his innocence, and his release was vehemently
denounced in the United States as were the well-wishers who welcomed him home.
The other expressed his contrition, after almost 35 years living in his country
in a state of freedom, and few commented.
When Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, the Libyan sentenced in 2001 to 27 years in prison
for the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, was
released from incarceration by the Scottish government on "compassionate
grounds", a furor erupted. On August 22, ABC World News with Charles Gibson
featured a segment on outrage over the Libyan's release. It was aired shortly
before a report on an apology offered by William Calley, who, in 1971 as a
young lieutenant, was sentenced to life in prison for the massacre of civilians
in the Vietnamese village of My Lai.
After Megrahi, who served eight years in prison, arrived home to a hero's
welcome in Libya, officials in Washington expressed their dismay. To White
House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, it was "outrageous and disgusting"; to
President Barack Obama, "highly objectionable".
Calley, who admitted at trial to killing Vietnamese civilians personally, but
served only three years of house arrest following an intervention by president
Richard Nixon, received a standing ovation from the Kiwanis Club of Greater
Columbus, Georgia, the city where he lived for years following the war. (He now
resides in Atlanta.) For him, there was no such uproar, and no one, apparently,
thought to ask either Gibbs or the president for comment, despite the eerie
confluence of the two men and their fates.
Part of the difference in treatment was certainly the passage of time and
Calley's contrition, however many decades delayed, regarding the infamous
massacre of more than 500 civilians. "There is not a day that goes by that I do
not feel remorse for what happened that day in My Lai," the Vietnam veteran
told his audience. "I feel remorse for the Vietnamese who were killed, for
their families, for the American soldiers involved and their families. I am
very sorry."
For his part, Megrahi, now dying of cancer, accepted that relatives of the 270
victims of the Lockerbie bombing "have hatred for me. It's natural to behave
like this ... They believe I'm guilty, which in reality I'm not. One day the
truth won't be hiding as it is now. We have an Arab saying: 'The truth never
dies'."
American exceptionalism
Calley was charged in the deaths of more than 100 civilians and convicted in
the murder of 22 in one village, while Megrahi was convicted of the murder of
270 civilians aboard one airplane. Almost everyone, it seems, found it
perverse, outrageous, or "gross and callous" that the Scottish government
allowed a convicted mass murderer to return to a homeland where he was greeted
with open arms.
No one seemingly thought it odd that another mass murderer had lived freely in
his home country for so long. The families of the Lockerbie victims were widely
interviewed. As the Calley story broke, no American reporter apparently thought
it worth the bother to look for the families of the My Lai victims, let alone
ask them what they thought of the apology of the long-free officer who had
presided over, and personally taken part in the killing of, their loved ones.
Whatever the official response to Megrahi, the lack of comment on Calley
underscores a longstanding American aversion to facing what the US did to
Vietnam and its people during a war that ended more than 30 years ago. Since
then, one cover-up of mass murder after another has unraveled and bubbled into
view.
These have included the mass killing of civilians in the Mekong Delta village
of Thanh Phong by future senator Bob Kerrey and the SEAL team he led (exposed
by the New York Times Magazine and CBS News in 2001); a long series of
atrocities (including murders, torture and mutilations) involving the deaths of
hundreds of noncombatants largely committed in Quang Ngai province (where My
Lai is also located) by an elite US unit, the Tiger Force (exposed by the
Toledo Blade in 2003); seven massacres, 78 other attacks on noncombatants, and
141 instances of torture, among other atrocities (exposed by the Los Angeles
Times in 2006); a massacre of civilians by US Marines in Quang Nam province's
Le Bac hamlet (exposed in In These Times magazine in 2008); and the slaughter
of thousands of Vietnamese in the Mekong Delta during Operation Speedy Express
(exposed in The Nation magazine, also in 2008). Over the last decade, long
suppressed horrors from Vietnam have been piling up, indicating not only that
My Lai, horrific and iconic as it may have been, was no isolated incident, but
that many American veterans have long lived with memories not unlike those of
Calley.
If you recall what actually happened at My Lai, Calley's
more-than-40-years-late apology cannot help but ring hollow. Not only were more
than 500 defenseless civilians slaughtered by Calley and some of the 100 troops
who stormed the village on March 16, 1968, but women and girls were raped,
bodies were horrifically mutilated, homes set aflame, animals tortured and
killed, the local water supply fouled, and the village razed to the ground.
Some of the civilians were killed in their bomb shelters, others when they
tried to leave them. Women holding infants were gunned down. Others, gathered
together, threw themselves on top of their children as they were sprayed with
automatic rifle fire. Children, even babies, were executed at close range. Many
were slaughtered in an irrigation ditch.
For his part in the bloodbath, Calley was convicted and sentenced to life in
prison doing hard labor. As it happened, he spent only three days in a military
stockade before Nixon intervened and had him returned to his "bachelor
apartment", where he enjoyed regular visits from a girlfriend, built
gas-powered model airplanes, and kept a small menagerie of pets.
By late 1974, Calley was a free man. He subsequently went on the college
lecture circuit (making US$2,000 an appearance), married the daughter of a
jeweler in Columbus, Georgia, and worked at the jewelry store for many years
without hue or cry from fellow Americans among whom he lived. All that time he
stayed silent and, despite ample opportunity, offered no apologies.
Still, Calley's belated remorse evidences a sense of responsibility that his
superiors - from his company commander Captain Ernest Medina to his
commander-in-chief president Lyndon Johnson - never had the moral fiber to
shoulder. Recently, in considering the life and death of Johnson's secretary of
defense Robert McNamara, who repudiated his wartime justifications for the
conflict decades later ("we were wrong, terribly wrong"), Jonathan Schell
asked:
[H]ow many public figures of his importance have ever expressed
any regret at all for their mistakes and follies and crimes? As the decades of
the twentieth century rolled by, the heaps of corpses towered, ever higher, up
to the skies, and now they pile up again in the new century, but how many of
those in high office who have made these things happen have ever said, "I made
a mistake," or "I was terribly wrong," or shed a tear over their actions? I
come up with: one, Robert McNamara.
Because the United States
failed to take responsibility for the massive scale of civilian slaughter and
suffering inflicted in Southeast Asia in the war years, and because McNamara's
contrition arrived decades late, he never became the public face of slaughter
in Vietnam, even though he, like other top US civilian officials and military
commanders of that time, bore an exponentially greater responsibility for the
bloodshed in that country than the low-ranking Calley.
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