When I entered the army in June 1967, my Basic Combat Training unit was at Fort Jackson, South Carolina. Early on, one of our drill sergeants, a “lifer” who had plenty of combat experience from the Korean War to Vietnam, marched our platoon out into a field.
As we stood at ease in a formation, his command voice boomed over us. “Listen up! Listen up! There are two basic rules in the army. There are two basic rules in the army.
“Rule number 1: Never break an Army rule.
“Rule number 2: When you break an Army rule, DON’T GET CAUGHT!”
We could tell by his tone and demeanor that we weren’t supposed to laugh, that he meant what he had just said. We also knew that we would not find his two basic rules in any Army manual, but that didn’t mean they weren’t real rules.
The My Lai Massacre
They broke rule #1: Never break an Army rule. So they sought to follow rule #2: Don’t get caught.
50 years ago on March 16^th^, 1968, Charlie Company of the Americal Division of the U.S. Army assaulted the little hamlet of My Lai 4 in Quang Ngai Province, Vietnam.
Poor intelligence reports had informed them that they would find armed enemy forces of the Viet Cong there and that the civilians would be away at the morning markets. Their orders were to engage the enemy and kill them. They found no armed enemy forces, only unarmed civilians and no men of military age.
That should have been the end of the story. Sadly, it wasn’t. Before the day ended, Charlie Company – and Bravo Company at My Khe, another nearby hamlet – had murdered more than 500 unarmed civilians. These were old women, old men, boys, girls, pregnant women, and babies.
They broke rule #1: Never break an Army rule. So they sought to follow rule #2: Don’t get caught.
For myriad reasons, the army helped them to cover up the truth of what happened at My Lai 4 and My Khe 4. The assault on these Vietnamese civilians was reported by the Army as a successful U.S. military action against the Viet Cong and was reported as such in U.S. newspapers the next day.
The Army cover-up lasted more than a year. By November 1969, an army veteran, Ron Ridenhour, wrote to thirty-some members of Congress. He informed them of what he knew about these murders. Although he had not been in Charlie Company or Bravo, he had learned of the massacre – the war crimes — from soldiers who had been there. Brave journalists, notably, Seymour Hersh, Frances FitzGerald, Gloria Emerson, Ward Just, and others exposed the war crime in articles that November and after.
Another year passed before an army commission – the Peers Commission – investigated the massacre. Another year passed before charges were filed and for courts-martial proceedings.
Excuses for Violence
Some have tried to excuse or to understand these sorts of actions by reasoning that surely the bad actors had not been instructed in the rules of engagement and international humanitarian law. On the basis of my army experience, I believe that this is untrue.
When the conviction of Lt. Calley of Charlie Company was reported, my wife Beth and I happened to be with a Vietnam Veteran. He had recently returned from Vietnam. He became quite agitated by the news. He told us, in confidence, that, while out in the field in Vietnam, he (and his squad) heard Vietnamese voices moving toward them in the thick foliage.
Fearing for their lives, they “opened up” with their weapons. No more voices. They went to find who had sneaked up on them. They found the two people – now dead –a mother and a young boy collecting berries of some sort.
This veteran claimed that he and his buddies buried the bodies, where they hoped that the bodies would never be found, and left the scene. They did not report their action that day. Would the army now discover and charge them?
Some have tried to excuse or to understand these sorts of actions by reasoning that surely the bad actors had not been instructed in the rules of engagement and international humanitarian law.
On the basis of my army experience, I believe that this is untrue. Surely, these men were instructed in the rules of war. During Basic Combat Training, we all suffered through something called Command Information Sessions. During these sessions, an officer would lecture us about some topic and one of those topics was the rules of engagement and international humanitarian law. Additionally, each of us was issued an easily-understood pocket version of the rules. Basically, these said that we were never to attack civilians or civilian targets or unarmed, surrendering enemies, period.
The Violence of White Privilege
Time and again our society has inflicted terrible moral injury on itself at the expense of precious lives in the communities of others. We are a racist society, and we have a long journey ahead of us.
When I consider what caused those U.S. soldiers to murder innocent unarmed civilians at My Lai 4, my thoughts go back to our nation’s system of white privilege. White privilege shows itself in a pattern – again and again – of leading our society into terrible violence against strangers, most often strangers of color.
European-Americans enslaved African people and then eliminated Native Americans from their own lands. During World War II, white American leaders forced Japanese-Americans into concentration camps and then firebombed Tokyo and used atomic weapons to incinerate civilians in the cities Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Today, we enforce the ‘New Jim Crow,’ through mass incarceration of black men and women while unarmed African-Americans are murdered in the streets of our cities. U.S. military interventions perpetuate violence in Afghanistan and Iraq and extend endless war seemingly everywhere.
Time and again, throughout its history, our society has inflicted terrible moral injury on itself at the expense of precious lives in the communities of others. We are a racist society, and we have a long journey ahead of us.
The massacre at My Lai 4 – terrible as it was – was not a few bad actors going haywire. On the contrary, it’s where we end up again and again. Senator J. William Fulbright called it “the arrogance of power.” To build peace and security, to restore a society of equality, to let every person fulfill her or his potential, and to let our Planet Earth sustain us, we must leave white privilege behind.
Joe Volk is an FCNL Executive Secretary Emeritus, having served in that role from 1990 to 2011. He was National Secretary for Peace Education at the American Friends Service Committee from 1982 to 1990. A member of Ann Arbor Friends Meeting (MI), he grew up in Blanchester, Ohio and is a graduate of Miami University, Oxford, OH. He went into the US Army to try to educate fellow soldiers about the U.S. war in Vietnam. He served from 1967 to 1969 and was honorably discharged.
