Reverse-engineering a Vietnam War popular myth

Dead on the road in the most famous photo from the My Lai massacre of 1968

[Wonkism alert! This is a long post about one of my favorite topics, the evolution of Vietnam War political folklore.]

I was struck by this claim in the American Legion's booklet Resolution 169 - The War on Terrorism: A Guide to Building Awareness (2005):

When veterans returned from World War II, they were welcomed with ticker-tape parades and the GI Bill, which was written by American Legion Past National Commander Harry Colmery. Sadly Korean War veterans were treated indifferently by many Americans and Vietnam veterans were often treated scornfully by an ungrateful public. ...

Never again will American heroes be tarred as "baby-killers" or disrespected by an ungrateful segment of society. Never again will U.S. servicemembers be reluctant to wear their uniforms in public. (my emphasis)

This business about the returning Second World War veterans being welcomed by "ticker-tape parades" goes back to the hype of Old Man Bush's administration at the time of the Gulf War. Actually, most soldiers returning from the Second World War were not welcomed by parades, ticker-tape or otherwise. They were decommissioned from their units and returned home individually, for the most part, just as soldiers during the Vietnam War were.

But who was it that supposedly blamed American soldiers as all being baby-killers or anything of the sort? You can look long and hard at antiwar books and speeches from both activist protesters and antiwar politicians and not find any such direct claim that all soldiers in Vietnam were "baby-killers". There may have been some among that group. But since veterans were always a significant part of the antiwar protest movement, it certainly was not a common theme.

However, there were instances in the real world of American soldiers deliberately and consciously killing babies, as well as unarmed adult civilians. The most notorious was, of course, the massacre at My Lai (Son My) of March 16, 1968, by American troops under the command of Capt. Ernest Medina and Lt. William Calley.

Medina's and Calley's troops moved into the village early in the morning. They discovered on NLF (Vietcong) troops. They came under no hostile fire. They found no males of military age.

But they began killing civilians of all ages. They killed men, women and children. The shot them individually, they shot them in groups, they herded some into bunkers and gunned them down, they tossed grenades into occupied huts. The massacre was extensively observed by Army helicopters overhead. There were even Army photojournalists in the village, because the operation was supposed to be a model operation that could show what great progress the US was making against the NLF.

Seymour Hersh was the American journalist who uncovered the story of this massacre, which the Army disgracefully tried to cover up. He wrote about it in his book, My Lai 4: A Report on the Massacre and Its Aftermath (1970). His meticulous journalistic account makes for grim reading. This is his account of what was going on about two hours into the massacre:

Calley then turned his attention back to the crowd of Vietnamese and issued an order: "Push all those people in the [drainage] ditch." Three or four GIs complied. Calley struck a woman with a rifle as he pushed her down. Stanley remembered that some of the civilians "kept trying to get out. Some made it to the top ..." Calley began the shooting and ordered [Paul] Meadlo to join in. Meadlo told about it later: "So we pushed our seven to eight people in with the big bunch of them. And so I began shooting them all. So did Mitchell, Calley ... I guess I shot maybe twenty-five or twenty people in the ditch ... men, women and children. And babies." Some of the GIs switched from automatic fire to single-shot to conserve ammunition. Herbert Carter watched the mothers "grabbing their kids and the kids grabbing their mothers. I didn't know what to do."

Calley then turned again to Meadlo and said, "Meadlo, we've got another job to do." Meadlo didn't want any more jobs. He began to argue with Galley. Sledge watched Meadlo once more start to sob. Calley turned next to Robert Maples and said, "Maples, load your machine gun and shoot these people." Maples replied, as he told the C.I.D., "I'm not going to do that." He remembered that "the people firing into the ditch kept reloading magazines into their rifles and kept firing into the ditch and then killed or at least shot everyone in the ditch." William C. Lloyd of Tampa, Florida, told the C.I.D. that some grenades were also thrown into the ditch. Dennis Conti noticed that "a lot of women had thrown themselves on top of the children to protect them, and the children were alive at first. Then the children who were old enough to walk got up and Calley began to shoot the children."

One further incident stood out in many GIs' minds: seconds after the shooting stopped, a bloodied but unhurt two-year-old boy miraculously crawled out of the ditch, crying. He began running toward the hamlet. Someone hollered, "There's a kid." There was a long pause. Then Calley ran back, grabbed the child, threw him back in the ditch and shot him.

Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson

Certainly, not all the American soldiers on the spot acted this way. Helicopter pilot Hugh Thompson discovered what was going on in this way. When his reconnaissance helicopter arrived on the massacre seen:

The pilot thought that the best thing he could do would be to mark the location of wounded civilians with smoke so that the GIs on the ground could move over and begin treating some of them. "The first one that I marked was a girl that was wounded," Thompson testified, "and they came over and walked up to her, put their weapon on automatic and let her have it." The man who did the shooting was a captain, Thompson said. Later he identified the officer as Ernest Medina.

Flying with Thompson that day was Lawrence M. Colburn, of Mount Vernon, Washington, who remembered that the girl was about twenty years old and was lying on the edge of a dyke outside the hamlet with part of her body in a rice paddy. "She had been wounded in the stomach, I think, or the chest," Colburn told the Inspector General (IG). "This captain was coming down the dyke and he had men behind him. They were sweeping through and we were hovering a matter of feet away from them. I could see this clearly, and he emptied a clip into her."

Michael Bernhardt was on the ground with Medina when he shot the woman:

"... He got up real close, about three or six feet, and shot at her a couple times and finished her off. She was a real clean corpse ... she wasn't all over the place, and I could see her clothing move when the bullets hit ... I could see her twitch, but I couldn't see any holes ... he didn't shoot her in the head." A second later, Bernhardt remembered, the captain "gave me a look, a dumb shit-eating grin."

Thompson marked two other wounded civilians before he realize just what was happening. One was "a small boy bleeding long a trench". Thompson marked his location with a smoke signal, as well. Then "he saw a lieutenant casually walk up and empty a clip into the child". They marked another wounded child, "and this time it was a sergeant who came up and fired his M16 at the child".

Thompson's recorded messages over his radio about this became key pieces of evidence in the case against Calley and Medina, though by no means the only one. Then Thompson witnessed the mass shooting at the ditch described in the earlier quote:

By now Thompson was almost frantic. He landed his small helicopter near the ditch, and asked a soldier there if he could help the people out: "He said the only way he could help them was to help them out of their misery." Thompson took off again and noticed a group of mostly women and children huddled together in a bunker near the drainage ditch. He landed a second time. "I don't know," he explained, "maybe it was just my belief, but I hadn't been shot at the whole time I had been there and the gunships following hadn't ..." He then saw Calley and the first platoon, the same group that had shot the wounded civilians he had earlier marked with smoke. "I asked him if he could get the women and kids out of there before they tore it [the bunker] up, and he said the only way he could get them out was to use hand grenades. 'You just hold your men right here,'" the angry Thompson told the equally angry Calley, "'and I will get the women and kids out.'"

Before climbing out of his aircraft, Thompson ordered Colburn and his crew chief to stay alert. "He told us that if any of the Americans opened up on the Vietnamese, we should open up on the Americans," Colburn said. Thompson walked back to the ship and called in two helicopter gunships to rescue the civilians. While waiting for them to land, Colburn said, "he stood between our troops and the bunker. He was shielding the people with his body. He just wanted to get those people out of there." Colburn wasn't sure whether he would have followed orders if the GIs had opened fire at the bunker: "I wasn't pointing my guns right at them, but more or less toward the ground. But I was looking their way." He remembered that most of the soldiers were gathered alongside a nearby dyke "just watching. Some were lying down; some of them were sitting up, and some were standing." The helicopters landed, with Thompson still standing between the GIs and the Vietnamese, and quickly rescued nine persons - two old men, two women and five children. One of the children later died en route to the hospital. Calley did nothing to stop Thompson, but later stormed up to Sledge, his radioman, and complained that the pilot "doesn't like the way I'm running the show, but I'm the boss." (my emphasis)

Altogether, Medina and Calley and the soldiers who obeyed their criminal orders murdered over 300 civilians non-combatants. Killed them at close range with bullets, bayonets and hand grenades.

A female casualty of the My Lai massacre

Eventually, Medina, Calley and a number of their soldiers was brought up on charges in connection with this massacre. In January of 1970, John Kesler, who was the defense attorney for Paul Meadlo, defended his client this way at a news conference:

"I don't even know for sure what a massacre is, or an atrocity. That war over there is just a series of massacres every day, one after the other, and I can't conceive that privates in the Army can be held responsible for things the U.S. Army compels them to do when it takes them over there." Meadlo, Kesler said, "was taken into the Army by the draft when he didn't want to be there. ... He has done nothing more than any soldier who was brought to Vietnam." (my emphasis)

So, here we have someone who is equating literal baby-killers to the ordinary soldier in Vietnam. "He has done nothing more than any soldier who was brought to Vietnam." Yep, that qualifies.

To be realistic here, a defense attorney has a legal obligation to offer a zealous defense to his client. And when you're defending someone involved in a massacre like this with extensive documentation and multiple witnesses, you don't have a whole lot of options. Any attorney in that position would have been tempted to use such an argument.

The previous month, Medina appeared with his attorney F. Lee Bailey, and Medina defended himself in a similar way at a press conference, by positioning himself as a representative soldier:

I think the news media have been very biased and unfair, not only to myself, but to any other soldier in uniform; to the United States Army. Now they're making accusations, taking statements from individuals and the press ... [and] not recording the other side of it. It's not fair to the other people that have served their country honorably, the people that are in uniform, and it's not fair to the soldiers that we have in Vietnam right now. (my emphasis)

He went on to say that information on the massacre was been spread by "probably certain dissident groups in the United States". But when a reporter challenged Medina with the fact that it was the Army itself had brought the charges against him, Bailey ended the news conference.

The legal argument is one thing. The political argument in the favor of the killers and the resonance it found among a segment of the public is another question.

When the massacre became public and charges were brought in 1969, Alabama's segregationist governor George Wallace expressed his support for the accused (and real) war criminal, who he said he was "proud" to meet. Wallace said, "I'm sorry to see the man tried. They ought to spend the time trying folks who are trying to destroy this country instead of trying those who are serving their country." (my emphasis)

And, gee, Hersh reports that "six American Legion posts in Jacksonville, Florida, announced plans to raise a $200,000 defense fund for Calley". That right: at least some of the American Legion were willing to actively promote someone whose defenders were claiming that all American soldiers in Vietnam were just the same as these baby-killers.

Calley himself was allowed by the Army to travel to Jacksonville for a "fund-raising party. He was greeted like a hero." One of the local Legion commanders, Robert Lenten, involved told the press, "We are not saying he is guilty or not guilty. We feel Lieutenant Calley has been condemned and vilified for performance of his duties in combat without benefit of the opportunity to defend himself." (my emphasis) To say the obvious: unlike the civilians (including babies) that this murderer and the men acting on his command had gunned, bayoneted and blown up at close range, Calley and his fellow dependents most certainly did have "the opportunity to defend himself".

Among prowar members of the public, the sympathy for Medina and Calley and support for the gruesome murders they committed was so strong that the New Left philosopher Herbert Marcuse, who analyzed intelligence on European politics for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during the Second World War, to point to it as a sign of a "proto-fascist syndrome". In a 1972 book called Counterrevolution and Revolt, he wrote, citing the Richard Hammer book, The Court Martial of Lt. Calley (1971):

The prevalence of accumulated violence among the population exploded, in a terrifying way, in the almost religious identification with a convicted war criminal, who was hailed as another Christ to be crucified. The outcry was that the war criminal should be honored rather than punished, and by a margin of a hundred to one, letters, telegrams, telephone calls challenged the sentence.

The Seymour Hersh account that I quote above was published before Calley's conviction. Certainly not everyone at the time read it. But what Calley had done was no secret, and the evidence of the massacre was overwhelming. There was and is no doubt that the massacre took place. Especially after Calley's conviction, his supporters weren't supporting his need to defend himself. They were supporting what he did.

So, did the war critics ("doves") in Congress take this opportunity to condemn the American soldiers in Vietnam as a bunch of baby-killers as the defendants and their supporters - including some in the American Legion - were doing?

Uh, not exactly. Some war supporters in Congress were complaining about the charges being brought and about the press for reporting it. One Maryland Republican, Congressman Lawrence Hogan had a letter supposedly from a Vietnam veteran placed into the Congressional Record that said:

It is probable you learned enough about the Oriental mind to find nothing incongruous about a Viet Cong woman advancing with a submachine gun on U.S. troops with her baby in her arms. These people are not stupid. They have our number very well. ... They know our reverence for soft women and helpless children and know how to capitalize on this strictly Judeo-Christian hangup. Caucasians simply can't fight these people according to western precepts and the grunts in the field learn this often after they have been half wiped out.

Fine Christian defenders of baby-killing like this supported Calley and other defendants, and a number of Members of Congress sympathized with them.

One of them was a prominent Democrat:

Congressional activities reached a high point on December 15, when Chairman L. Mendel Rivers, of the Armed Services Committee, joined by 140 other supporters of the Vietnam war, pushed through a House resolution praising "each serviceman and veteran of Vietnam for his individual sacrifice, bravery, dedication, initiative, devotion to duty ..." In so doing, the House overrode a complaint by Representative Jonathan Bingham, New York Democrat, that the praise of "each" serviceman "was unfortunate, especially at the present time when we are so concerned about the apparent massacre at My Lai."

What's that? The House of Representatives, at the instigation of war supporters and admirers of William Calley like the American Legionnaires we heard about, passed a resolution that in the context clearly equated the action of the baby-killer Calley to "each serviceman and veteran of Vietnam". Dang! You suppose any of the American Legion posts opposed such an action at the time?

But the doves? Hersh reported:

There was an equally strong denunciation by Senator George S. McGovern, the liberal South Dakota Democrat, who told a television interviewer on November 30 that "what this incident has done is to tear the mask off the war. ... I think that for the first time millions of Americans are realizing that we have stumbled into a conflict where we not only of necessity commit horrible atrocities against the people of Vietnam, but where in a sense we brutalize our own people and our own nation. I think it's more than Lieutenant Calley involved here. I think a national policy is on trial." (my emphasis)

Now, George McGovern in no way encouraged massacres or the targeting of civilian populations in the Vietnam War, and he made that very clear on many, many occasions. If you really comma-dance hard on his words quoted there, you could twist it to sound like he was also equating the actions of all US soldiers in Medina and Calley and other literal baby-killers.

What McGovern and other war critics were emphasizing was that certain aspects of the Vietnam War, such as the "free-fire zones" where any one alive not in a friendly uniform was considered a hostile combatant, wound up inflicting unnecessary civilian casualties. And that such ambiguous conditions along with the general environment of guerrilla warfare would inevitably lead to excesses like the My Lai massacre.

Hersh continues:

But few other Dove voices were heard discussing My Lai 4 in the Senate or House during the weeks following the first reports; apparently the liberal legislators sensed what the subsequent polls showed—that many Americans were ignoring or dismissing the implications of what happened there. Others were just as astute; it took President Nixon twenty-five days to make his first public statement about the massacre. (my emphasis)

After Calley's conviction, Nixon commuted his life sentence to the point where Calley wound up being released in 1974. He didn't seem to be much more troubled by those "Judeo-Christian" hangups the Maryland Congressman's pro-massacre correspondent.

In other words, it was very clearly the prowar conservatives who admired the baby-killer William Calley who worked hard to equate his criminal and murderous actions with those of all American soldiers in the Vietnam War. In their eyes, Medina and Calley who commanded the massacre and actively directed it, killing some of the victims personally, were showing just as much "sacrifice, bravery, dedication, initiative, devotion to duty", in the words of the House resolution, as Hugh Thompson, who did his duty as a soldier in face of the immediate threat of being fired on by troops under the war criminal Calley's command, and saved civilians from their would-be murderers.

Now it's become part of the rightwing Republican folklore that it was opponents of the war who made the equation of all American soldiers in Vietnam with the baby-killers like Medina and Calley. That the faith-based (or hate-based) version of reality incorporated into the American Legion's 2005 propaganda pamphlet as, "Never again will American heroes be tarred as "baby-killers" or disrespected by an ungrateful segment of society."

So, it's worth keeping this in mind when you see a broadside like this from American Legion National Commander Marty Conatser, Challenging The Slanderers 09/14/07 at the Legion's Web site:

When the term "betray" is used to describe any American general not named Benedict Arnold, it gets most people’s attention. When it is used in a New York Times advertisement to describe a brilliant wartime commander with the credentials of David A. Petraeus, it gets the 2.7 million member American Legion’s attention.

... When one senator said Gen. Petraeus's firsthand report required "a willing suspension of disbelief," it seemed to this Midwesterner that it was Washington's way of calling him a liar.

Even so, the libelous attack on a general is not The American Legion’s primary concern about the anti-war movement. Our concern is for the private, the sergeant, the lieutenant and the major. If a distinguished general could be attacked in such a manner, what can the rank-and-file soldier expect when he or she returns home?

At our national convention last month in Reno, nearly 3,000 delegates unanimously passed Resolution 169, codifying The American Legion’s support for the global war on terror. The resolution recalls that Congress authorized the military action in both Iraq and Afghanistan and reminds Americans that you cannot separate the wars from the warriors. With nearly a million Vietnam veterans in our organization, the symbolism of such a resolution is striking. Never again should Americans be tarred as baby-killers, terrorists or criminals for risking their lives so others could be free.

With almost 170,000 American forces in Iraq, there will be some criminal acts from time-to-time. Find me a town anywhere in America with the same population and I promise you will find a higher crime rate than what is seen among our military. Where is the perspective when the headlines repeatedly remind us of those crimes, yet little is written about Army Reserve Capt. Joel Arends, who led a team in Baghdad through fire to rescue Iraqi civilians? And why are the convicted soldiers from Abu Ghraib more famous than Marine Cpl. Jason Dunham, who sacrificed his life smothering a grenade so that others would live?

As Americans, we all have a duty to speak up when our uniformed heroes are slandered. When a major media outlet accepts advertising revenue to mass produce such slander, we should be outraged. MoveOn.org can write anything it wants to, but the New York Times is not required to publish such libel.

... "Support the troops," however, really is a mere bumper sticker if we allow our fellow Americans, the media and our elected leaders to slander their heroism.

So, here we are 37 years later. The American Legion's national commander is preemptively defending war crimes and still pretending it was someone else who used to equate baby-killer like Calley and Medina to the ordinary American soldier who did their duties and didn't murder babies or other noncombatants.

I try to take notice of at least some things like this, because someday, most likely sooner than later, the same sort of bizarre folklore development and deliberate rewriting of history that the supporters of Calley's massacre undertook will be applied to the Iraq War, as well.

Notice the real point of Conatser's polemic: criticizing our Saviour-General Petraeus is the same as criticizing all soldiers.

In the American Legion's version, "support the troops" is nothing but a code word for "cheer for Bush's war policies and every general who defends them".

Tags: american legion, authoritarianism, ernest medina, herbert marcuse, hugh thompson, iraq war, marty conatser, seymour hersh, vietnam war, william calley