Year 501 Copyright © 1993 by Noam Chomsky. Published by South End Press.
Chapter 10: Murdering History Segment 11/17
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As America contemplated Japan's crimes on the fiftieth anniversary, a new book appeared on the one American atrocity that has indeed been recognized: the My Lai massacre in March 1968. American reviewers were shocked to learn that "the infamous Lt. Calley," who commanded the killers, "served less than three years of confinement in his bachelor officer quarters before he was paroled" and now enjoys life as a Georgia businessman, driving his Mercedes sedan from his pleasant home to the shopping mall where his jewelry store is located. Concluding his reflections on the massacre, the Washington Post reviewer observes: "Any book on this subject ultimately shirks its responsibility unless it clearly tracks the fault down to the complex light and dark of the individual human soul."

In the London Financial Times, Justin Wintle had a different reaction:

Like nearly every other book about Vietnam published in the West, Four Hours in My Lai focuses on America, and the damage done to the American self-esteem. The other half of the equation is marginalised. Although [the authors] dutifully record the eye-witness accounts of a handful of survivors of My Lai, the engulfing sorrow that still pervades Quang Ngai as a result of eight years' occupation by US and South Korean forces is here unsung. Instead the reader is swamped by any amount of often trivial biographical detail pertaining to the lives of nearly every American mentioned in the text.

That pattern had been set early on. Few winced when the New York Times published a think piece from My Lai on the fifth anniversary of the massacre, in March 1973, noting that the village and region remained "silent and unsafe," though the Americans were still "trying to make it safe" by relentless bombardment and shelling. The reporter quoted villagers who accused the Americans of killing many people, adding philosophically: "They are in no position to appreciate what the name My Lai means to Americans."41

The Washington Post review observes the laws of Political Correctness by enjoining us to plumb the depths of "the individual human soul" with its dark complexities, to seek the answer to My Lai in some universal fault of the human species, not in US policies and institutions. The laws prescribe that the US only reacts to the crimes of others, and has no policies beyond a general benevolence; in Quang Ngai province, no policies beyond "trying to make it safe" for the suffering Vietnamese who we are "protecting." True, there was destruction in Indochina, but, quite commonly, with no agent. There were "substantial tracts of land made fallow by the war," the Times leading Asia hand, Fox Butterfield, reports, coining a phrase that would have made Orwell gasp. His colleague Craig Whitney summarized "the legacy of the war": "the punishment inflicted on [the Vietnamese] and their land when the Communists were allowed to operate in it" and the villagers "driven from the ancestral homes by the fighting." It was all some natural disaster, inexplicable, except by musing on the darkness of the individual human soul, perhaps.42

The British reviewer recommended a step beyond: a look at "the objectives of Washington's policy makers," not merely the soul of Lt. Calley and the half-crazed GIs in the field who carried out the brutal massacre, knowing only that every Vietnamese in the ruins of a Quang Ngai village -- man, woman, or child -- was a potential threat to their lives. As a first step in determining these objectives, we might inspect Operation Wheeler Wallawa, in which the official body count listed 10,000 enemy, including the victims of My Lai. In his detailed study of this and other mass murder operations of the period, Newsweek Bureau Chief Kevin Buckley writes that My Lai was "a particularly gruesome application of a wider policy which had the same effect in many places at many times," for example, in one area of four villages where the population was reduced from 16,000 to 1,600, or another where the US military command's location plots reveal that B-52 bombings were targeted precisely on villages, and where helicopters chased and killed people working in the fields. "Of course, the blame for that could not have been dumped on a stumblebum lieutenant," Buckley commented: "Calley was an aberration, but `Wheeler Wallawa' was not." Or many other operations like it, a fact that brings certain thoughts to mind.43

North American relief workers in Quang Ngai knew of the My Lai massacre at once, but, like the local population, took no particular notice because it was not considered out of the ordinary. Retired army officer Edward King wrote that "My Lai represented to the average professional soldier nothing more than being caught up in a cover-up of something which he knew had been going on for a long time on a smaller scale." By accident, the military panel investigating the My Lai massacre found another much like it a few miles away, at My Khe, but dismissed charges against the commanding officer on the grounds that it was a perfectly normal operation in which a village was destroyed with about 100 people killed and the remnants forcibly relocated -- much like the remnants of My Lai, sent to a waterless camp on Batangan Peninsula over which floated a banner reading: "We thank you for liberating us from communist terror." There, they were subjected to Operation Bold Mariner, which "tried to make that region safe" with probably even greater slaughter and ecological devastation.44

Could there be another candidate for war crimes trials, beyond General Yamashita and 1000 others executed for their crimes in the Pacific War?


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41 Robert Olen Butler, WP-MG, April 5; Wintle, FT, May 16-17, 1992; reviews of Michael Bilton and Kevin Sim, Four Hours in My Lai. AP, "Five years later, My Lai is a no man's town, silent and unsafe," NYT, March 16, 1973.

42 Butterfield, NYT, May 1, 1977; Whitney, NYT, April 1, 1973.

43 Buckley's unpublished notes. See PEHR, I, sec. 5.1.3.

44 Ibid.; FRS, 222. King, The Death of the Army (1972), cited by Kinnard, War Managers.