My Generation

by William Styron

  Boredom, inanition, a sitting war; drunken brawls in Danang, whores, more chickenshit, the seething lust for action. All this Caputo embroiders in fine detail—and then the action came in a powerful burst for Caputo and his comrades. Suddenly there were pitched engagements with the enemy. There were the first extended movements into enemy territory, the first helicopter assaults, the first real engagements under heavy fire, and, inevitably, the first shocking deaths. War became a reality for Caputo; it was no longer a film fantasy called The Halls of Montezuma, and there is great yet subtle power in Caputo's description of how—in this new kind of conflict, against a spectral enemy on a bizarre and jumbled terrain (so different from such textbook campaigns as Saipan or even Korea)—the underpinnings of his morale began to crumble, doubt bloomed, and the first cynical mistrust was implanted in his brain. These misgivings—which later became revulsion and disillusionment—arrived not as the result of a single event but as an amalgam of various happenings, each one repellent, which Caputo (as well as the reader) begins to perceive as being embedded in the matrix of the war and its specifically evil nature.

  It is an evil more often than not underscored by a certain loathsome pointlessness. A nineteen-year-old marine is discovered cutting the ears off a dead VC. After a huge engagement in which the battalion expends thousands of rounds of ammunition there are only four Vietcong dead. (Later three thousand troops supported by naval gunfire kill twenty-four VC in three days.) In pursuit of the enemy and fearing an ambush, one of the platoons goes berserk and burns down a hamlet, devastating the place entirely. In this instance none of the villagers is seriously hurt, yet there is a peculiar primitive horror about the scene, and Caputo does not even bother to make the point all too ominously adumbrated by his powerful description: hovering in that smoke and the sound of wailing women is our common knowledge that My Lai is only a few years away.

  There were many brave men who fought in Vietnam, and many performed brave deeds, but the war itself disgraced the name of bravery. That “uncommon valor” of which the Marines are so justifiably proud—which still stirs men when they hear names like Belleau Wood and Guadalcanal and Peleliu—was as much in evidence on the banks of the Mekong and on the green walls of the Annamese Cordillera, about which Caputo writes with such strength and grace, as in those early struggles. But what names blaze forth from Vietnam? Men's courage passes from generation to generation and is never really extinguished; but it is a terrible loss that, try as we might, we cannot truly honor courage employed in an ignoble cause.

  —

  In this book Philip Caputo writes so beautifully and honestly about both fear and courage, writes with such knowing certitude about death and men's confrontation with the abyss, that we cannot doubt for an instant that he is a brave man who fought well long after that “splendid little war” became an obscene nightmare in which he nearly drowned. But he was dragged downward, and indeed the most agonizing part of his chronicle is found not in the descriptions of carnage and battle—as harrowingly re-created as they are—but in his own savage denouement when, driven into a raging madness by the senseless devastation he has witnessed and participated in, he turns into a monster and commits that mythic Vietnam-stained crime: he allows the murder of civilians. Although he was ultimately exonerated, his deed became plainly a wound forever engrafted on his soul. It seems the inevitable climax to this powerful story of a decent man sunk into a dirty time, in a far place where he was never intended to be, in an evil war.

  In a passage near the beginning of A Rumor of War, Caputo—happy, optimistic, thirsting for battle—sits in an observation post overlooking the sun-dappled rice paddies, the green hills, the majestic ageless mountains of the Annamese range. He cannot even dream of the horrors yet to come. He is reading Kipling and his eyes fall upon some lines which may be among the most lucid ever written about the mad, seemingly unceasing adventures which bring young boys from Illinois to such serene, improbable vistas:

  The end of the fight is a tombstone white with the name of the late deceased,

  And the epitaph drear: “A Fool lies here who tried to hustle the East.”

  [New York Review of Books, June 23, 1977.]

  Calley

  Whole seas, one feels, could not contain the tears that humanity must shed at the knowledge of the horror at My Lai. As one goes over the event yet another time—as one rereads Seymour M. Hersh's brilliant, pitiless account My Lai 4, published last year—one has to try to insulate one's self from the details of the massacre, protectively conjuring up visions of other atrocities, saying to oneself: “Keep thinking of Bengal, of the murder of the Huguenots, the sack of Magdeburg, of Lidice, Malmédy. Isn't this only what men have always done to other men?”

  Near them [writes Hersh] was a young Vietnamese boy, crying, with a bullet wound in his stomach….The radio operator then stepped within two feet of the boy and shot him in the neck with a pistol. Blood gushed from the child's neck. He then tried to walk off, but he could only take two or three steps. Then he fell onto the ground. He lay there and took four or five deep breaths and then he stopped breathing. The radio operator turned to Stanley and said, “Did you see how I shot that son of a bitch?”

  * * *

  Nineteen-year-old Nguyen Thi Ngoc Tuyet watched a baby trying to open his slain mother's blouse to nurse. A soldier shot the infant while it was struggling with the blouse, and then slashed at it with his bayonet.

  * * *

  Nguyen Khoa, a thirty-seven-year-old peasant, told of a thirteen-year-old girl who was raped before being killed. G.I.’s then attacked Khoa's wife, tearing off her clothes. Before they could rape her, however, Khoa said, their six-year-old son, riddled with bullets, fell and saturated her with blood.

  Until recently America had by luck or through divine providence been saved from being a truly militaristic nation, but it has in the past been a bloodthirsty one. Such passages as those just quoted therefore do not so intolerably rend the heart merely because they describe atrocities at the hands of wholesome American boys—these clean-cut American boys, after all, butchered the Indians and inflicted tortures on the Filipinos—but because just as we grieve for its victims we grieve for an America which, twenty-six years after the end of a war to save the world for democracy, finds itself close to moral bankruptcy—the criminal nature of its war in Southeast Asia symbolized by the My Lai carnage and by its flyblown principal executor, First Lieutenant William Laws Calley.

  For this reason Calley commands our most intense interest. Banal, stunted in mind and body, colorless, lacking even a native acumen, with an airless, dreary brain devoid of wit—he is not the first nobody whose brush with a large moment in history has personified that moment and helped define it. One thinks of Eichmann. Almost all comparisons between America and Hitler's Germany are strident and inept, but here the analogy seems appropriate. Both of them, the Nazi functionary and the loutish American officer, attempted exculpation of their enormous crimes through insistence that they were merely cogs in a great machine, that they were only carrying out orders, that the true guilt lay with others. Both of them finally, in their rancid ordinariness, symbolized the historic moment more dramatically than the flamboyant leaders they served.

  Thus, as the Nazi concentration camps recede into the past, Eichmann seems to embody their memory, and even that of the entire Nazi regime, more significantly than does a Goebbels or a Himmler. It would slander the young men who have been forced to fight and die in Vietnam to say that Calley is an archetype of the soldier in this war. He may in the perspective of time, however, become more archetypal of the war's total moral degeneracy than its actual perpetrators—miscreants of the White House and the Pentagon too well known, too numerous, and enjoying at the moment too much exposure to need naming here.

  This is not to assume that on lower levels of authority there are not those who share in Calley's guilt. It is spelled out in Hersh's book, and one's conviction that other officers were criminally involved is reinfor
ced by Richard Hammer's The Court-Martial of Lt. Calley, an excellent, straightforward piece of reporting which pursues the theme of Calley's individual guilt with almost puritanical zeal but which cannot help leaving the impression of the culpability of others. It is difficult to believe, for instance, that Lieutenant Colonel Barker, the task force commander who was whirling over the area in his helicopter as Charlie Company went about its bloody work, was not aware of the true nature of what was happening and should not have stopped it; but this can probably never be proved, for Barker was killed in another action.

  But to focus upon the guilt of others is largely begging the question when it comes to judging Calley, for, as Hammer points out, we do not exonerate a criminal merely because his accomplices in the crime had the good luck to escape justice. Military life may be a repugnant notion to most of us; but the idea commonly nurtured by those civilians who most detest, or misunderstand, or indeed admire the military as an institution—that because it is engaged in killing it is an amoral place, or a place in which ordinary considerations of morality are irrelevant—is tempting and romantic but false. Despite the paradoxes involved, the military may remain our most intransigently “moral” institution;* and it was an unawareness of this fact on the part of those millions of Americans who thought Calley was persecuted, or considered him a sacrificial lamb, that led to their confusion.

  Much, for instance, has been made of Calley's “orders.” Is it not the first duty of a military man to obey orders from a superior? The answer is yes, but a strictly qualified yes. Calley and other witnesses contended that at Captain Ernest Medina's briefing the night before the assault, the captain ordered the company to “kill everything.” Medina and still other witnesses have disclaimed such an order, maintaining that by “kill” or “waste” or “destroy” he did not mean unarmed men, women, and children. This issue, in detail, remains obscure.

  Yet the point is that if Medina did indeed give an order specifying the wholesale murder of helpless civilians, it was an illegal order, which Calley—especially as a commissioned officer, whose very commission implies that he is supposed to know better—was obliged to refuse to execute. His own orders to his troops to kill and the alacrity with which he himself sprang to the slaughter, on the other hand, in contrast to those of the men who declined to join the bloodletting, illustrate dramatically how there existed that morning at My Lai the element of choice; and this is another dimension by which Calley must be judged and condemned.

  It is a lamentable fact—though one perhaps not too surprising—that some of the GIs under Calley's orders embarked on private orgies of murder that defy words. But others of those “grunts” so ably depicted in Hammer's book drew back in shock and shame. Those white and black dogfaces from places like Holyoke, Massachusetts, and Providence and New Orleans, the deprived or the semideprived with their comic books and their bubble gum and their grass, these melting-pot types bearing names out of a patriotic World War II movie, Dursi and Maples and Grzesik—they were benumbed by the horror and they refused to kill; and their presence at Fort Benning as they bore witness against Calley brought out perhaps more than anything else the lieutenant's fathomless dereliction.

  If this were not sufficient, there was the testimony of a fellow officer, Lieutenant Jeffrey LaCross, the leader of the third platoon, who said that he neither heard Medina give the command to kill everyone in the hamlet nor did he himself assume that anything should be done to the civilians other than to employ the usual practice of gathering them together and submitting them to interrogation. Having done just this on that day, he too demonstrated by contrast the measure of his fellow platoon leader's irresponsibility; and his testimony was badly damaging to an already brutally damaged Calley, who, it seemed plain as the trial drew to an end, had got his name entered on the rolls of history's illustrious mass murderers.

  But what of Calley himself? Hammer's book is an honest, penetrating account of a crucially significant military trial; but his loathing for Calley is manifest on every page. Surely, one thinks, there must be some extenuation, some key to this man's character which will allow us a measure of compassion or at least of understanding so that despite his crimes some beam of warmth or attractiveness will flow out—some tragic or, God knows, even comic dimension that could permit us to mourn a little over this good ole boy from Florida gone wrong. Hammer stalks Calley so relentlessly that, despite resistance, one begins to feel the sweat of Christian charity being coaxed from one's pores. We therefore turn with eagerness to Lieutenant Calley: His Own Story, as told to John Sack, hoping for that ameliorative detail or insight that might help cast a gentler light on the transgressor.

  Alas, it is a vain hope, for Calley's whole identity—as recorded, according to his Boswell, “on five hundred thousand inches of magnetic tapes and a fiftieth ton of transcripts”—impresses the reader as being one of such stupefying vacuity, of such dwarfishness of spirit that one is relieved that his account does not yield us the luxury of even a fleeting affection. Furthermore, the book is an underhanded, self-serving document, one of those soulless apologias that have emanated many times before from base men. Simulating honesty, it attempts a cheap vindication, and in so doing, more firmly ratifies the guilt.

  In his preface, after anesthetizing us with more statistics (“I talked to Calley for a hundred days. I asked him somewhere near ten thousand questions, or one question for each three-fourths of a sentence here”), Sack tells us how impressed he became with Calley's sincerity and appeals to the reader not to lose sight of it. One reader lost sight of it after about the tenth and a half page, although in fairness to Calley this may in part be the fault of the style, or technique rather: those five hundred thousand inches of magnetic tape ending up on the page as indigestible splinters and strips—one feels choked on acetate.

  That a tape recorder, in proper hands, can be an effective amanuensis and collector of thoughts and voices was proved by the late Oscar Lewis, whose guiding intelligence brought an almost Balzacian sweep to his works of social anthropology. But Sack's intelligence does not guide. This lapse, in conjunction with the boyish squalor of Calley's mind, gives the book a fragmented, groping, almost hysterical quality, as if spoken by a depraved Holden Caulfield. There is an irresistible temptation to believe, in fact, that Sack, perhaps without knowing it, is bent upon hanging Calley on the gallows of his own “sincerity.” Otherwise, it is hard to make sense of such a remarkable passage as that which comes near the beginning of the book, in which Calley describes his reaction to the news that he is likely to be prosecuted for the murders:

  I thought, Could it be I did something wrong? I knew that war's wrong. Killing's wrong: I realized that. I had gone to a war, though. I had killed, but I knew. So did a million others. I sat there, and I couldn't find the key. I pictured the people of Mylai: the bodies, and they didn't bother me. I had found, I had closed with, I had destroyed the VC: the mission that day. I thought, It couldn’t be wrong or I’d have remorse about it [italics Sack's].

  Here in these few lines, which are fairly typical of the book in both style and substance, Calley manages to reveal at least three appalling facts about himself: that he is still unaware, or pretends to be unaware, of the difference between a massacre and lawful killing in combat; that he is still unmoved by the effects of his butchery at My Lai, when others who were there had been gruesomely haunted by the sight for months, at least one of them driven to the brink of mental breakdown; and that he is a liar. He is a liar, we see, because it is impossible that so many months after the event he still thinks that the victims of his slaughter—old men, women, and children—had been really his enemies, the Vietcong.

  Or what is one to say about a truly flabbergasting passage in which, at the very height of the carnage at My Lai, Calley describes how he rushes to prevent a GI from forcing a girl to perform a sexual act, and then asks himself rhetorically why he had been so “saintly”?

  Because—if a GI is getting sex, “he isn't doing his j
ob. He isn't destroying communism.” Calley's puzzlement over moral priorities and options seems typically in the American grain, for he then goes on to brood:

  Of course, if I had been ordered to Mylai to rape it, pillage, and plunder—well, I still don't know. I may be old-fashioned, but I can't really see it. Our mission in Mylai wasn't perverted though. It was simply “Go and destroy it.”

  Or this episode, a few pages later, describing his encounter at My Lai with a defenseless civilian (apparently a Buddhist priest), whom he was convicted of murdering:

  You sonofabitch. And bam: I butted him in his mouth with my M-16. Straight on: sideways could break the M-16. He had frustrated me!

  Sack should have been advised that sometimes sincerity does not appear to be a winning virtue. Yet, if indeed sincerity were a truly consistent component of this book, we might be able to accept at least part of it. The story is, however, implausible when it is not being greasily devious, and it is dominated by two tendentious themes. One of these themes—Calley's fear that civilians, whether they be old men or women or children, are really the enemy in disguise—pervades, indeed saturates, the narrative. It is allied with another theme—his hatred of Communism, which he cheerfully admits as a “run-of-the-mill average guy” that he doesn't understand—and together they form a linked motivation which even a very unperceptive reader would begin to perceive he is going to use to rationalize his crimes at My Lai.

  Page after page is filled with his animadversions, if such they may be called, on the Communist menace. These passages alternate with those which express his terror of the civilian populace, his frantic suspicion that each innocent-appearing Vietnamese may in truth be a Vietcong concealing a weapon or ready to throw a bomb.