My Lai and the Morality of War

It is a curious and sad mentality which holds that ethical principles are valid, and then fails to apply those principles to reality.

The fundamental principle of the libertarian social ethic is that no man, regardless of his station, can morally and with impunity initiate force against other innocent men. It does not matter if the victims are rich or poor, white or non-white, American or foreign. Libertarianism holds that every man, in every country, has an absolute and inalienable right to his own life, liberty, and property, which no other man can morally violate. Furthermore, if a man does initiate force against another, he is then properly subject to retaliation.

Of all the various forms of initiatory force, premeditated murder is clearly the most heinous. Unlike theft, which only deprives the victim of part of his property, and unlike the draft, which only deprives the victim of part of his life, murder is the negation of the totality of an individual's existence. Thus, properly, the penalty for murder in every civilized society is the greatest of all criminal penalties. When the crime of murder is compounded by multiple victims, the criminal assumes the status of a true moral barbarian, and forfeits his claim to his own life many times over. In fact, the mass murderer excludes himself from the realm of civilization entirely, and becomes a dangerous beast in a society of generally peaceful men. At the very least, such a creature should be totally ostracized; at most he should be subject to the same painful torture which he has inflicted upon others. The willful mass murderer of innocents, regardless of his rationalizations, is not a moral hero, but a moral monster.

Consider these principles applied to Lt. William Calley, Jr., the butcher of My Lai. On March 16, 1968, Lt. Calley willfully and with pre-meditation rounded up at least one hundred South Vietnamese civilians in the village of My Lai, and, after holding them at gunpoint for several hours, had them thrown into a ditch and ordered the men in his command to open fire. Lt. Calley personally killed at least twenty-two, including many women and children. Those who tried to escape were shot in flight.

As Calley's trial was later to reveal, these civilians did not give any indication of being hostile or a threat to Lt. Calley or his men: Lt. Calley was not suffering from temporary insanity at the time; and he was probably not given an order to massacre the village. Even if he had been given such an order, it would have been (in the jargon of the military) an “illegal order” which he would have been both morally and legally obligated to disobey by the Army's own code of justice. Thus there was no question about Calley's committing mass murder under the threat of personal harm, and there was no question about the innocence of his victims.

The men who pronounced these judgements and found Lt. Calley guilty of first degree murder were not hippies, or ivory tower intellectuals, or even libertarians. They were rather themselves career military officers, who found the evidence for Calley's guilt so overwhelming, and the crime itself so despicable, that even they could not evade the facts and countenance Calley's actions (though, as several jurors have expressed, they initially just refused to believe that the crime occurred.)

The motivation for Calley's actions was clearly revealed by a psychiatric report describing his state of mind: “He did not feel as if he were killing humans, but rather that they were animals with whom one could not speak or reason.”¹ This is collectivism in its naked essence; collectivism as it is practiced, rather than as it is preached. It is an ugly concretization of the same mentality which enables the great majority of U.S. servicemen in Viet Nam to regard all Vietnamese as “gooks”, sub-human beings without either feelings or rights.

Whether or not Calley was given even an indirect order to commit his monstrous crime we may never know. Calley testified that he was ordered to “kill every living thing” in My Lai. His immediate superior Captain Ernest Medina denies ever having issued such an order. But what is more important than the reality of the order itself is the fact that Calley was so indoctrinated by the authoritarian military system that he believed that the mere existence of such an order would free him from all blame and moral responsibility. That is, Calley regarded an order as an irreducible moral primary of his existence, as a fact beyond question or dissent.

Calley's mental corruption (which, revealingly, the Army regarded as a ‘normal state of consciousness’), does not exonerate him, however, any more than the fact that one was born in a slum absolves one of all blame for becoming a criminal. Despite their understanding of the nature of their acts or their ignorance, men remain morally responsible for what they do. It was, in the final analysis, Calley who decided that he had the right to kill over a hundred innocent Vietnamese; it was Calley who had never thought to question; and it was Calley who had volunteered to be in the Army in the first place (and hence made himself liable to be placed in a My Lai).

In view of Calley's clear guilt, in view of the fact that the massacre which he supervised had nothing whatever to do with military objectives in Viet Nam (not that that would free him from blame), the public reaction to his conviction has been nothing less than appalling — a frightening reminder of the present state of our culture. Within a week after its appearance, “The Battle Hymn of Lt. Calley” (which depicts Calley as a sort of “Davy Crockett of Viet Nam”) sold over one million recordings. A poll conducted a few days after the “guilty” verdict showed some 79% of a representative sample of the American people to be against Calley's conviction (with 12% abstaining, and only 9% actually in favour). And the White House has been deluged with mail at the ratio of 100 to 1 demanding Executive clemency.

Most heart-warming of all (if you are a vampire) was the quick reaction of many veterans declaring that ‘they had killed many more innocent people than Calley’ had and ‘if he were guilty, then so were they.’ After all, what is a paltry hundred Vietnamese? The clear implication of their statements is that they are not guilty of any wrongdoing, and therefore neither is Calley — that war is hell, so anything goes. But if murder, rape, torture, and genocide are all par for the course, one might well ask what is America attempting to defend in the first place? Certainly not human rights.

What is being advocated here, by conservatives this time, is the old “we are all responsible, so let's not blame anyone” theory. It is the same pseudo-ethical nonsense which enables sanctimonious liberals to assert that “we” were all responsible for the death of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King. Well let me here go on record as stating that I deny any responsibility whatsoever for these assassinations or for the crimes of Lt. Calley. In Calley's case in particular, I did not support the draft or taxation which made the War possible, nor did I pull the trigger in My Lai. But Calley did, and that is precisely the point.

Lt. Calley is morally responsible for his crimes.

The arguments variously asserted for mercy and/or Calley's innocence range from inane to outright mentally sick. “The innocent-looking South Vietnamese in My Lai might have had concealed weapons”, some say. Well then, why didn't Calley search them first during the several hours that he held them at gunpoint? In any case, if the Army has declared “open season” on all South Vietnamese, including two year olds, who the hell are they protecting in the first place? There are only two possibilities: either everyone in Viet Nam is an enemy, or they are not. If everyone is an enemy, then what is the U. S. fighting for? If not everyone is an enemy, and they are really protecting someone, then the Army had damn well at least try to determine who is who.

Of course, it is possible that a two year old Vietnamese child is carrying a concealed hand grenade or a satchel charge, but two year old American children have also been known to blow their father's heads off with a sporting rifle. Should we therefore also declare “open season” on American children? If you think not, don't you dare think that the life of a Vietnamese child is one bit less sacred than the lives of your own children.

In reality, there is little doubt that the military has declared “open season” on the Vietnamese long ago. According to Time, some 5,000,000 people in Vietnam — nearly one-third of the population of South Vietnam have become refugees. And an estimated 1,000,000 civilians have been injured and 300,000 killed.² This is a very strange way to “protect” people.

Next there is the argument of anti-war groups that Calley should be freed because he is a scapegoat, and even if guilty, his punishment will simply divert public attention from the more basic and important issue of the immorality of the Vietnamese War itself. Even if true, this argument is morally irrelevant. If a man is guilty of a crime, he deserves to pay for it, period. Further, I contend that the belief that Calley's conviction will reduce criticism of the War is in error. In point of fact, I maintain, his conviction, regardless of whether or not it is later overturned (probably by Nixon during prime time in the '72 campaign), has already done more to arouse rational anti-War sentiment and thoughtful reconsideration of what the U. S. is fighting for in Vietnam than all of the anti-War rallies put together.

The exact reason that the “red-blooded Americans” are screaming for Calley's release is that they do get the idea. They see that if it was wrong for him to murder innocent civilians, then so too was it wrong for them or their husbands to fire-bomb Dresden and Hamburg during World War II, and for their sons to napalm Vietnamese villages. That is, compelled to confront the issue of the morality of war as it is presently conducted, they have only two alternatives: either admit that war is wrong, totally wrong, wrong in principle — and that therefore they or their relatives are guilty or of premeditated murder — or they can evade. And clearly most Americans are evading; in fact they are screaming their evasion — in protest letters to the White House and in pompous rallies in Calley's defense and “honour”. They are screaming their evasion in the futile hope that they can drown out the sound of their now-awakening consciences.

Finally, there is the argument that it is not “fair” to convict Calley when so many others are guilty of even more heinous crimes. The concept being asserted here is the “fairness” of uniform tyranny or of the grave. It is the opposite side of the argument which holds that “since the draft is immoral, everyone should be drafted.” That is, the principle being advocated here is, “If one instance of an action is wrong, then it becomes right when made universal.” If you detect a logical flaw in this argument, congratulations: you are one of the minority of 9% who endorsed Calley's conviction.

Rationally, if an action is wrong, it should be abandoned totally, not generalized. There is no “fair” way to administer an injustice. In the case of the draft, the point is that since it is involuntary servitude or slavery no one should be drafted. In the case of Calley, the point is that others should indeed be punished as well,³ and not that Calley should be set free. If you have 1000 Calleys roaming the street, it is far preferable to have one brought to justice. At least the remaining 999 will then have some second thoughts about their immunity to retribution.

What the Army is therefore saying by convicting Calley, and in its subsequent order to field commanders to disobey illegal orders, is that there are some acts which even the war machine considers too monstrous to sanction or allow. The situation is analogous to living in a barbarous society which regularly has virgin sacrifices, kills every second infant, and eats its enemies. If the leaders of that society suddenly decide to outlaw virgin sacrifices, but keep the remainder of their pagan rites, the society is not any the worse for it. On the contrary, they have taken a step in the right direction, and so is the U. S. Army by attempting to prevent future My Lais.

The beneficial effects of Calley's conviction are already in evidence. SP/4 Jimmy White of Columbia, Tennessee, has been quoted in Time as stating, “Since the word about Calley got out, everybody's been watching a lot closer what he shoots. That's one good thing about the incident. Everybody's definitely more careful now.”⁴

Most importantly, the conviction of Lt. Calley has initiated a nation-wide discussion of the morality of modern war itself. David Lawrence's April 12 editorial in U. S. News and World Report is typical in calling for “a definition of the kind of fighting permissible in reprisal against attack.” If, as a consequence of the controversy which Calley's trial has generated, only 1% of the U. S. population decides correctly, that is, decides that morality does indeed limit the actions of men in war far more drastically than previously imagined, it will be a major cultural victory for incipient libertarian thought. After all, when is the last time that professional libertarians managed to change the minds of two million Americans on some fundamental issue?

As I have often stated, modern warfare is a monstrous evil which no libertarian can sanction. It was wrong for the United States to fire-bomb tens of thousands of innocent German civilians in World War II; it was wrong to drop the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki; and it was wrong for Lt. Calley to kill twenty-two innocent Vietnamese civilians. The rights of all men — Germans, Japanese and Vietnamese — are no less sacred and absolute than our own rights. It is only the most crass collectivism and racism which allow anyone to think otherwise.

Yes, in this world of collectivists, communists, and dictators, we need to have means of defending ourselves from aggression. But proper defense does not require or entail the mass immolation of innocents. Between lying prostrate before our enemies and abandoning morality by declaring war to be outside of its province, stands the third alternative of libertarian metawar.⁵ Between pacifism and aggression there stands true defense.

If you still believe that Lt. Calley should go free, I suggest that you make one simple experiment. Substitute for My Lai the name of your own hometown, and substitute for the unpronounceable names of some Vietnamese peasant children, the names of your own children. Then ask yourself if you still think that morality doesn't apply to war.

Footnotes

1. “The Clamor Over Calley: Who Shares the Guilt?”, Time, April 12, 1971, p. 18.
2. Ibid., p. 19.
3. Though, practically speaking, it is neither possible nor desirable to attempt to try everyone guilty of some war crime, since there are neither enough policemen, courts or jails to do the job; and the resulting civil war from the attempt would certainly do much more to harm the cause of individual liberty than to further it.
4. Op. cit., p. 20.
5. I discuss the philosophy and strategy of metawar, “conflict in which violence and destruction are minimized”, in “The Philosophy of Defense”, The INDIVIDUALIST, July 1970.

Jarret B. Wollstein, editor of this publication, is a libertarian theorist and author of Public Services Under Laissez Faire and Society Without Coercion.