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Book Review
| Michal R. Belknap, The Vietnam War on Trial: The My Lai Massacre and the Court Martial of Lieutenant Calley, Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002. Pp. xiv + 298. $35 cloth (ISBN 0-7006-1211-4); $15.95 paper (ISBN 0-7006-1212-2).
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| When invited to undertake this review for Law and History, I suggested that it would not be an appropriate assignment. Not only are Mike and I old friends from grad school more than thirty-five years ago; but also at the request of the University Press of Kansas, I had already examined and evaluated his manuscript in some detail. But the book review editors insisted. Thus I have reread Belknap's study yet again and can report that time has not diminished the enthusiasm with which I regarded it more than three years ago. This time around, however, I was more disturbed when I had finished then before; not because of any previously undetected flaws but rather because the passage of time has etched this tragedy in clearer perspective. More than a generation after the war, its legacy of mistrust, waste, and distortion reechoes all the more harshly as we confront what may yet become our new Vietnam quagmire in the Middle East. |
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Belknap begins by placing William Calley's background and that of the army he joined in striking context. The great majority of those Americans who fought in Vietnam were drafted. They represented the young men "who got left behind in schools, jobs, and other forms of social competition," and "not the social and intellectual cream of American youth." For the most part, that sector avoided Vietnam either through student deferment or by enlisting in the National Guard. It was, Belknap notes, mostly "draft induced volunteers," men "from the lower middle class who were most likely to serve, fight and die." Men like William Calley. |
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Because so few volunteered, as the war expanded in the mid 1960s, an army desperate for officers could no longer rely on ROTC. In offering a probable leadership status to the likes of Calley, a loser thus far in both education and attainment, the army placed heavy responsibilities on new officers very unsuited for them. Along with the flaws in Calley's background, Belknap also focuses on the monumental failures of the army to attract what David Halberstam called "The Best and the Brightest." Individuals who could not make it in society were handed a rifle, a commission, and a gold bar—none of which could make Calley into what he was not: an effective and knowledgeable leader of men under fire. |
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Belknap describes in searing prose the type of war American ground forces fought in Vietnam. The heat, often more than 100 degrees, and indeed the overall climate made conditions "miserable." Discomforts were exacerbated by insects, leeches, fire ants, rats, and poisonous snakes. Infantrymen (grunts) carried about sixty pounds of gear through flooded rice paddies, or razor edged elephant grass "so thick that it was impossible to see more than a yard ahead." Moreover, the enemy represented a formidable presence. In mid 1968, the killed-in-action rate exceeded those in both Korea as well as the Mediterranean and Pacific theatres of World War II. The most deadly weapons were often not the rifle or machine gun as much as mines and booby traps. All too often the enemy killing Americans was not seen as much as felt, in the presence of an unnoticed trip wire, or a hidden sniper, or a buried mine set off by an unknowing boot. |
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Frustrations, and fears gave way to anger as the members of Calley's company grew increasingly unable to identify friend from foe. How, as one member of his company asked, "was one supposed to distinguish good Vietnamese from the bad ones when they all looked alike?" Stress, compounded by guerrilla fighting and the sense that the enemy was everywhere, created an atmosphere where atrocities became common. On the eve of the My Lai operation, casualties had cut Calley's platoon to half its original strength. Ordered to destroy the village along with all in it, his men were more than ready to settle the score, and indeed they did. |
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The details of the massacre need not be rehashed here, but the matter-of-fact tone in Belknap's description enhances the sense of repulsion seeping out to the reader. His account of the army's malevolent though understandable effort to cover up the massacre is well treated, as is the courageous determination of a few to make sure that such an effort would ultimately fail. The Calley court martial itself is the center piece of the book. Belknap treats it with justifiable detail, and one understands after reading his account how in a real sense the military justice system itself as well as the unfortunate defendant was on trial. Nor does the author shy away from assessing the meddlesome role played by Richard Nixon who, in the waning months of his presidency, repeatedly interfered with the operation of military justice as it applied to Calley. Finally, Belknap places the entire episode in the context of growing American disenchantment with the war, and the deep divisions in public opinion which it engendered. |
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Belknap's book is not fun reading. It covers what has become largely unfamiliar terrain, although in the early 1970s the subject was front page news for weeks at a time. Military justice remains an area all too remote from public scrutiny. Such a condition helps neither the system itself, nor the populace it is supposed to serve. All the more important, then, for his study to receive the wide readership it merits. |
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| Jonathan Lurie
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| Rutgers University |
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