The US Army always needs a scapegoat and Lieutenant William Calley of My Lai was one of them for Vietnam.
William Calley wasn't competent as an officer, he wasn't competent at much of anything and this was easily shown from his pre-Army records which, presumably, the recruiting officer ignored and which subsequent testing failed to reveal.
Before going out into the field, Calley was given this order (as understood by him):
I was ordered to go in there and destroy the enemy. That was my job that day. That was the mission I was given. I did not sit down and think in terms of men, women and children. They were all classified as the same, and that's the classification that we dealt with over there, just as the enemy. I felt then and I still do that I acted as I was directed, and I carried out the order that I was given and I do not feel wrong in doing so.
He has no conception of the wrongness of what he has just said and this is what the US Army did to him. This is the crime for which the US Army is absolutely unrepentant.
That's what the US Army does to every single person who has the misfortune to endure that horrible presence. They emerge from the training / indoctrination thinking the above makes sense and they believe it so much that they will put over a hundred civilians in a ditch to murder them. You've seen this kind of barbarism all the way up to recent times in Abu Ghraib and always the Army has an excuse. This soldier failed or that one did ... but no, no, it will never happen again.
William Calley wasn't competent as an officer, he wasn't competent at much of anything and this was easily shown from his pre-Army records which, presumably, the recruiting officer ignored and which subsequent testing failed to reveal.
Before going out into the field, Calley was given this order (as understood by him):
I was ordered to go in there and destroy the enemy. That was my job that day. That was the mission I was given. I did not sit down and think in terms of men, women and children. They were all classified as the same, and that's the classification that we dealt with over there, just as the enemy. I felt then and I still do that I acted as I was directed, and I carried out the order that I was given and I do not feel wrong in doing so.
He has no conception of the wrongness of what he has just said and this is what the US Army did to him. This is the crime for which the US Army is absolutely unrepentant.
That's what the US Army does to every single person who has the misfortune to endure that horrible presence. They emerge from the training / indoctrination thinking the above makes sense and they believe it so much that they will put over a hundred civilians in a ditch to murder them. You've seen this kind of barbarism all the way up to recent times in Abu Ghraib and always the Army has an excuse. This soldier failed or that one did ... but no, no, it will never happen again.
William Calley never got out of bed during his school days and thought, man, when I grow up I'm going to herd a bunch of innocent people together and I'm going to waste those motherfuckers. That idea was planted in his head which had a mind too weak to resist it.
This is yet another world view of the Milgram Experiment in which people will be obedient to just about anything but the military is infinitely clever in ensuring the soldiers never have any other basis for comparison to determine if the obedience is warranted.
This doesn't forgive Calley, although Nixon did, as he was weak and he killed a lot of people. However, for the Army to absolve itself of what it did to him that he could become such a monster is an ongoing disgrace and modern events show it has not been addressed in any way. If anything, it's worse.
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