My Lai massacre - 30 November 1969

This is the weekend, on which in other years, we have looked at the amiable and even moving festival of Thanksgiving, the day, now always the last Thursday in November, when Americans criss-cross the country, and join their families and sit down with certain traditional dishes – roast turkey and cranberry sauce and pumpkin pie – to celebrate the first harvest, 350 years ago, of the original Massachusetts colonists.

It used to be a time when the newspapers warmed up a regular editorial, totting up the blessings of American life. When the president, especially if he was Roosevelt, sat by his fireside and went on with considerable persuasion about the hardiness and yet, the essential benevolence, of the American character.

I suppose there are hardy festivals in Spain, saluting the independence of the Spanish character, that were not suspended during the years that Generalissimo Franco had all independent men under his heel. I realise this is not a happy analogy but it did, after all, come to mind. Not to say that the United States today is cowed by the rule of any single man, it is cowed this Thanksgiving by its own conscience.

And there must be very many homes indeed in which the rich food, and all its fixings, lie heavy not only on the stomach, but the mind. For it's not often possible to say that a whole nation is haunted at any one time by a single preoccupation. This is one of those times. I don’t think there is any need to go into the details of the ghastly and deliberate massacre of a village and all its inhabitants in South Vietnam, which has only now come to light.

It’s a story of almost numbing horror; what haunts Americans this weekend is why they haven’t been numbed long ago. For though the story is, no doubt, detailed and complicated and will be straightened out in the coming courts martial, the moral issue is horribly simple, it’s been there for several years, and it ought to have plagued us long before this.

Only in the last few days has it been brought home to people that the massacre at Son My is not an isolated incident but simply a brazen variation on a regular policy of modern war. In spite of President Nixon’s regretful statement to the effect that the massacre violated the American rules of war, the truth had already anticipated him; that the men of Company C 1st Battalion 20th Infantry, did with rifles what the air force and the artillery had been doing for years, as standard procedure – namely wiping out the people of any village that were suspected of harbouring, or being under the control of, the Vietcong.

Now before we take off on a bout of indignation, and at the moment, mere indignation is premature, let us remember that the killing of civilians harbouring nothing more than their own goods and fears has for a long time been a regulation practice of all armies; there would not otherwise have been any bombing in the second war. But the gruesome practice was defended, if not humanised, with a doctrine in the second war: we called it strategic bombing. In the Vietnamese war, we call it a free-fire zone.

In the second war, many good men and true laboured night and day over maps of Germany, for instance, to pick out those industrial towns, shipyards, ammunition dumps and the like whose destruction would most damage the enemy's war effort. Unfortunately, factories and shipyards are not built in separate locations suitable for hygienic bombing. And the dead mothers and children as well as the workers of Southampton and Coventry could testify to the hard fact that, in time, the bombing of the people who make the guns, or raise the young men becomes indistinguishable from the killing of the war workers and the young men who might turn into soldiers.

Nobody who has seen the huge flat, plain of Hiroshima rebuilt as a tacky neon city can doubt that strategic bombing goes beyond itself and, ultimately if the choice is between defeat and survival, gets forgotten.

The decision to use the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was made after much deliberation by one man, who very many Americans, and non-Americans regard with admiration and even much affection – by Harry S Truman. He did it after some of his closest advisors, humane men, among them General George Marshall and Secretary of War Henry Simpson, put before him the considered alternative, which was to withhold the bomb and invade the Japanese islands. The best military estimate of the American losses in a Japanese invasion varied between, I think, 600,000 and one, or even two, millions.

I have gone into this not at all to provide a plausible excuse for the fearful scenes that followed; they are, perhaps they are not the most dreadful examples of how the momentum of total war can carry you beyond its declared aim. The so-called strategical bombing of Dresden is perhaps an even more flagrant example, for it too was a military base, but also, the unique northern capital of Baroque architecture, and while Hiroshima had its 120,000 casualties, Dresden – it is always a shock to hear – had its 130,000.

It may be cold blooded, but I think it's relevant to the massacre of Son My to recall the bomb on Hiroshima and the Allied devastation of Dresden. Now, in the Vietnam war, we have two related doctrines that sanction the killing of women, and children and other non-combatants. There is the doctrine of search and destroy, and we think of it as the legitimate pretext for searching out the Vietcong in the rice paddies and the jungle and the bush, and destroying him and his hideouts, but fairly early on, search and destroy was expanded to take in what is called a free-fire zone; that's to say a village presumed to be under Vietcong control and consequently – no different from our second war bombing procedure – an enemy target, open to attack from B52s or from artillery.

There is a really knotty problem here. How can you decide when a village is under control of the Vietcong in a war whose villages are so often inhabited by young men who go about their work by day as peaceable south Vietnamese and who, by night, turn into Vietcong? In Son My, to make the tactical decision more heartrending still, the women and children left behind belonged to men who were off fighting either with the South Vietnamese army, or with the Vietcong. It’s as if half the inhabitants of a village in the Cotswold had been in the British Army, and half in the German.

There is ample evidence to show in the writings of war correspondents such as Jonathan Schell that neither the American air force nor the South Vietnamese agonised too long about deciding whether or not a village was a free-fire zone. Jonathan Schell, a young and very gifted young American, in his middle twenties still, has written two books which are full of bombing missions that unload their bombs on the home run, on the people of villages that might or might not have housed Vietcong.

A young sergeant now back home, was interviewed on television the other night, was asked by an eager reporter if the villagers shot at Son My were Vietcong. And he replied with dry disgust, most of them were too young to walk, I doubt they could have been Vietcong. In last Wednesday’s New York Times there was a letter from the same Jonathan Schell written, he said, in the hope of dispelling two possible misapprehensions, that such executions are the fault of men like Calley and Mitchell alone – the two men already accused of murder – and that the tragedy of Son My is an isolated atrocity.

He tells of flying daily missions with forward air control, on which they utterly destroyed a whole province and its people, in August 1967. Schell recalls the so-called pacification camps became so full that army units in the field were ordered not to generate – a delicate word – any more refugees. The army complied, but search-and-destroy operations continued, only now peasants were not warned before an airstrike was called in on their village. They were killed in their villages because they was no room for them in the swamped refugee camps.

The usual warnings by helicopter loudspeaker, or air-dropped leaflets, was stopped; the civilians on the ground were assumed to be the enemy by the fact of their living in Quang Ngai, which was largely a free-fire zone. Pilots, servicemen not unlike Calley and Mitchell, continued to carry out their orders. Village after village was destroyed from the air as a matter of de facto policy. Airstrikes on civilians became a matter of routine. Such atrocities were, and are, the logical consequences of a war directed against an enemy indistinguishable from the people.

Well, certainly we are an age away from that almost ludicrous day in the First World War, when the Germans dropped a bomb on the eggcup of an old gentleman in a hotel in – Scarborough, was it – and he rose in a purple rage and cried, that the Huns had gone too far. But I honestly don’t know if we are very much further away in callowness or brutality from the strategical bombing of the second and all subsequent wars.

Once the so-called art of war renounces the attack at dawn, the inventory lines drawn against each other, the opposing trenches, the squadrons of airmen fighting in mid-air, and all the other manoeuvres of soldier against soldier, once the battleground is any city and any village, and all its intermingled populations, the man who aligns the bombsite, and the man who drops the bombs, is only saved by the charity of distance from the crimes of Lieutenant Calley and Sergeant Mitchell.

I don’t suppose it’s a popular time to be asking mercy for these two men, but the moral riddle will not go away. Is it valiant to bomb a hundred women and children from the air, and despicable to shoot them on the ground? I leave it to you, and don’t care to stay for an answer.

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