Little Rock, Ark.
WHEN I went to war as a junior officer in Iraq 15 years ago, we faced a far different enemy for far less time than today's troops are dealing with — four days back then, into our fourth year now. Yet in those first weeks in the desert before Desert Storm, back when we fully expected Iraq's several armored divisions to drive into Saudi Arabia and crush the two divisions we had on the ground, two soldiers under my command digging a fighting position lost their heads. One pulled a knife on the other. Fortunately, other soldiers pulled them apart.
It's impossible to imagine the frustration and stress on American soldiers in Iraq today — impossible, or maybe it's simply not something we willingly work to imagine. Then the news breaks. My first thought on hearing about the alleged atrocities at Haditha — and of the announcement this week that murder charges are being brought against eight American servicemen for killing an Iraqi civilian at Hamdania in April — was "Duh." If we didn't know this day was coming, we were fools.
I would like to ask those troops accused of war crimes in Iraq what they know about My Lai 4, the site of the most famous American atrocity in Vietnam. In the late 1990's, I did a brief stint in the Army Reserve commanding a company whose job was supporting active-duty basic training units. I recall no mention of My Lai in our classroom instruction.
These days, when I teach a college course on American war literature, My Lai inevitably comes up. Inevitably, a fair number of students raise their hands to be reminded, possibly even introduced, to that dark day in 1968. These young men and women attend a prestigious liberal arts college and probably won't find themselves in places like Haditha or Hamdania. But they should be reasonably expected to know more about American history than their peers whom we do send with guns to Haditha and Hamdania.
I am slightly encouraged by our military's new commitment, announced in the wake of the Haditha reports, to ensure that coalition forces in Iraq receive training in ethics and values. But the cynic in me groans. Not another dull, forgettable one-hour block of instruction on ethics like I endured in my years of officer training. Who needs to be told not to run a bayonet through a baby?
According to Gen. Peter Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, such training "should provide comfort to those looking to see if we are a nation that stands on the values we hold dear." With all due respect to the general, does he really think that such training will appease those who believe the Americans at Haditha and Hamdania, and our soldiers and agents elsewhere, are guilty of atrocities? Regardless of the results of official inquiries and courts-martial, the damage has been done. In the Muslim (and much of the non-Muslim) court of opinion, the verdict is already in.
Of course, learning about My Lai is hardly assurance against similarly criminal behavior; no more than graphic images of car accidents prevents reckless driving. And focusing on it today can create other problems. One is that we allow it to become representative, and to prejudice our perceptions of all American soldiers' behavior in Vietnam. The other is that we treat it as singular — an aberration for that war or for any American wars.
We already feel similar tensions regarding the reports out of Iraq. While General Pace assures us that "99.9 percent of the servicemen and servicewomen" are behaving properly and humanely, too many Iraqis report registering no surprise in learning about the alleged atrocities.
So are we saviors or monsters? The truth, as it always does, lives somewhere between. Our military is as thoroughly professional as scrappy guerrilla forces usually are not. But to pretend our soldiers never mistreat others would be a gross lie. After an article in The New York Times Magazine last year about American soldiers accused of drowning an innocent Iraqi and their battalion commander's cover-up, I got an e-mail message from one veteran of the current war that the treatment of that Iraqi differed from the treatment of others only in degree and result, not in kind.
Apologists for My Lai — and presumably future apologists for Iraq atrocities — are quick to lecture: That's war, buddy. You should see what the other guy does. I object to this argument because it smells like rationalization. It permits us to accept the unacceptable. It resists aspiring to a better way. The very idea of "wartime atrocity" is a 20th-century development, the most progressive and hopeful legacy of the world's bloodiest century.
There is hope. I can't imagine a Haditha or Hamdania version of "The Battle Hymn of Lieutenant Calley," a tribute to the officer responsible at My Lai that cracked the Billboard Top 40 in 1971. Its lyrics ran: "Sir, I followed all my orders and I did the best I could. / It's hard to judge the enemy and hard to tell the good. / Yet there's not a man among us who would not have understood."
Despite the calls to prosecute up the chain of command (indeed, up to President Bush himself) for the alleged crimes in Iraq, I sense more collective sympathy with the novelist William Eastlake's remarks to West Point cadets about My Lai, as quoted in the Encyclopedia of American War Literature: "You cannot say after wiping out a village, 'My superior told me to do it.' You're big boys now. Behave yourselves. Don't blame all your sins on General Westmoreland."
Last fall, around the time the Haditha events occurred, another veteran of the current war, a National Guard second lieutenant, confessed to me his war crime. His platoon was searching a home where an Iraqi man was sobbing uncontrollably for the loss of his brother. "Would somebody shut him up?" the lieutenant shouted, throwing in an expletive for good measure.
That was his crime. He cried telling me the story. I think he recognized that he had crossed a line. I think he realized how easily such an outburst can become a shove or a slap, a poke with a rifle muzzle or a kick in the ribs, a gun butt to the head. This man was no weakling; he had risked his life for his men. I respect him immensely for owning up to his remorse and, in the process, in his own small way, raising the standard for wartime behavior. There's hope.
