A shame we don’t study military history. It’s full of inspiration and human potentials. Chief among our potentials, however,  is the capacity for cruelty and criminality wars promote.

It’s close to 50 years since the massacre at My Lai took place in Vietnam.  To liberate Vietnam from communism, our troops raped, killed and burnt an entire village of over a hundred souls, mostly little kids, women, and old men.  

Nowadays, many loudly thank anyone in military uniform for their heroism and service. My Lai was helpful in focusing on the non-heroic aspects of this, and all wars.
Though not all our soldiers were bad actors, enough criminality went down through all levels from top brass to grunts in the jungle to ruin what our leaders sold as a great enterprise.  

Then, as now, soldiers were taught the rules of polite warfare, how to kill within bounds.  Rape and slaughter of innocents is officially out of bounds.

When Nazis killed innocent European townspeople as reprisals against the resistance, we were happy to condemn them. Their Final Solution was also obviously criminal as well. When the Japanese killed Chinese for sport in Shanghai during their invasion, and put American men on death marches, we easily recoiled in horror.

But what do we do when our own armies act criminally?  We are led to believe that patriotism demands we disbelieve, and our leaders patriotically work to discredit the truth. We can’t handle the truth.
Seymour Hersh’s March 30th article in The New Yorker details how we tried to cover up My Lai and other atrocities.  Although “fourteen officers, including generals and colonels, who were accused of covering up the massacre” were charged with crimes from dereliction of duty to murder; only two were court-martialed.

Lt. Calley, a junior college dropout, was found guilty and sentenced to life, but Nixon busted him out of the brig and let him go free 3 months later.

Nixon had promised he had a secret plan to end the war. That plan was to fight it for another 4 years, doubling American deaths and casualties, and bombing sufficiently to beat WWII, the good war, in total tonnage by a factor of three.  So few targets, so little time. Strategic bombing chalked up another failure.

But face it, raping and killing an entire village is peanuts, and retail peanuts at that. Running wars the way Nixon and Bush did was wholesale crime, but both of them refused to change course while thousands died. Nixon bragged he wouldn’t be the first American president to lose a war.

We didn’t exactly lose. Ho Chi Minh did not take over Washington. But we didn’t exactly win either. We lost thousands of men and the respect of the world in Vietnam and Iraq.

Many atrocities went on in Vietnam, including carpet-bombing, deadly Agent Orange defoliant drops, and handy kill zones wherein anybody alive was fair game, When John Kerrey testified to Congress about these epic fails, “patriots” resented the truth. Years later, like elephants that never forget or forgive criticism, these apologists for our criminality Swift boated.

Admittedly, Kerrey was an awful candidate. It’s been said anybody that couldn’t beat George Bush was like an able bodied person who loses in the Special Olympics. Kerrey was a self-promoter, having had film taken of himself in coming ashore in Vietnam and earning Purple Hearts for minor scrapes. He refused to release his military files to clear up allegations.  

But at least he was telling the truth about American war crimes.
When another Senator, Bob Kerry and his men were rumored to have wiped out a village in another battle, he drew his comrades to a retreat and they decided to agree that it never happened.  Why blame them? If they hadn’t slaughtered these people, the villagers would have reported their presence and their Navy Seal outfit would have been ambushed. It’s standard criminal procedure to eliminate witnesses. Wouldn’t you?

Now we are involved in another misadventure. We’ve inserted ourselves into ancient Islamic rivalries. When, as predicted, civil war broke out in Iraq instead of a flowering of democracy,  our leaders were afraid to call it civil war. It was sectarian strife. When Senator Chuck Hagel protested the bungling, his own party called it politically motivated.

And similar to the My Lai massacre, those who ordered and encouraged the torture protocols were never prosecuted. Only a few patsies were trotted out and punished. We can’t prosecute the terrorists of Guantanamo because information from torture is inadmissible.

Unlike some of Nixon’s men, Bush’s do not seem to have any qualms about their mistakes. Cheney famously says he’s never lost any sleep over his decisions to plant false stories in the NY Times and quote them as news as pretexts to invade, or his energetic work to promote torture outlawed by the Geneva Convention.

He’ also never lost any children or relatives in the ongoing debacle, the heartless draft-dodging bastard.
But you have to hand it to him. He made several corporations and quite a few Iraqi stooges billions of dollars. Good times.

At Obama’s first inauguration, I stood with some Teamsters at the Purple Gate watching the events. One noted that in some countries, they’d execute the Bush people, “and that’s only for what we know they’ve done.”

Thank them for their service.