I’m sure experts can say many deep things about war crimes. Alas, I’m no expert. And yet, that caveat in place, I think I’ve noticed two things about war crimes. It’s up to you to judge how interesting they are.
The first thing I can say about war crimes is that for years we hear next to nothing about them, even during wartime. It’s almost like wars became civilised affairs.
Then, suddenly, news reports are full of alleged war crimes.
That’s what happened since February 2022, when the Russian Federation invaded the Ukraine: the term “war crime” became almost as frequent on our TV screens as the daily appearances of the Ukrainian President.
The second thing I’ve noticed is that current news coverage of war crimes is inevitably framed within a cosmic good versus evil conflict – sorry – Western liberal democracies versus autocratic regimes narrative. In this story war crimes are the preserve of the Other: autocratic regimes (aka, the bad guys). Western liberal democracies (We), the immaculately good guys, abhor such things. Living under the rule of law, We promote an “international rules-based order”.
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If you are young enough (and certainly, many Aussies old and young do their best to erase this episode from public awareness) you probably never heard of My Lai, let alone remember it, but today is its anniversary.
Fifty five years ago the military of the United States of America, our ally, the world’s richest and most democratic nation, did this:
The whole thing was so deliberate. It was point-blank murder and I was standing there watching it … I walked up and saw these guys doing strange things … Setting fire to the hootches and huts and waiting for people to come out and then shooting them … going into the hootches and shooting them up … gathering people in groups and shooting them. — Sgt. Michael Bernhardt, US Army.
The American Army kill count that day reached between 347 and 504, depending on who you believe. Virtually no single fighting-age male was there: victims were elderly men, women, children and even babies (women, on top, were often gang-raped before being murdered).
That’s not how the US Army reported the event: as a result of a successful “search and destroy” operation, a communiqué claimed, 128 fighters, among the most battle-hardened in the Viet Cong lines, had been killed. 20 civilians, it added, were accidental victims (what we now call “collateral damage”).
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It’s said that it’s impossible to conceal the truth when too many people witnessed the events. It’s a comforting thought and there probably is truth in it, but reality is more complicated than that.
In reality, My Lai could have been swept under the carpet, even though many knew what really happened there.
Vietnamese survivors, for example. They, however, may not mean much: would American journalists or investigators want to approach them to hear their stories? Even if approached, would they trust any Americans? Assuming a positive answer to both questions, would the American public believe those stories?
There were more witnesses. That morning some 100 troops – not counting helicopter crews – from the 23rd Infantry Division (the Americal Division) took part in that action. Under the command of Captain Ernest L. Medina, those men were grouped in three platoons – one of them led by 2nd Lt William “Rusty” Laws Calley Jr.
They, too, knew the truth: after the massacre rumours inevitably started circulating.
They were hard to believe though. Ronald “Ron” Ridenhour, another Americal GI:
… I couldn’t quite accept it. Somehow I just couldn’t believe that not only had so many young American men participated in such an act of barbarism, but that their officers had ordered it.
However, in spite of initial doubts, Ridenhour went on to substantiate the allegations. The result (the letter you see at that link) started a low-profile military investigation.
Eventually investigative free-lance reporter Seymour Hersh heard the rumours and learned of the investigation. He cobbled together the pieces and put out an explosive report.
But even that, by itself, could have led to nothing. Just like Ridenhour, newspaper editors could not believe the story.
Serendipity intervened. Sgt. Ronald Haeberle, a war photographer assigned to Americal, had photographed the massacre. The editors of The Plain Dealer (a Cleveland, Ohio, local newspaper) learned about Haeberle’s photos at about the same time they read Hersh’s story. And although Haeberle had destroyed photographs depicting individual GIs committing the atrocities – out of a sense of “mateship” with the perpetrators: he wasn’t there to point fingers at anybody, he said – the photos he kept were enough to corroborate Hersh’s report. It was those photos and the interview Haeberle gave reporter Joseph Eszterhas that made that story reach the public.
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Once news of the massacre spread the Army was forced to charge 26 GIs (although the three platoons took part in the action). Medina and Calley were included among them. No higher ranking officer was charged. Only Calley – out of the 26 indicted – was convicted, even though military witnesses testified having seen Medina executing a female Vietnamese and claimed he personally had ordered the massacre.
The American public suspected Calley was an escapegoat. It’s hard to disagree. But one shouldn’t feel too bad for him. He could have gotten death, I believe, but the prosecutor asked for life, later reduced to 20 years after conviction. After serving three and a half years in house arrest, he was pardoned.
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This fifty fifth anniversary of the My Lai massacre finds Australians sleepwalking towards a world war with China as the baddest guy of all under the pretext of a crusade against autocracies. That makes it critically important to spell out the lessons of this episode.
Here goes nothing, as Yanks say. We may live in what our leaders call civilised Western liberal democracies, we may feel solidarity towards “our” boys and girls in arms, we may even find it hard to believe them capable of such things, but we are wrong. Even them can commit war crimes. Or better, even we can commit war crimes. We cannot let that happen, least of all in our name.
War crimes are not the preserve of autocracies, my friends: they are intrinsic to war and no laws of war can change that.
That is not something we left behind in a distant past or something only the “bad guys” do. This happened only a few years ago. The protagonists were Australians, citizens of a civilised Western liberal democracy:
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