An Aye for an Eye

By * Ed Magnuson

THE COURT-MARTIAL OF LT. CALLEY by Richard Hammer. 398 pages. Coward, McCann & Geoghegan. $7.95.

A charitable way of viewing the waves of public anger generated by the conviction of Lieut. William L. Galley Jr. last March is to assume that too few Americans were fully aware of what really was established at his court-martial. The 45 days of testimony by 104 witnesses were indeed confusing, repetitious, and often contradictory. Yet it is difficult to believe that any reasonable man can now read New York Times Reporter Richard Hammer's expert though impassioned distillation of the trial proceedings and still feel that the six jurors --all combat veterans acting against their own instincts as professional soldiers--could have reached any conclusion other than the one they did. The conclusion: in the 1968 U.S. assault on the hamlet of My Lai, Calley was guilty of the premeditated murder of at least 22 defenseless Vietnamese babies, children, women and old men.

So many members of Galley's own platoon contradicted Galley's testimony about his role in the carnage and Galley's memory of the action was so self-servingly selective that Hammer concludes flatly: "Calley lied and lied blatantly on the stand." He was also ill-advised by his attorneys, especially his civilian counsel, George W. Latimer, whose defense strategy was "confusing and confused, rambling and directionless." The defense at various times argued that: 1) there was no large-scale killing at My Lai; 2) yes, there was a lot of killing but it had been done by helicopter and artillery rather than Galley's platoon; 3) the scared and vengeful mood of Galley's men made a slaughter inevitable and they could not be blamed; 4) Calley had not committed the charged crime, and well maybe he had, but he was acting under orders and suffering from mental stress.

Violated Conventions. Eventually, claims Hammer, the outgunned defense tried to turn the court-martial into a near trial of Galley's commander, Captain Ernest L. Medina. The defense produced soldiers who claimed that Medina had ordered the slaughter of civilians. Calley, it was argued, had no choice; he could not disobey his superior. Medina denied giving such orders, and the Army's young prosecutor, Captain Aubrey M. Daniel III, was able to draw from a surprising number of defense witnesses the admission that they had disobeyed Galley's order to fire into the assembled groups of civilians --without being disciplined for their refusal.

Hammer has a weakness for run-on sentences and rhetorical questions, and he allows his feeling of outrage at the

My Lai atrocity to show clearly. Nevertheless, his basic point seems humane and inescapable: though war is hellish, there are conventions for its conduct and Calley, among others, violated them. Hammer concedes it will be unfair if Calley alone goes to prison for My Lai. But, he asks, "does anyone believe, because most of the crimes in this country are never solved, that those who are caught, tried, and convicted should be set free?" He wonders, too, whether those who deplore Galley's conviction are not dispensing with one of the moral bulwarks of individual men and of society: the notion "that a man is ultimately responsible for his own mistakes, errors, sins, and crimes and must himself pay for them and make his own atonement."

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