Verdict on My Lai

By Keith R.Johnson

MEDINA by MARY MCCARTHY

87 pages. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. $2.45.

Mary McCarthy brings a special sensibility to her journalism about the war in Viet Nam. Behind the smart bitchiness of The Group there is a complicated spirit in anguish over what she now calls "this miserable country." As an expatriate, she sees the U.S. in sharp focus, remarking on incongruities that a resident takes for granted. Thus she recognized--and skillfully skewered --American bungling in Viet Nam (1967), though her later Hanoi (1968), likewise based on firsthand reporting, suffered from a Lincoln Steffens I-have-seen-the-future-and-it-works naivete. In Medina, her third short book of war reportage, she turns an account of the acquittal of Lieut. William Calley's immediate superior into a disquieting meditation on the meaning of My Lai.

Sometimes bitterness leads her into overstatement. She acknowledges that the U.S. is probably the only country that would have brought a Lieut. Calley to trial. But then she baldly states that with Calley's sentence reduced and everyone else involved in the massacre and the ensuing cover-up either acquitted or not even brought to trial, "mass-murders have been welcomed back into the population." She adds: "Now any member of the armed forces in Indochina can, if he so desires, slaughter a reasonable number of babies, confident that the public will acquit him, a) because they support the war and the Army, or b) because they don't." To be sure, the irony was obvious enough when both the left (the war is inherently immoral) and the right (Calley was only following orders) agreed for irreconcilable reasons that Calley should go free. But many, McCarthy included, still feel that Calley was rightly brought to justice. Why would a second Calley not be?

McCarthy is at her best and most disturbing when she argues that the Medina proceedings were doomed from the start. Since Calley's judges concluded that he acted on his own rather than on orders, Medina's prosecutors could scarcely argue that Medina was the culprit after all.

Prejudiced Witnesses. Interestingly, McCarthy reports that before any of the My Lai proceedings began, a group of young Army lawyers suggested that all concerned--from generals down to sergeants--be tried en masse, on the Nuremberg model. Such a proceeding, she says, could have "apportioned blame in large, small and medium slices according to a single measure." Instead, the combination of separate trials and administrative decisions inevitably produced "a haphazard result" and left "a sense of un fairness." Even after Medina's trial, "the feeling remained that the full story of My Lai 4 was still to be told, not the details of the massacre but what lay behind it."

One thing that lay behind it was the absence in Charlie Company -- and among many other officers and men in Viet Nam -- of any sense of identity as soldiers. McCarthy notes that witnesses at the Medina trial spoke of enemy-inflicted casualties as atrocities, "that is, as though they themselves were civilians." The consequence is plain: "When a man in uniform, with a gun, makes no distinction between himself and a civilian, he will scarcely make a distinction between the military and the civilians of the other side." In Viet Nam, the other side has not spared civilians either. But even the nasty realities of war cannot excuse the telltale figures in the My Lai commander's report on the action, which noted 128 "enemy killed -- but only three weapons captured."

McCarthy makes a final telling point. Though no one seems to have remarked on it at the time, many of the officers called as character witnesses for Ernest Medina had themselves been investigated for possible crimes in connection with My Lai; two had actually been charged.

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