Cog Ergo Sum

By R.Z. Sheppard

THE MAN-EATING MACHINE 177 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $6.95.

Nature abhors its vacuums, and man cannot abide free-floating guilt. But scapegoats are getting harder to find these days (vide Richard Nixon and his Watergate problems). After My Lai, the U.S. Army thought they had a pretty good sacrificial offering in Lieut. William Calley--until corrosion began eating its way up the chain of command. The Army's containment plan was not helped by Journalist John Sack, who moved in with Calley for one of those total immersions that have become the baptismal rites of the New Journalism.

The result was 60 tape-recorded hours of Galley's own words about truth, military honor and My Lai, a virtual confession that resulted in a controversial magazine article, a book and even a subpoena, when the Army tried to get hold of the tapes.

Sack, also the author of M, was not out to hang little "Rusty" Calley with his own words. Quite the opposite. The intention was to show that Calley was what Sack now calls a "brass instrument" through which the order to execute My Lai villagers was trumpeted. The blame is then pinned on The System, of course.

In The Man-Eating Machine Sack artfully enlarges his vision of the System as Superscapegoat for the Superstate. Basically the book consists of profiles of four Viet Nam veterans. But it is also a metaphor that has been duly certified by such thinkers as Marx, Veblen, Jacques Ellul, Lewis Mumford and Siegfried Giedion (Mechanization Takes Command). The theme is familiar, though no less enticing for having been subject to countless cliches. The oversimplified version goes like this: As technological systems grow more complex, individuals grow less responsible for controlling the consequences.

Sack swallows these abstractions whole, yet the characters in his book are concrete enough, and very real indeed. Varoujan Demirgian is an ex-G.I. in Viet Nam who thought he had a problem--he was there for a year, says Sack, without ever killing a Communist. Robert Melvin is a black Viet veteran now totally committed to working his way up the executive ladder at a Madison Avenue advertising agency. Another black, Vantee Thompson, came home from search-and-destroy missions to find himself on riot-control duty in Baltimore, his own people becoming as hard to understand as the Viet Cong.

Chic Anarchy. Finally Sack trots out Calley again, this time interviewed before his trial while he was playing tourist in New York. Dressed in a brown tweed suit with a credit card in his wallet, Calley glues himself to a telescope atop the Empire State Building and looks for sunbathing girls. Downstairs it's a four-Bloody Mary lunch and reminiscences about Asian whores. "Normal, normal," says Sack, "like sugar in water, he had been dropped in a city street scene but he didn't displace anything." It is a little late in the century, though, to be wowed by this monster-next-door approach to evil.

Sack enters Galley's head at crucial moments to deliver other thoughts that often seem inconsistent with the man-is-only-a-cog theory that permeates the book. Calley decides to tell the truth at his trial, says Sack, because "a lie violated the inner consistency of what every soldier did in Viet Nam." He is thus viewed as a loyal robot unable to make moral distinctions, while at the same time Sack tells us about Calley's intelligence and honor. Few readers are likely to swallow such contradictions. Despite Sack's intent to exculpate Calley, the My Lai triggerman (still confined to base at Fort Benning) comes across as a very shrewd robot, cynically using the truth to embarrass the Army and deflect his own guilt.

Sack never actually denies either the need for or the possibility of free will and individual guilt and responsibility. Instead he slides into the sticky, popular claim that "We are all William Calley." The preposterous implication being that none of us cogs can be guilty of anything. "To absent oneself is the only innocent act," says Sack sententiously, "to accept uncertainty, to trust oneself and to walk quietly out on the great dictator, the incontestable expert, to undo every organization and let every organism turn to the rhythms within." For a man who apparently operates very well within the man-eating machine, this is anarchy at its most chic. sbR.Z. Sheppard

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