Villains and Heroes
America lost a villain last week — Lieutenant William Calley, the only member of the armed forces convicted in the worse known atrocity in the Viet Nam war, the massacre at My Lai (pronounced mee LYE). The Vietnamese called the village Sơn Mỹ.
Yet for some he was a hero. For many in a divided America, he was the hero celebrated in the 1971 spoken word recording, “The Battle Hymn of Lt. Calley.” Vocals were by Terry Nelson and music by the pick-up group C-Company — named for The US Army company that attacked My Lai — its melody was “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Speaking as Calley, the singer describes himself as a persecuted and forgotten soldier who, as in the Rambo films, offers the excuse that anti-war protesters and politicians gave away battlefield victories. The Noble Cause narrative is just a stone’s throw away.
Receiving a lot of airplays on Country and Western stations, the record sold over a million copies in four days and went on eventually to sell more than two million copies. Think of the battle over Calley — villain or hero? — as the first skirmish in the 2nd Civil War that climaxed on January 6, 2021.
For Ron Ridenhour, the My Lai whistleblower who brought the atrocity to light, Calley was something of a scapegoat. Well, not really a scapegoat because, as Tim O’Brien, author of The Things They Carried, reminded me at the 25th anniversary conference at Tulane, “scapegoats don’t usually do anything.” Over 500 villagers were killed that day, March 15, 1968, and many were lined up at a ditch where Calley directed his platoon to fire.
Yet for Ron, My Lai’s spasm of rape and murder laid bare the horror and inanity of a war strategy that was supported up and down the Pentagon’s chain of command. The strategy of “attrition” made body count, civilians included, the metric of “success” in a war America was already losing.
Why not kill villagers who dressed no different from the Viet Cong? Why not kill babies who would grow up to be Viet Cong? So Calley testified in his defense.
Majors and colonels were stacked in helicopters that day, observing the action. “They could have stopped it at any time,” Ron argued during his last talk before his untimely death in April 1998. Other officers charged in the My Lai trials were acquitted.
A military photographer took pictures later published in Life.
Another massacre on the same day was carried out 4 kilometers away at the village of My Khe. It was barely reported and never prosecuted. For Ron the loose cannon was not Calley but the military command who gave the orders.
The official military after-action report called My Lai a successful search-and-destroy mission.
Calley was released to house arrest under orders by President Richard Nixon three days after his conviction. His initial life sentence had been modified to a term of 20 years, and was then further reduced to ten. He ultimately served three years of house arrest.
The Forgotten Hero: Hugh Thompson
For the writer Trent Angers, the forgotten hero of My Lai was helicopter pilot Hugh Thompson who, witnessing the massacre, landed between American soldiers and Vietnamese villagers and ordered his door gunners Larry Colburn and Glenn Andreotta to train their weapons on the Americans. The soldiers backed off.
Hugh was a man of action. Facing the moment, urged on by instinct, he knew how he wanted to act.
He was often asked, Why did he act and not another? Hugh had an unswerving answer: it was how he was raised by his parents in Georgia.
A Hero of Thought
Both Hugh and Ron were heroes of conscience. Ron had time to think about it. When he heard about My Lai from soldiers he had trained with, he knew if he did nothing he would be complicit. He waited till he was demobilized from service before acting.
He spoke to family and community leaders back in Arizona before deciding. His stepfather told him he’d be crazy to do anything. His Boy Scout leader and favorite English teacher both advised silence. They’ll f*** with you for the rest of your life, they all agreed.
Nixon in fact put Ron on his enemies list along with Dan Ellsberg, the Pentagon Papers whistleblower.
But for Ron silence was not an option. “Doublethink,” George Orwell’s term, here comes into play. The psychological phenomenon behind it is called doubling. Doubling, splitting yourself into two, means you can hold true to your personal morality while maintaining a separate public or institutional morality.
In such situations it’s helpful to be able to hold contradictory positions, to separate out your different selves or different lives. You can be a good person even while you do things that aren’t good. Doubling allows you to follow immoral orders while imagining yourself to be a moral individual.
But whistleblowers like Ron can’t split themselves. Whistleblowers personify philosopher Hannah Arendt’s idea of the heroic — people who talk seriously with themselves about what they are doing. Ron and people like him carry on a conversation between the parts of their lives, professional and personal, heart and head and conscience. They cannot not tell the truth. They feel a compulsion to do the right thing.
They often speak of it this way: “I had to do it; I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t speak up.” Faced with a “choiceless choice,” they cannot not choose to abide by their conscience.
Ron’s letter to Congress and the Pentagon offered map coordinates and names that made it impossible to ignore. The letter reflected the investigative instincts he was apparently born with. And the eloquence. In the letter he wrote:
Exactly what did, in fact, occur in the village of “Pinkville” [the soldiers nickname for My Lai] in March, 1968 I do not know for certain, but I am convinced that it was something very black indeed. I remain irrevocably persuaded that if you and I do truly believe in the principles, of justice and the equality of every man, however humble, before the law, that form the very backbone that this country is founded on, then we must press forward a widespread and public investigation of this matter with all our combined efforts. I think that it was Winston Churchill who, once said “A country without a conscience is a country without a soul, and a country without a soul is a country that cannot survive.”
Hugh was an improviser. Ron was a hero of thought.
Sometimes I come down on the side of the non-improviser. Acting on instinct, like the classic improviser, Hugh achieved an undeniable authenticity. Acting not only on conscience but also consciousness, Ron’s authenticity went deeper.
“One Good Man”
When I got to know Ron, who’d come to my Tulane class on “Literature and the Experience of the Vietnam War,” he was still angry. He felt that by “scapegoating” Calley, America had not learned the lesson of My Lai. His last talk, 30 years after the massacre, was titled “My Lai and Why It Matters.”
I had the privilege of introducing Ron Ridenhour to journalist David Halberstam at the 25th My Lai anniversary conference in 1994. They were two of a kind. Both willing to speak truth to power, both had already touched history.
On the journalism panel at the 25th anniversary conference, David quoted Robert Kennedy’s favorite line from Emerson, that “if one good man plant himself on his conscience, the whole world will come round.” With Seymour Hersh, who with Ron’s help won the Pulitzer Prize for the My Lai story, sitting between them, David pointed to Ron and said, “You are that one good man.”
Later when he returned to Tulane to give a memorial talk in Ron’s honor, David related that, upon first meeting Ron, he felt as if he had always known him. The mystery came clear, he explained, when he realized where he had seen Ron before: “Ron was James Stewart in the Capra pictures, Gary Cooper in High Noon, and Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird. . . . It is one man alone doing the right thing,” he intoned. “And therefore when he did it, we were ready for him.” On a hero’s journey.
A few years later I was privileged to further enshrine the legacy of my old friend, when I hooked up with Ham Fish of the Nation Institute in New York, with the help of our mutual friend Jonathan Schell, to create The Ridenhour Prizes, which we gave out annually to whistleblowers and other deserving recipients in recognition of the courage they displayed in speaking out on matters of principle, often in the face of retaliation
The Ridenhour Prizes memorialize Ron’s dual career as whistleblower and investigative reporter. Dan Ellsberg, Sy Hersh, Ambassador Joseph Wilson, and President Jimmy Carter are among its winners. I know Ron would have been thrilled that Congressman Jamie Raskin — who led the second Trump impeachment and was a member of The Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol — was awarded the 20th annual Ridenhour Courage Prize.
Looking Back and Ahead
Calley showed no remorse during his trial. It finally broke through in 2009 when he spoke at a Columbus, OH Kiwanis Club meeting. “There is not a day that goes by that I do not feel remorse for what happened that day in My Lai,” Calley said. “I feel remorse for the Vietnamese who were killed, for their families, for the American soldiers involved and their families. I am very sorry.”
Little late for a hero’s call. But leagues ahead of that other disastrous leader, remorseless Donald Trump.
Meanwhile Kamala Harris seems to be a woman of both conscience and reflective thought.
