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This chapter celebrates public occasions and measures in recent years where the American government and citizens’ groups acknowledged national “misdeeds” in international relations, especially in its wars. The chapter begins with the 1998 Pentagon award of three soldiers’ medals to the helicopter crewmen who sought to call the My Lai massacre to a halt. It then describes recent presidential apologies for American failures to curb massacres in Bosnia and Rwanda. The author then nominates some still-to-be-acknowledged occasions for repentance in this country’s recent international affairs: the civilian-bombings of World War II, failures of public leaders to mourn — or even to count — the deaths of enemies in war, and the arrogance of American claims to global “full spectrum dominance”. The chapter concludes with pleas that America listen more carefully to its friendly critics in other countries, especially the two countries with which the book began: Germany and South Africa.

This chapter introduces a brief history of Ha My and My Lai with a focus on the historical situation of the village being turned inside out by the violent forces of the Cold War. The abstraction of total war had to be weighed against concrete needs for survival, and this painful negotiation was a genuine people's struggle in the streets during the violent Cold War. This paradigm of the people's war also became a reality, with tragic consequences, to some of those who fought against the paradigm. Following this, the chapter discusses the history of the village's ancestral temples and their fluctuation between being positive and negative moral symbols as a way of situating the political history within the spectrum of local norms. Even post Cold War, the political identity of the people could not be settled and they had to deal with the consequences of the war.

This chapter analyzes the historical aspects of the death notices for Hugh Thompson, the American helicopter pilot who put a stop to the massacre of Vietnamese civilians at My Lai. It suggests that while the obituarists attempted to recover some sense of humanity in Thompson's life, their flat accounts did little to illuminate the source of his courageous resistance or explain the brutalities perpetrated by the men in Charlie Company at the My Lai Massacre. This chapter also suggests that histories of whatever genre can never escape the limitations of representation to become history as such.

In Vietnam, household death-commemoration rites are a rich store of historical evidence. The domestic ritual calendars in places like My Lai and Ha My offer a panoramic view of the fluctuating production of violent death in past generations. People gathered after the Ha My and My Lai wars to share their sorrow and joy, a generation after the war. The end of a generation of separation involved many people and opened up a new perspective on reality. Above all, it meant the restoration of the right to approach the life-world as an encompassing reality that includes afterlife as well as life. The Ha My villagers began to improve their domestic environment, and they started by renovating the dwelling places of their dead relatives. The modernization of village life was initiated in both cosmological terrains, and the vision of a prosperous future materialized first in the place of the dead.

Throughout the US-Vietnam conflict (1965–1973), American forces labored to comply with the Geneva Conventions and customary laws of war, though US war crimes largely overshadowed those efforts. This chapter relates the training US forces received on the law of war and describes how military lawyers practiced law “in country.” US combatants were constantly directed to report war crimes, known or suspected. Too often those directives were not obeyed. My Lai is fully examined, including its badly failed military prosecutions. Disturbing post-trial clemency by civilian authorities, in many cases, is also detailed. On the whole, however, the sentences of US personnel convicted by courts-martial of war crimes were sincere efforts to appropriately punish battlefield criminality. This chapter argues that, under difficult conditions, US military efforts in Vietnam to comply with the Geneva Conventions, and to punish known US war crimes, were more genuine and effective than have been generally recognized.

This chapter focuses on the atrocities committed by U.S. troops against civilians during the wars in Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq. More specifically, it examines the murderous misconduct by U.S. soldiers in No Gun Ri in Korea, My Lai in Vietnam, and Haditha in Iraq. It also considers how the rules of engagement affected civilian life. Finally, it assesses the attitude of the U.S. government and the American public toward such atrocities.

This chapter provides an account of the gigantic human catastrophe that devastated Vietnam in the second half of the 1960s, due to the Ha My and My Lai massacres. The connectedness of these incidents was not limited to the dynamic theater of a territorial war but also had a global dimension. The crimes were inseparable from the bipolar geopolitical structure and the interstate network dominant at the time of the Cold War. The postwar state hierarchy of Vietnam promoted the worship of the heroic war dead to a civic religion and, in doing so, demoted the traditional culture of death commemoration. A generation after the end of the war, the political economy of memory is now changing in Vietnam. The people of Ha My and My Lai are now engaged in renovating the places of the dead, as a part of “the commemorative fever.”

The Vietnamese perception of the world incorporates the awareness that the life of the dead is intertwined with that of the living, and that the Vietnamese idealize a harmonious relationship between the two forms of life. The morality of death, in modern history, cannot be considered independently from the history of mass death. In Ha My and My Lai, mass death was a central episode in family and village history. The war in Vietnam resulted in high numbers of displaced, troubled, and ritually “uncontrolled deaths.” This chapter examines the implications of the conceptual polarity for the memory of mass death. To illustrate this, it discusses relevant sociological theories about death symbolism. Furthermore, it highlights the two-sided commemorative ritual practice, and relates it to the idea of “symbolic ambidexterity” proposed by Robert Hertz. Finally, it considers its practical implications and theoretical significance against the background of the moral symbolic hierarchy of death.

Southern soldiers served, died, and won Medals of Honor in numbers that appreciably exceeded Dixie’s share of the nation’s population. This chapter examines their motives for service, their wartime experiences, and their reflections on the war. This examination includes whites, blacks, Chicanos, men, and women. It also highlights the role of General William Westmoreland, the US commanding general from 1964 to 1968; the leadership of Lieutenant Colonel Hal Moore at the battle of Ia Drang; the experience of the Bardstown, Kentucky, National Guard unit, one of the very few units activated during the war; the experience of Lieutenant William Calley and Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson, key participants during the My Lai Massacre; and the stories of two marines, Jim Webb and Gustav Hasford, both of whom wrote acclaimed novels based on their Vietnam service.

Following the Vietnamese communist Tet Offensive of early 1968, Presidents Johnson and Nixon reluctantly made the decisions that would ultimately lead to US withdrawal from Vietnam. As these decisions were made and implemented, majority southern opinion and key southern legislators remained supportive of the war. This regional position was particularly important to Nixon when Democrats from other sections abandoned the deference they had shown Johnson. The southern public and media and the voting records of Dixie’s congressional representatives demonstrated this dogged prowar perspective. Majority southern opinion was also evident in the South’s response to the My Lai Massacre and support for Lieutenant Calley, in the hostility toward GI coffeehouses, and in Senators Gore’s and Ralph Yarborough’s failure to win reelection. But the war’s ever-mounting agony was affecting the South. Senator John Sherman Cooper emerged as a prominent proponent of legislating an end to the war, and even former hawks such as Herman Talmadge began to waver following Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia in 1970.

Larry May’s chapter is concerned with the relationship between jus ad bellum and jus in bello and attempts to offer a unified response to two seemingly disparate questions: When should war crimes trials be staged? Who can be held liable for violations of jus ad bellum? Schooled on the Nuremberg precedent, we tend to think of war crimes trials as post hoc phenomena, staged in the aftermath of war. But as May points out, this need not be the case; May finds a potent example in the My Lai massacre and the trial of William Calley that ensued. Despite its anomalous features, the Calley trial stands as an example of a war crimes trial staged in the midst of ongoing hostilities. As the struggle against global terror has destabilized the very distinction between conditions of war and peace we might expect to see more Calley-like trials in the future.

This chapter argues that the US-led war in Vietnam (1955–1975) paved the way for institutional changes in the US military, including the establishment of the US Law of War Program, which later precipitated the emergence of a new doctrinal approach to the laws of war called ‘operational law’. Military lawyers emerged from the Vietnam War better equipped and with a formal mandate to advise military commanders on the legality of targeting operations. Military lawyers performed a wide range of duties in Vietnam, especially around Prisoner of War (POW) issues, and were deployed in unprecedented numbers. Military lawyers were not involved in targeting, neither during ‘Operation Rolling Thunder’ nor ‘Operation Linebacker’, but the Vietnam War in general and the My Lai massacre of 1968 in particular helped to create the conditions for their involvement in subsequent wars.

Chapter 2 applies the situationist view to war crimes. A number of the experiments discussed in Chapter 1 focus on situations that seem directly relevant to the circumstances in which war crimes occur. For this reason, several social psychologists and philosophers argue that situationism offers the most plausible explanation of how and why war crimes occur. According to the situationist view, war crimes can occur as a result of both immediate battlefield conditions, and the ongoing situational pressures of military training and culture. Advocates of this view argue that this combination of situational forces undermines the ability of military personnel to recognize and act on relevant moral considerations, leading them to believe that certain acts, such as torture, are permissible. Thus military personnel may be unable to recognize illegal and immoral orders, even in situations arising far from the heat of battle.

SDS split in two: the SDS/RYM (Revolutionary Youth Movement)--led by Jeff Jones, Bernardine Dohrn, and Mark Rudd, soon to become Weathermen—and the SDS/PL (Progressive Labor), led by old-school Marxists. The Weathermen visited campus, recruiting for a revolutionary action in Chicago, a failed effort—few Illini followed their lead—and the local SDS withdrew from the national organization, as antiwar feelings were now mainstream on campus but violent revolution was not. The Radical Union (RU) formed, supporting a national march on Washington; the FBI arrested three on campus for harboring a deserter; Seymour Hersh exposed the My Lai massacre.

Chapter 7 turns to the question of the punishment and prevention of war crimes. While the bases of legal liability for participation in war crimes are complex, our account of responsibility has important implications for a particularly controversial defense against a charge of war crimes: the superior orders defense. We consider a number of different arguments for the view that combatants who commit war crimes under orders are partially excused for their actions, and argue that the only defensible conception of the superior orders defense is one in which a combatant acting under orders can plead duress or coercion. The second part of Chapter 7 turns to the question of preventing war crimes. The account of war crimes that we develop in this book offers important insights into prevention strategies that, we hope, can provide the basis for further work on this important topic.