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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.

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.

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.

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.