Bucha and My Lai

BBC News photo

Having been a teenager with two baby sisters in the house and done more than my fair share of babysitting, I thought I knew what a piteous wail sounded like until I heard young, homesick draftees in their basic training barracks after lights out.  In the late 60’s, most of them were drafted under “Project 100,000,” a McNamara program instituted at the peak of the war in Vietnam that reduced the IQ requirements for service in the army by 20 points and jettisoned the requirement for a high school diploma in an attempt to satisfy the army’s need for cannon fodder because student deferments and successful draft-dodging had severely reduced the available pool of young men of draft age. 

Almost all of them were 18 years old, inducted the moment they had become eligible for the draft, and had never been away from home, or even their hometowns, in their lives.  I spent six weeks in the summer of 1967 as a “third lieutenant” doing what West Point called Army Orientation Training, whereby cadets were given regular jobs in the army as leadership training.  I was assigned to be an executive officer of an armor advanced individual training company at Fort Knox, and it was my job at least one night a week to serve as Duty Officer for the battalion.  It was when I was making my nighttime rounds through the barracks that I heard the trainees in their bunks sobbing openly for their mothers.

It wasn’t ordinary homesickness that these boys were suffering from.  The company was nearly at the end of its 12-week training program, so they had already received their orders for the duty stations they would be assigned to after graduating.  More than two-thirds of them already had orders to Vietnam.  There were only a very few sergeants assigned to the training brigade because so many non-commissioned officers (NCOs for short) were serving in Vietnam.  But the sergeants assigned to train the company to drive tanks and shoot them were brutal in the tales they told about what the young soldiers would face when they were in combat overseas – punji stakes tipped with human excrement, so-called bouncing-betty grenades placed as booby traps that sprang out of the ground and sprayed the poor soldier who stepped on one with deadly shrapnel, ambushes that lit up the night with tracer rounds and explosions, guys the sergeants knew who had lost their arms or legs or even both…

There was a good reason what I heard in the barracks at night was so pitiful.  The boys weren’t just crying because they missed their mothers and fathers; they were frightened of what awaited them in Vietnam, and they had good reason to be.  At least some of them would die over there, 9,000 miles from home in a country many of them were just now hearing about for the first time.

Seeing the images from Bucha of Ukrainian women and men lying dead in the streets brought back the memory of when I covered the trial of Lt. “Rusty” Calley, the second lieutenant who commanded the platoon that shot more than 300 civilians to death point blank in My Lai, Vietnam in March of 1968.  Many of the dead in My Lai were left at the bottom of a ditch, like some of the dead in Bucha. 

Calley testified that he was ordered to kill everyone in the village because “they were all VC,” or Viet Cong.  Calley, in turn, gave the same order to his soldiers, most of whom had been drafted in 1967, the same year I was training that company in Fort Knox.  Most were teenagers, like my trainees.  When they had testified earlier in the trial, some of the members of the platoon who pulled the triggers on the guns that killed the people in the village of My Lai said they believed Lt. Calley when he told them “they are all VC.”

It sounds incredible, doesn’t it?  That senior officers in the American army could have ordered such a massacre, and that the order could have been passed along by a second lieutenant to his enlisted men, that they all believed what they had been told, that the village was full of the enemy, and the “enemy” turned out to include old women and children.

It’s even more incredible when you think that some Russian superior officer or non-commissioned officer probably ordered a unit of Russian soldiers to shoot the people of Bucha, and gave them a reason, too – that they were all Nazis, or something else that seems far-fetched to us, but could have sounded perfectly logical to them.

And it’s incredible to think about the Russian soldiers who did it.  We don’t know yet if they were conscripts – read:  draftees – or Russians who volunteered to serve in the army as professionals.  It’s incredible to think that like the American soldiers who committed the massacre of My Lai, they were human beings who were capable of such monstrous acts.

Why?  Why were these young American and Russian men capable of such evil?  Perhaps the Russians were like the men in Calley’s platoon, who had been drafted under Project 100,000.  Maybe that’s why they believed such patent bullshit, that the village was full of the enemy.   Perhaps the Russian commander, the man who gave the order in Bucha, was like Calley himself, who was also drafted under Project 100,000.  Calley qualified for Officer Candidate School, we learned, because he was one of the few soldiers in his training company who had a high school diploma, and his scores on the qualification exam had been higher than those of his fellow trainees.

We cannot excuse either Calley or his soldiers, and certainly we cannot excuse the Russian soldiers who killed the people of Bucha by shooting them at point blank range the way Calley’s soldiers shot the people of My Lai.  Calley deserved to be tried and convicted of his crimes in My Lai, and he would have served time in Leavenworth for what he did, had not Nixon effectively commuted his sentence.  His superiors deserved to have been tried and convicted for ordering the massacre.  The Russian commanders who ordered the killings in Bucha deserve the same thing, and so do the soldiers who did the killing.  But the soldiers who did the killing in My Lai were never charged, never came to trial, never served a day in prison.  And neither will the Russians who committed the crimes in Bucha, because trust me, the International Criminal Court in The Hague will never bring any of them to trial.

But consider this:  the images you’ve seen of a street in Bucha lined with blown-up Russian tanks and APCs are evidence that at least some justice has already been meted out by the Ukrainian army.  Every destroyed Russian tank you’ve seen contained three Russian soldiers who are now dead:  a driver, a gunner, and a tank commander.  The slant-nose APCs destroyed in Bucha most likely contained a squad of infantry and a driver and vehicle commander – from eight to ten Russian soldiers.  Those armored vehicles have proven to be death traps.  Thousands have died terrible deaths as they were transformed into fiery coffins by Ukrainian missiles and artillery.

Putin and his generals are not only destroying the country of Ukraine and killing its soldiers and many of its civilian citizens.  They have sent what must now be tens of thousands of young Russian men to their deaths.  And for what?  For a lie, that they are ridding Ukraine of Nazis who do not exist and freeing the Ukrainian people from a dictatorship that exists only in Putin’s imagination.

Terrible, terrible things happen in wars:  massacres like My Lai and Bucha; total destruction of cities like Mariupol and some of the suburbs of Kyiv and Kharkiv; the random murder of civilians by artillery and rocket shelling.  And the senseless deaths of Ukrainian soldiers and Russian soldiers, too – some of them teenage boys and young men barely old enough to drink liquor legally, to marry or sign a legal contract or get a driver’s license.

It is an old, old truth that old men start the wars that young men, and now young women, are sent to die in.  It was true of Vietnam and it was true of Iraq and Afghanistan, and it is true of Ukraine, and it will be true of all the wars in the future. 

It’s important to remember this:  that it is not only the mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers of the war dead who cry at night.  It is the soldiers who do the killing, too, many of whom are yet children.  This is not to excuse them.  It is to state a tragic fact of war…all wars. 

(With thanks to John Douglas Marshall)