Albert Szent-Gyorgyi - The Crazy Ape

APPENDIX

POST SCRIPT

The My Lai massacre came to light as I was about to finish this book. It was very painful to see the good name of my beloved country blackened, the country which for a long time was the flag-bearer of human ideals. We Americans knew or guessed that the sort of thing that happened in My Lai was going on, and we are guilty of even worse mayhem and torture, guilty by association.

What will happen, naturally, is that the main culprits will be court-martialled and receive stiff punishments. The Army will try to polish its tarnished image and will try to show its innocence by shifting the blame to a few individuals, especially to Lieutenant Calley. What frightens me about Calley is not that he allegedly killed, but that, according to witnesses, he is a decent fellow who was a good student and a good soldierhe apparently always did his duty and never revealed any traits of criminality. This frightens me because it shows how terribly brutalizing wars and military life are, how they are capable of turning decent fellows into mass murderers who can shoot women and children down in cold blood. The culprits are those who turned Lt. Calley into a murderer. If I were his judge I would dismiss the case, exonerate Lt. Calley and his fellows, and pass a severe judgment on the society which created the institutions that made murderers out of decent people. After all, the main object of prolonged military training is to teach men to obey orders without questioning. This, it appears, is exactly what Lt. Calley did. He was being a good soldier. There is a Hungarian saying: The fish always starts to smell at its head.

There are other points, too, which disturb me about this case. There were attempts to prove that the massacre could not have taken place because My Lai was wiped out earlier by an air attack. If this could be proven, there would be no problem. What disturbs me is that if this were true, all the women and children would have been killed just the same. Why, then, is the point-blank shooting of civilians on the ground worse than an air attack, which belongs to the routine procedures? Just because the pilot who drops the bombs does not see his victims? Killing the victim by a gun, point-blank, is a more honest and open way of doing it. To see what one is doing and accept the responsibility for it is more honest and manly.

What makes the whole situation so gruesome is that it was we, the United States, who laid down the principle that orders do not excuse misdeeds, and everybody should act according to his own moral standards, being responsible to his own conscience. But if so, where are the limits? My own conscience tells me that it is wrong to go ten thousand miles away from home to kill people in order to keep in power the anti-democratic and corrupt government of a police state. Of course, if I was a young man sent to Vietnam I would kill, but only in self-defense. If I did not have to go there, however, I would not have to defend myself. Thus if I was indeed 20 years old today and was called up, and I followed my conscience, I would certainly tear up my draft card. I would certainly then be sent to jail, maybe for five years of hard labor. The judge who would send me to jail for refusing to kill would be, in principle, the same judge who would condemn Lt. Calley for having obeyed the order to kill.