Atrocities 'R' U.S.?

Michal R. Belknap. The Vietnam War on Trial: The My Lai Massacre and the Court-Martial of Lieutenant Calley. Landmark Law Cases & American Society, ed. Peter Charles Hoffer and N. E. H. Hull. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002. xiv + 298 pp. Chronology, bibliographical essay, and index. $35.00 (cloth); $15.95 (paper).

Headlines and editorials echo today with words and phrases not heard in a generation: quagmire; guerilla war; friendly fire incidents;frustrated and scared soldiers shooting at civilians; questions about the rationale for war given by the president; presidential pronouncements that defeat is not an option; and the foreign press trumpeting possible war crimes charges. By exchanging the humidity of the jungles of Vietnam for the heat of an Iraqi desert, newspapers in 2003 could easily double for those published in 1969. To paraphrase Mark Twain, history may not repeat itself, but it does seem to rhyme a lot. Of course there are differences aside from the length of operations between the two conflicts, most important being the draft army of the 1960s versus the volunteer army of today. But that difference raises a number of significant issues. Most observers see the Vietnam War or the current fighting (as of September 2003) during the occupation of Iraq as aberrations in U.S. military history. In fact, conventional war using both draftees and volunteers as seen in World War I or the American Civil War occurred far less than almost constant unconventional warfare throughout U.S. history.

From the destructive wars against tribes on the east coast of mainland North America in the colonial period, to the massacres of the Native Americans on the Great Plains, U.S. expansion hinged on the eradication or removal of the so-called Indians. Soldiers in the volunteer United States Army constantly faced irregular warfare. With the end of the continental frontier, unconventional war or "Indian fighting" continued in the Philippines, with the key difference being that American servicemen for the first timewere outnumbered by their foes and quiescent noncombatants alike. Phrases like "no prisoners" and "the only good Injun/gook was a dead one" remained thus etched into the American consciousness. As historian John Dower explains, soldiers and marines fighting the Japanese in the Pacific during World War II often imitated these racist thoughts common to the wars against Native Americans or Filipinos. ¹ Combat was again against an "Other"—a non-white group—that used unconventional tactics like booby-trapping dead bodies. The Vietnam War, like the current Iraqi situation, resembled the combat experience of the American soldier historically more often than not. Considering the billions of dollars the United States spends on defense today—equal to that of the next ten nation-states put together—it appears doubtful that in the future any power will confront the U.S. military machine in a conventional-war setting.

In the well-written Vietnam War on Trial, Michal R. Belknap thoroughly examines how a company of American soldiers went berserk during one such unconventional war, the repercussions of the atrocity, and the public fall-out of the court-martial proceedings that followed. Belknap is a professor of law at California Western School of Law and an adjunct history professor at nearby University of California at San Diego. Unlike some lawyers who turn away from their legal practice to become professional historians, the author earned his legal credentials while teaching history at the University of Texas. Belknap has fashioned a dual historian/law professor career out of writing on what he refers to as political trials, particularly post-World War II cases. He has written a number of well-regarded books, including Cold War Political Justice: The Smith Act, the Communist Party, and American Civil Liberties (1977) and Federal Law and Southern Order: Racial Violence and Constitutional Conflict in the Post-Brown South (1994), and he has served as editor and a contributor to American Political Trials (rev. ed., 1995). Belknap defines political trials as court cases that...