It has been difficult to watch the coverage of the current events in Iraq over the last couple of weeks and not hear a reference to Vietnam. On the surface the two wars are very different: Vietnam was one of the pitched battles of the Cold War, a long-running war that spanned decades and the administrations of three presidents and that took tens of thousands of lives on both sides, a war fought in the green wet heat of Southeast Asia, a war that the United States lost. The current war in Iraq is taking place amidst the war on terrorism (which may prove to be as amorphous and tentacular as the war on Communism), and has so far been short-lived and relatively less lethal as troops and civilians fight amid the often stifling of the desert. But in both wars (and this has become increasingly true over the last week in Iraq) is that the line between soldier and civilian is often so blurred that it does not exist at all.
It was out of this blurring of who is a soldier - and so who may be attacked, injured, killed - and who was not during the fighting in Vietnam that the My Lai Massacre occurred and that Lieutenant William Calley was court-martialed for his role in the death - the murder by some standards at least - of at least five hundred Vietnamese civilians at the village of My Lai 4. Calley led his platoon (under orders from his superiors) into the village on March 16, 1968. During his court-martial he would argue that those superiors had also ordered him to attack the settlement with the intention of killing everyone in it. When his platoon did enter the village, they found only old men, women and children, all going about the daily business of earning a living, none actively involved in military or quasi-military activities. Nonetheless, Calley and his men began to separate the people into groups to be executed. Within a few hours, 357 civilians in My Lai had been killed. About 150 more in surrounding villages had also been executed....