"War is cruelty. There is no use trying to reform it. The crueler it is, the sooner it will be over."William Tecumseh Sherman famously presented the city of Savannah, Georgia to President Lincoln as a Christmas gift; he had promised to make the war "as severe as possible," and as an index of his intention, he sent the following words to Lt. Gen. William J. Hardee, head of Savannah's protecting army:
"I am prepared to grant liberal terms to the inhabitants and garrison; but should I be forced to resort to assault, or the slower and surer process of starvation, I shall then feel justified in resorting to the harshest measures, and shall make little effort to restrain my army--burning to avenge the national wrong which they attach to Savannah and other large cities which have been so prominent in dragging our country into civil war."
Three days later, rather than surrender to Sherman, Hardee and his lot bridged the Savannah River with rice pontoons and deserted, leaving the city's mayor to make the regrettable decision. On December 21, he surrendered Savannah, sparing its population and property from Sherman's threat.
The doctrine of total war is a gruesome and sickly practical invention. Its proponents claim that war is always and inherently immoral, an organized violence that functions most effectively when free of political or ethical intentions. War is never civilized, they argue, and to believe that babies and mothers do not die, towns are not destroyed, traditions, cultures, and races made extinct, is utter ignorance or, worse, a practiced deceit. Moreover, political war, with its theoretical distinctions between soldiers and civilians and combatants and non-combatants; with its naive adherence to an ethical model that demands fair treatment of prisoners; with its untenable belief in differences between battlefields and schools or hospitals, is more than unrealistic; it is pernicious. Compromised warfare, they continue, persuades us to pursue war lightly. Armed conflicts, after all, are supposed to be civilized campaigns. But any study of the history of war teaches one thing: human beings are cruel; when they pool their cruelties, they make nations; nations make war.
Then there's My Lai, which violates the code even of total war, which has one, and only one, rule: make war's cruelty count for something. Total war recognizes that in battle innocent people die and it exploits that fact, to our revulsion, as a military strategy. But at My Lai US forces murdered five hundred and four villagers--infants, the elderly, men and women, everyone--for no strategic reason. Not to precipitate peace by making war unbearable and, ultimately, unthinkable, as Sherman aimed to do. Not to alienate or intimidate a population. Not to deprive an army of munitions or reserves. The massacre at My Lai was not a useful act. It was a crass, disorderly, repugnant barbarism. It was not just cruelty, which can be redeemed, but purposeless cruelty, which cannot. It was also covered up by senior administrators. When Sherman burned Atlanta to the ground, he boasted, not from pride but in order to make clear the abominable consequences of civil strife. He intended his march to be a terrible warning, not a lurid indulgence in hatred and petty vengeance. We, however, so ashamed, and rightfully so, by our cowardice and evil and appalled by our eagerness to exact upon ordinary human beings indiscriminate wrath, did the only thing a civilized body can do when called to confront what it is capable of doing to others: we lied. We pretended.
Whether total war is a philosophically sound doctrine I don't know. Men and women much smarter than I am will debate that question until marauding hordes settle the matter by putting everyone's head on a spike and impaling our rabbits. But I do know that what a handful of young men did to those villagers in 1968--men no different than I am--simply because no one told them not to, is a crippling judgment on all of us. Plenty of men that day shot children in the head. Plenty more watched and did nothing. Even if you or I couldn't have summoned whatever it takes to cull people as though they were wheat, leading them into a drainage ditch and then liquefying their bodies, chances are good that we, the conscientious, would have stood by, terrified, silent, complicit.
Did we learn anything? Sherman also wrote that fear is the beginning of wisdom. If you instill enough fear in a thinking man, he believed, that man will be wise enough not to destroy himself. As we look forward in the coming year to our withdrawal from Iraq, and to the prospect of interminable war in Afghanistan, and to the nebulous and inexhaustible task of waging war on concepts--"terror," "drugs"--that, by definition, cannot be conquered, let's consider that somewhere, right now, some squad or company or whole division is likely staging its own My Lai. This country, and every country, has done much worse and inevitably will do so again. "War crime" is a tautology. Any deliberate violence toward unknown persons is a crime. And we're all criminals. When you filed your taxes, you paid for the weapons that kill people. Soldiers enact war; officers and politicians design war; civilians fund war. One man fires a rifle and another buys a car. The distinction is arbitrary and meaningless.
By the way, if you want to read the name, age, and sex of every person murdered at My Lai, click on this link: http://countryjoe.com/massacre.htm
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