Generally Speaking (22 page)

Human intelligence gleaned from the CIA's Phoenix Program, which relied on the dubious information of Vietcong prisoners and deserters, indicated all the village's innocent noncombatant older men, women, and children would have “gone to market” by the time the Charlie Company troops swept into My Lai hamlet at 0730. Significantly, the later Army investigation revealed Military Intelligence officers in the 11th Brigade and Americal Division discounted this information, but for whatever reason—inertia, disinterest, overwork—did not protest the false Phoenix Program intelligence assumptions on which Task Force Barker's search-and-destroy operations plan was based.

So Captain Medina and one of his platoon leaders, First Lieutenant William Calley, told their soldiers that the village of My Lai was a “VC stronghold,” Medina noting that they should expect “a hell of a good fight,” and that they had orders from superior authority to completely destroy the hamlet, including houses, livestock, and any enemy who resisted. Since the soldiers had already been briefed that innocent civilians would have left the village before the Americans arrived, most of the troops believed they would face only the 48th Local Force Battalion and its civilian auxiliaries in the warren of thatched huts and tangled banana and litchi groves.

When Lieutenant Calley's 1st Platoon entered My Lai, they came firing their M-16 rifles on full automatic and pounded bursts of M-60 machine gun fire through the thin walls of the houses. Soldiers threw grenades into the villagers' shallow bomb shelter bunkers. As civilians ran down the muddy lanes, clutching children, ducks, and pigs, they were cut down in their tracks. A number of those who did surrender were herded out of the village to an irrigation ditch, where Calley gave the order for them to be machine-gunned. After about four hours of chaotic murder, almost 500 Vietnamese civilians were dead, all old men, women, and children.

Calley radioed Captain Medina that he had encountered the enemy in a sharp firefight and accounted for approximately 125 “enemy Killed in Action,” a very respectable body count.

But before Calley's unit could move on to the next hamlet, Warrant Officer Hugh C. Thompson, Jr., flying a Light Observation helicopter near My Lai, was shocked to see Americans slaughtering civilians. Thompson landed his aircraft and argued with the American troops, eventually hovering to land again and place the helicopter between the cowering Vietnamese and the U.S. troops and ordering his door gunner and crew chief to threaten the Americans with weapons if they continued to menace the civilians. Thompson managed to shepherd the handful of survivors to safety and even retrieved a wounded child from a heap of dead bodies near an irrigation ditch. Effectively, he and his crew's action brought an end to the worst American atrocity of the Vietnam War.

Thirty years later, in 1998, Hugh Thompson and his surviving door gunner, Lawrence Colburn, were awarded the prestigious Soldiers Medal by Major General Michael W. Ackerman (later a lieutenant general and the Inspector General of the Army), himself a former Americal Division combat helicopter pilot, in a ceremony at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington. General Ackerman cited Thompson's and Colburn's loyalty to the Army's values of courage and sacrifice as having set “the standard” on a day that was “one of the most shameful chapters in the Army's history.”

For almost a year after the My Lai massacre, the leadership of the Americal Division tried to cover up the massacre. And it was only when a soldier with firsthand knowledge of the horrible event returned to the States and contacted the news media did the cover-up unravel. Then the Army acted quickly, naming Lieutenant General William R. Peers to lead an investigation commission. The Peers Commission broke open the rotten core of the cover-up. A large criminal investigation ensued, but the only officer ever convicted was Lieutenant William Calley, who served about three years' house arrest of a life sentence for murder before President Richard Nixon pardoned him.

I had read about My Lai and of Hugh Thompson's heroism before coming to CGSC. To me Lieutenant General William Peers, who led the investigation commission, was also a heroic figure. It would have been easy for him to quash the inquiry and effectively spare the Army the protracted anguish of the long court-martial's media circus. But Peers was a decorated combat veteran of three wars who felt a deep sense of loyalty to the Army as a vital, ethical American institution. He knew that the massacre at My Lai had been an aberration so far beyond the scale of smaller illegalities that the act had to be excised from the flesh of the Army like a cancer or it might devour the service from within. Peers was an officer who placed loyalty to the Army and faith in its future beyond Vietnam above all else.

Civilians sometimes misunderstand the Army's culture of hierarchy, discipline, and authority. Perhaps the cause can be found in clumsy Hollywood depictions of Army life in which the arrogant senior officer swaggers to the conclusion of a monologue delivered to silent subordinates with the words, “And that's an order.”

This is just not how command works in the Army. There is a great deal of give-and-take as the course of action is mapped out. Key officers and NCOs with a stake in the outcome play a role as a decision develops. Typically, we identify the problem, gather information bearing on it, develop several possible courses of action with discussions of pros and cons on each alternative, recommend the optimum course to the decision-maker, and await the decision. This is what we call the deliberate decision-making process, which can take weeks to reach conclusion in some cases. The “hasty process” accommodates the need for a quick decision, but also supports the culture in which expert opinion or group input plays an important role. In thirty-two years in uniform, I have never spoken the words, “And that's an order.” Nor have I heard them. Except in the movies.

There is simply no need for gratuitous, dramatic emphasis when a senior officer issues an order. We all know and accept the authority of the person in command. In fact, the related principle of unity of command is one of the Army's fundamental concepts. The person of the commander is the central clearinghouse for all information relevant to an operation. It would be disastrous in combat or any other stressful circumstances to have several commanders vying for authority in an operation.

Although my colorful commander in Korea, Colonel Charles Black, often resorted to bluster and flourishes worthy of a Hollywood film director, he never felt it necessary to emphasize his orders. He could have whispered, and we would have felt the hurricane. Still, as I've noted, Colonel Black had a solid motive: He wanted to make things so stressful for us under tense peacetime conditions that we would be ready for war.

Another widely accepted, and equally inaccurate, myth about the Army is that soldiers are inculcated to “just follow orders.” In fact, the opposite is the case. We teach soldiers from their earliest days in the Army (as recruits in Basic Training) that there is a clear distinction between lawful and unlawful orders. A soldier has an obligation to obey lawful orders and
not
to obey unlawful orders. Among the many differences between an Army and an armed gang, this is one of the most significant. Soldiers are personally accountable for their actions and cannot use the defense, if accused of impropriety, that they were only following orders. The international tribunal that convicted Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg after World War II helped make this concept a widely accepted international value. Unfortunately, as we have seen tragically unfold in the Balkans, the Caucasus, across Africa, and in Indonesia in the past decade, this value has not been universally applied. We have witnessed the spectacle of national armies degenerate into murderous gangs that savaged the civilian population they were officially sworn to protect. In these cases the senior officers responsible issued unlawful orders, which their soldiers chose to follow. We in the democratic West can feel fortunate that our armies are firmly rooted in order and discipline.

Part of that foundation of discipline involves a hierarchy of authority, what is often referred to as a chain of command that extends from the most junior private to the President of the United States. It is enormously important to Army culture that we respect the position of the senior person we salute, that we defend the Constitution and the nation, not a particular individual. I salute an officer senior to me (when we are out-of-doors), not as a statement of personal respect, but as a recognition of my oath to “obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me.”

The more powerful an army, the more necessary it is to instill this obedience to civil authority. Not since the tragedy of the Civil War almost 150 years ago has the American military defied the rightful authority of the President. General of the Army Douglas MacArthur assumed that his well-earned status as a military leader of heroic proportions would permit him to question the orders of his commander-in-chief, President Harry S. Truman, during the Korean War. MacArthur was wrong. Truman fired him.

In a formal bilateral discussion with the senior military officer of another country, I was startled to hear him sounding me out about American reaction if his military were to overthrow the weak current civilian head of state. I gave him my very complete and unrelenting view that the United States was adamantly opposed to internal military takeovers against a civilian government, regardless of the sentiments in their military about the civilian leadership. When I finished my year at the Command and General Staff College, I happened to be chatting with an Allied Officer from a developing country about our next assignments. I was on my way to a staff job in Germany. I asked about his assignment. “I'm going to overthrow my government and become President.” I waited for the punch line. There was none.

Thinking back on the time that I weighed my own small decision after discovering the plagiarizing, I consider the most important leadership attributes I look for in my peers and seniors. Integrity and honesty are at the top of the list. The military is not like the private sector, where office politics too often becomes an ongoing intramural tournament in which deception and cheating may be considered acceptable. We in the military simply have to trust each other to tell the truth. For example, when an Infantry captain acknowledges an order to move his company to a ridge to protect the exposed flank of a battalion's advance, the battalion commander has to take the captain at his word that he has completed the movement. We are not in the habit of checking up on each other in the Army because we are taught as career soldiers to act honorably. Our bonds of trust are mutual.

But if this ideal situation prevails in the Army of the twenty-first century, the moral and ethical hangover of Vietnam was still a lingering problem in late 1970s. I had to decide where my loyalties lay, to the ethical compromises that had fostered the My Lai cover-up or to a future Army that had regained its moral and ethical grounding under leaders such as William Peers and Max Thurman. To me, it would be impossible to respect senior leaders whom I could not trust: By definition, a leader was a person of character who earned the loyalty and respect of all.

Certainly we've all worked for people who dominated their subordinates through rigid means of control, often playing one group off the other by unprofessional means and cultivating favorites. But such leaders never earn respect or loyalty because we can't trust them. They cheat and lie out of expedience. At their core is an ethical vacuum. When we see them employ these tactics on someone else, it's obvious that we might be the next to suffer. We obey their orders out of necessity, but they will never inspire us to excel.

I was uneasy until I made the decision to report the officer who had plagiarized the research paper. But once I had taken that step, my mind was free of doubt.

The faculty thanked me for bringing the issue to their attention and said they would look into it. I was relieved that they handled the delicate situation in a low-key manner and did not overreact. They confronted the officer with the evidence of his plagiarism, but did not bring formal charges against him for this obvious breach of the honor code. Instead they made him rewrite the paper.

As I wrestled with the dilemma of reporting the cheating officer, I again recognized that overlooking an ethical lapse was tantamount to participating in the event. It had not been my intention to personally judge this officer for unethical conduct, but rather to act out of a sense of loyalty to the Army as an institution. I was attending a professional Army school that formed future leaders. That school had repeatedly told us that it had an honor code meant to foster standards of self-discipline and ethical behavior among those leaders. My decision to report the incident had been an act of loyalty to those standards. Having recognized this duty, I had nothing to regret.

Soon after taking command of the 3rd Operations Battalion at Field Station Augsburg in 1986, I learned important lessons about the complex bonds of loyalty that tie a leader to her soldiers, those soldiers to one another, and the transcendent higher bond that unites them in their loyalty to the values of the Army. Since then, I've come to realize that the insights I gained during a trying episode at that time are also readily applicable to leaders outside the military.

The situation involved my responsibility as a commander to administer military justice, which includes both forwarding cases for trial by court-martial and sitting in judgment in nonjudicial punishment cases under Article 15 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice. In Augsburg, I had far fewer occasions to administer nonjudicial punishment than I had as a company commander at Fort McClellan in 1973–75. This was because the Army had made remarkable progress in improving the quality of its soldiers in the intervening years, because a battalion commander is a step removed from the soldiers in the chain of command and normally leaves Article 15 proceedings to the company commanders, and also because Military Intelligence soldiers go through a far more selective screening than troops who are not subject to the security clearance process.