The Scapegoat's Apology

I don't begrudge William Calley his remorse about My Lai, but I'm hesitant to acknowledge his apology for it.

If you
steal $10 from your mother, you need to apologize. If, as you carry out
orders, you lead a raid on a village that slaughters 500 or more
defenseless people, something of a higher magnitude is required before
you can have your life back.

"There is
not a day that goes by that I do not feel remorse for what happened
that day in My Lai," Calley told members of the Kiwanis Club of
Columbus, Ga., last week. "I feel remorse for the Vietnamese who were
killed, for their families, for the American soldiers involved and
their families. I am very sorry."

It's not
that I don't believe him . . . or that I hold him unforgivable. As a
matter of principle, I refuse to waste time heaping my allotted
teaspoonful of disapprobation on a scapegoat. Calley's "responsibility"
for My Lai, though personally enormous, is a minute fraction of the
symbolic role -- the Bad Apple in an American Uniform -- he was forced to
fill. He was, indeed, just following orders. And the first order of war
is to suspend your humanity.

Just ask
Lynndie England -- another Bad Apple, another Face of Shame -- who was
also recently in the news. She had been scheduled to discuss her
biography as part of a veterans forum at the Library of Congress
several weeks ago, but threats and safety concerns forced the
organizers to cancel her appearance.

England
once almost apologized for Abu Ghraib, or for her miniscule but
high-profile role in that scandal. "Yes, I was in five or six pictures
and I took some pictures," she told an interviewer for Stern, the
German illustrated weekly magazine, "and those pictures were shameful
and degrading to the Iraqis and to our government. And I feel sorry and
wrong about what I did."

The apology
came well into the interview, in response to a pressing question about
her sense of remorse. It was still tangled with her anger that the
photos were made public at all, and was the lamest part of a
fascinating interview. Far more interesting, for instance, were her
memories of the casual horrors of Abu Ghraib and the moral relativism
that was expected of her:

"Of course
it was wrong. I know that now. But when you show the people from the
CIA, the FBI and the MI (military intelligence) the pictures and they
say, 'Hey, this is a great job. Keep it up,' you think it must be
right. They were all there and they didn't say a word. They didn't wear
uniforms, and if they did they had their nametags covered. . . .

"It was
kind of weird at first. But once I started to see the big picture, I
thought, OK, here come these guys, the OGAs (other government
agencies), the MIs or even officers, and they don't even look twice at
it. If they approve, then I'm not going to say anything. Who was I to
argue?"

Poor
Specialist England. She was just trying to be patriotic -- "as a child I
mainly grew up on military gung-ho movies, so that's where I got the
idea" (to join the Reserves) -- but she got caught up, like Lt. Calley,
in the darkness of war, which passeth all understanding. "Who was I to
argue?"

It's always
the same darkness, is it not? At his trial, Calley protested: "I was
ordered to go in there and destroy the enemy. That was my job on that
day. . . . I did not sit down and think in terms of men, women and
children. They were all classified the same, and that was the
classification that we dealt with, just as enemy soldiers."

In both
cases, the odd thing was that the darkness got interrupted and they got
caught in freeze-frame, enthusiastically carrying out their orders, or
perhaps improvising them. But they'd been doing so surrounded by a
context -- the chain of command -- which suddenly vanished when they got
caught.

And here we
come to the excruciating difficulty of any scapegoat's apology. Their
personal regrets, whether sincere or wound through with self-pity,
hardly touch the enormity of the role they've been forced to play. They
can apologize, or try to apologize, for carrying out their orders, but
they can't apologize for the orders themselves, or the special
interests of war that bear ultimate responsibility for their
implementation.

But let us
stop playing with that slight word, "apology," and dig at least for a
word that approaches the magnitude of the matter at hand. What if
Calley had told the Kiwanis of Columbus, Ga., that he intended not to
apologize but to atone for his role in the My Lai massacre? What would that mean?

At the very
least it suggests a commitment to do more than clear one's name or
somehow pay off a debt for old crimes. It suggests a lifelong
commitment to reach for wisdom, and to convey that wisdom to the
present moment. To atone is to cry out -- with the outsize voice that
history has bequeathed the scapegoat -- against the big wrong called war
that is still worshipped today, and with one's words cut into present
policy. We can't change the past but, by God, we can humanize the
future.