Flows Downhill

Fifty-five years ago today, 31 July 69, Cadet Dufton, along with nearly 1,000 others became an “Officer and a Gentleman”. My most vivid memory of the ceremony in a sweltering hot Quonset Hut / Gymnasium at Indiantown Gap Military Reservation was that our distinguished speaker, General William Westmoreland, former commander of all forces in Vietnam, did not sweat a drop. “Perhaps rigid control of one’s body temperature is how you get to be a four star General,” I thought.

Our Army officer training included many aphorisms not exactly mentioned in any official manual — “Never volunteer”, “Sleep whenever possible”, “Shit flows downhill”. The last of these was particularly applicable to fledgling Second Lieutenants. Your superiors will pass blame down the command chain until it stops at the most junior officer.

The classic example of this returned to the news yesterday with the news that LT William Calley passed away at age 80. Calley was the scapegoat for the 1968 My Lai Massacre. He was the only soldier court-martialed even though the Major and Captain to whom he reported assured him that any civilians encountered in My Lai were Viet Cong. CPT Medina ordered Calley to “Destroy anything that is walking, crawling, or growling. Get rid of them.” Calley’s platoon did just that. As many as 374 Vietnamese villagers, mostly women and children, were killed that day. The cover-up extended all the way to headquarters in Saigon. General Westmoreland stated that the My Lai Campaign “dealt a heavy blow to the Viet Cong.”

One of the helicopter crewman who picked up Calley’s platoon that day photographed the carnage. It took three years and brilliant work by a New York Times reporter for the truth to come out. Now that the public was aware of it, the “shit flowed downhill” bypassing the senior officers who covered up the massacre when it happened and even past the Major and Captain who issued those bloodthirsty orders. The blame stopped at poor Lieutenant Calley who was arrested a week before he was due to be discharged from the Army.

Calley was court-martialed and sentenced to life at hard labor. The Army’s public image was crap in 1971 and poor Calley slaving away on a rock pile would look good. Of course, once the furor died down, Calley’s sentence was reduced to twenty years, then to ten years, and finally to house arrest until he was freed after three years of house arrest. Calley never was imprisoned and never worked on a chain gang.

Still, shit flows downhill.

By Ed Dufton