Prihelicopter, and the division commander in his heli-copter, all just hovering on the battle. With the commumunications and the helicopters itTs not that theydidnTt know what was going on.Cooper: I personally think itTs totally wrong to1 try anyof those people for that crime. The crime is soa diffuse that we must consider it a collective crime ofae our whole society. We sent them over there, we armed~ them, we equipped them, and we filmed the moviesst;it,T: ;n- h\ergfic, Ppsalis eothat made them want to go out and kill, and we madethem feel they were something. Even in our capacitiesas Officers itTs totally bogus for us to blame a superiorand hold him accountable for everything a subordi-nate does because that man is an individual and theion. Army doesnTt issue leashes of sufficient length andnumber to kepp a hold of everybody whoTs under hisans command.: Blitzer: I would like to take issue with you feel-NATION ON TRIAL |ing that the man, the general in this case, is a freethinking individual. He, in turn, is influenced by theentire military system - something that relates back toits infrastructure and what makes it go as a system;that being the complete subordination of oneTs freewill to the system itself. As you pointed out andI saidit is difficult to place the blame on any one individualbut rather the entire system and the society whichsupports this system. For without this support thesystem could not be maintained and perpetuated.Cooper: _| feel that we all maintain that to blamethe guy one step up for these war crimes is thewrong approach to any sensible solution. Because ifthis is to be the case one could always keep going upand up and up. CalleyTor someone else there pulledthe trigger. The question we have to ask is why diddid he pull the trigger. Not what individual is to blamebut why. ;Berk: Traditionally the whole concept of justicein trials has been to isolate the destructive elements ofsociety so they canTt do their destroying. But if youare trying to indite people of the caliber of WilliamCalley, youTre going to have a whole hell of alot ofpeople in jail because America has turned out mil-lions like him.Freyer: ItTs like the murder committed by the maincharacter in Richard WrightTs Native Son. HeTs a blackman who has such a difficult, primitive life that he cando almost nothing else, and what he does you under-stand so well. Of course he has to be tried and exe-suted for his crime. But you know so intimately thatreally the crime is societyTs crime. ItTs not his crime.ThatTs the tragesly and thatTs CalleyTs tragedyoor the.q ts whole My Lai tragedy, and as Coop says, itTs ourbe- i: crime.p ss Cooper: How much worse is William Calley, howlian = much more solied are his hands personally by pullinged iss _~ the trigger than say the numerous aviators who arelet- {= declared asheroes Thye drop bombs on Hanoi, Hai-mand == Phong, and numerous villages; and then get captured= and now we lament for them in front of our various~om. =: military purchasing houses on post. These people overoon 2 there are treating criminals in the sense of equal sta-ture, probably as evell as we're treating Calley.Vaught: We donTt really know that.Berk: ItTs hard to say, but it would be interest-ing to know how they are treating the so called pri-soners of war.pter,¥ISFord: North Vietnam considers them war cri-minals - not prisoners of war. ThatTs their exception toThe Geneva Convention. They'll treat a prisoner ofwar according to the Geneva Convention. gut they re-serve the right to treat war criminals differenTly,Cooper: _"_ Legally an international court of law wouldprobably hold it as such, because we never have le-gally declared war against North Vietnam. WeTve beenover there in an undeclared conflict dropping bombson people and then trying to gain some legal status~according to the perverted Western rules of war whereyou havé to declare war to go to war. But this countryinsists on fighting numerous wars and never declaringwarVaught: _ItTs interesting equating Calley to the pri-"? of war. I donTt know if ITd thought of that be-ore.Cooper: The publicTs attitude towards Calley isdifferent that it is towards the prisoners of war. Whenthey come back, assuming the war is over sometime, Iexpect they will be given a tickertape parade downsomebodyTs street, probably Atlanta now rather thanNew York; whereas Calley is now in court being triedfor crimes committed in Vietnam.Blitzer: I hate to sound cynical, but thereTs alsothe possibility that society no the Army itself in theform of public opinion may consider that itTs easier tomake Calley a hero than to bring him down becausein the long run theyTll be bringing themselves down.This may even take precedence over his innocence orguilt.Cooper: My fear is that what the government istrying to do is to diffuse the peace effort by raisingthe POW issue when they could bring everyone of themhome tomorrow by getting our troops out of Vietnam.Vaught: No, no. The negotiating teams are just set-ting the date for withdrawal, then the prisoners can bereleased.Cooper: The point is the government has it in itspower to get those prisoners back by taking appropri-ate action.Freyer: Is there any real danger, militarily speaking,in getting out say in a week? Because thatT s often theexcuse that you hear. You canTt get out such a largeforce so quickly. You need two years.Vaught: I donTt think you could get them out in aweek, but a month isnTt totally unrealistic. Whatwould you say, Cooper?Cooper: I think logistically speaking it would take awhile. But the govemmentTs main arguments are bo-gus in terms of taking one or two years to get thetroops out .Berk: But the main issue in terms of safety iswhether North Vietnam is interested in attacking theretreating Americans.Cooper: No, thatTs contrary to their whole theoryof war. If American troops are actively leaving Viet-nam, they wouldnTt attack us. They have nothing togain by attacking our troops because they would besacrificing their own troops to eliminate troops whoare leaving anyway.Berk: The only reaction they could get would beto prolong the whole thing, which I donTt think theywould be interested in doing.Waught I think six months at a leisurely pace andprobably much less if this is their intent.Cooper: As said before, I think these issues arebeing used to defeat the peace effort. TheyTre beingused to make Nixon look goodby making the peoplefor peace look as if theyTre out of sympathy with thePOWTs. Well they arenTt. They just look upon it in thecontext of the entire war. They just see that itTs un-réalistic to ask the North Vietnamese to return ourprisoners until America quits the war. And at the samesame time the administration is trying to say in thetrial with Calley, oNow weTve killed our war criminal.�I have artillary ears.�T ItTs very common. They wereproud that they couldnTt hear. It was part ofthis,ooBe a man concept�.Cooper: Perverted masculinity concept.Freyer: Very similar to the Indians who markedthemselves. YouTre proud of the fact that you dis-figured your own body.for the glory of war orto prove your own manhood.Ford: _ ItTs the whole sickness of war or the waywe operate it. We glorify it to the point wherewe train a man to be proud of his ability to kill.We give him medals for killing people, for gettingwounded; any kind of job you do conneted withcombat""infact, any kink of job you do in themilitary. If you just do a damn good job pushingpapers, you get a commondation medal. But itTsthe whole sickness of the entire system thatcreates this type of mentality in a man that hedesires to strive toward killing other human beingsand feels proud about doing it. Now if itTs a warthat has to be fought where we're being attacked anditTs our national survival, and we're out there justto survive, itTs a job that has to be done.But do we have to be proved of our ability to do it?This is the thing thatTs always disturbed me.Freyer: There should be something next to theinedal that says, oThe winning of this medalmay be hazardous to your health.�Cooper: The unfortunate thing though is thatall this discussion is a logical consequence of anarmy. ItTs impossible for a man to devote 20 yrs.of his life to somethong without taking some pridein it. It seems to me that all the perversions thatcome out of war are logical extensions of armies.The armyTs function is to go to battle, as Johnsaid earlier, if one really feels thatthereTs somethingworth fighting for....., ayFreyer: Is that really their function? Sometimes youtalk to them and they say our goal is peace, which Ipersonally donTt believe.Blitzer: This is one of the great falacies that the publicbeen led to believe. ItTs a matter of society being deceivedor even worse deceiving itself into believing the oftenuoted rationalization that. oour goal is peace.�erefore, there are no more war Criminals, ItTs im-portant to make people aware that these crimes hap-pen everyday in Vietnam. ItTs a matter of policy.Freefire zones are a matter of policy. All one has to do isgo to almost any hospital on the West Coast wheretheyTre working on Vietnamese children who had theirfaces totally demolished. ItTs beensaid that the wholecountry may become a labratory for the affects ofDDT on people over a perios of time because thereTsbeen so muc of it used and so indiscriminately. Thishas to bring us to the realization that war is such a to-tal atrocity. ITve met officers who told me that theywent out on a hill every day and fired artillery atanything that moved, no matter what it was. Atroci-ties, crimes and brutalities are war, and thereTs noway to escape these things unless we got out of thewar. .Berk: They really pound this insanity into thesoldiers that go over there. I was talking to a soldieronly this afternoon, and he said that when he was ovethere it was common while placed on a ~defensive: %perimeter, if you saw something move, you shot eventhough you may have been instructed to hold yourfire until you could determine what you were shoot-ing. This is routine? itTs just the way itTs done. So inrealitythe policythe government sets is probably lessimportant that how it acts.Cooper: _~ This brings to mind aconversation I hadwith a soldier who had all his antagonisms mixed up.He hated Vietnamese because they didpTt.fight. andhe wanted to go back and fight again because his bro-ther had been killed over there, which just demon-strates how far the army can goin confusing theirfighting men.Freyer: We also accept many things that we shouldnot necessarily accept. I was talking about hearingproblems, which I often talk about with patients; andone day I was talking totthe son of a very?high rank-ing commander in the Armed Forces who told me thatsoccalled ~artillery manTs earsT (the loss of hearing forcertain high frequencies often associated with not be-'ing able to hear your watch tick or your car direction-al) is accepted almost as a mark of distinction, whichis almost unbelievable. The logical conclusion is theinfantrymanTs loss of his right leg.Yaught: " We used to have instructors at WestPoint, especially in summer training, who when askeda question would say, oSpeak up, be a man, speak up,What was WestmorelandTs statement about theRussian generals being extremely envious of us?Vaught: _...of the Vietnam war, because ourforces were receiving extensive training in airmobile tactics.Cooper: And he might be right though. SeethatTs the point,thatTs. what ITm talking about.Blitzer: _ItTs unfortunate that this is the levelof his thinking. Ihe imperssion I get is that hisconcept of whatTs happening is not beyond(or he'snot permitting it to go beyond) just the military. IsonTt think he has the wisdom, which I would wantthe person in command of the Joint Chiefs of Staffto have.Cooper: Welt. I think this is perverted because armiesare perverted. If you, believe that wars have to befought sometimes, unfortunately whether itTsgood or bad, then this thinking is totally logical tome; because if | wanted to be a soldier, I thinkthat the best way to become a good soldier is topractice it.Freyer: Maybe the goals of an army could be to.be the smallest army possible ; just as the goalsof automotive companies is to have the least em-ployees making the most cars.Cooper: But it wouldnTt be an army Stu.Freyer: Well it would be whatever it would be...a missile army or whatever. A different idea thatdidnTt involve men dying, the least men involved,and the quickest peace. The general who got thequickest peace would get the prize.Cooper: If you believ you need an army thenthereTs no point in maintaining an army that wonTtwin.Vaught: But he istalking about winning!