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Thursday, November 5, 1970
University Daily Kansan
KANSAN comment
The Wash Comes Out
The President and the Vice President went into the 1970 off-year election campaigns with all flags flying, determined to purge Congress of its "radical liberals" and install a flock of willing sheep to Administration policy.
Their efforts fell short of the goal, but succeeded well enough to throw a scare in the face of them.
The question now arises—was it worth
it?
Spiro Agnew and, to a lesser extent, Richard尼克斯 engaged in a campaign using some of the lowest tactics of fear and intimidation. The group became almost synonymous with "liberal" in the minds of many voters, a phenomenon carefully designed to send uneasy voters to the polls to vote for the candidates who back the尼克斯 Administration.
Even party lines were not sacred. Republican New York Senator Charles Goodell, too liberal to follow Nixon's lead, said in an interview that he advocated who would "vote for America."
But when the returns were in, the GOP had managed to do no more than increase its strength in the Senate by two seats, plus two third party winners who will almost assuredly align with the Republican Senate vote.
In the U.S. House of Representatives, Agnew and Nixon's best efforts could not forestall the usual off-year loss by the Republicans, who increased their lead by 19 House seats.
And in the statehouses, the Republicans lost their shirts.
Some of the biggest Nixon-and-Agnew pushes failed miserably, including that of George Bush in Texas (which Agnew still called an Administration gain). And Bush once again found out what it was like to run out of gas in California.
But the whirlwind campaign did damage to the Democrats in several crucial races, notably that of defeated Albert Gore of Tennessee, considered to be the next in line for Speaker of the House.
Locally, the Nixon endorsement of the Republican statehouse contender, Kent Frizzell, was almost a wasted effort. We know we have Docking, but we're still not sure whether we have a Republican or a Democrat.
The Republican semi-victory, however, was a hollow one, considering to what lengths Agnew and Nixon went to get it. The political harangue and backbiting that accompanied the polls this year, but one wonders about the possible future effects of such tactics.
Can the President and the Vice President hope that the political divisiveness brought about by their vicious campaign will be resolved for joint effort in Congress? Or will it backfire as a misguided power play resulting in stamach party splits on Congressional action?
Cass Peterson Assistant Editor
Don't think of yourself as a political kidnap victim. Think of
yourself as a strategic holder."
Does 'The System' Work?
Tuesday was the "day of the people." Tuesday was the day their will was heard and democracy reaches hypothetical zenith. Tuesday was a day of hypocrisy.
Being a registered voter, I gave the system a try and went to cast my votes
I had anticipated a feeling of confidence and power upon entering the polling place. Instead, I felt subdued and disheartened.
Before me we mud-splattered farmers who mumbled in broken English about the radicals and the lack of law and justice. It was going to make law and order today, by God.
Behind me were young people who talked about suppression and stagnation and were dressed in clothes reminiscent of frontier days.
Hypocrisy is the false assumption of an appearance of virtue. Tuesday, thousands of Lawresidents voted for men and women who were represented beforehand as the best of the state and county working in their best interests. If the voters had known what the candidates had really done and would do, the returns undoubtedly would have reflected a different "will."
I gave my name to an election matron,
gave my ballots and went into a booth.
I pulled the curtains of red, white and blue around me to conceal my true intentions from others, and wondered how much people did this in a similar way every day.
After painful selection and some abstentions, I was finished.
There had been few people to vote for, but many to vote against. Was this what systemized democracy had evolved to—alternatives to repression and stagnation rather than choices to growth and progress?
I folded my ballots and deposited them in a box the same way Kansans did a century ago. It would require much time for the polls closed to determine the winners.
Candidates included those who had voted against the amendment to end the war against progressive ecological measures and favored less or no rights for students.
I was working within the system, but it was an antiquated system. It was a slow process and definitely inferior to what it could have been.
The magazine cover leaps out from the newstand, obscuring the festive Thanksgiving Time-Newsweek-LookLife-life. The face on the cover is a young woman with brown glasses. The face on the cover smiles out, the eyes blue, the teeth straight and very white, the sandy-colored hair thinning, the nose, though not in profile, obviously stubby, perhaps even pugged. It is a pretty woman with an American from the newstands and mailboxes. Smiling broadly, no, it's a dumplie-producing grin, eyes lit up and sparkling, asking to be liked. It's the girl in black chuck in high school would have called "cute" and it brings to the kind of kid that has a nickname.
Upon leaving the polling place I reflected on what I had done. I had voted for a few people to determine the lives of many.
Staying within the system meant inefficient and inadequate responses.
Detachment from the system was both futtle and irresponsible.
Going outside the system meant censorship and sometimes penalties.
By JEANNE GOLDFARB
Kansan Writer
The solutions must come not from pressure groups and cold political machinery, but from both the human heart and mind—two organs steadily facing atrophy from non-use in our society.
Calley: John Wayne In Vietnam?
Good all-American face. Yet when you see it—among all that magazine artwork clamoring for your attention—it fits you with a force that takes its weight. He's wearing a uniform, a combat infantryman's badge and first lieutenant's rank insignia. He has his arm around two Oriental wafts (that's the only word for "you"). He's wearing his eyes from the magazine cover. Two other little Oriental children are leaning on the soldier's back and their faces peer secretly over his shoulders. It is a charming, sattyting picture—until you realize he's beginning of his name on an Army name tag, half hidden by one of the children. C-A-L, that's all you can read—and it's enough—this is CALLEY, LT. Children. And then you notice the caption "The Confessions of Lt. Calley." (Step right up, folks, inside we know all, we tell all.) And he does have a nickname, it turns out, He's "Rusty" Calley, but no one knows up on that. He's Lt. William L. Calley of Mylai.
Perhaps another society would work.
—Tim Cragg
"That's what the world knows me as," Calley says in the "confession," "My last name is Mylai," and it seems she's ticking on the cover cormings with mansaging tales of Vietnamese bodies strewn in a ditch.
"The pleasant image conveyed by the happy setting on the cover commingles with nauseating thoughts of Vietnamese bodies strewn in a ditch, heaped one upon the other . . ."
heaped one upon the other, slaughtered, mothers and children and old people and of a Vietnamese child who somehow survived the ordeal and holds firmly onto the hand of a corpse.
But, afterall, Calley is an American soldier, not an Eichmann or a Gobbels perpetrating an official government policy of race extinction. Calley wasn't carrying out a step in the 'final solution of the Holocaust,' but rather the 'final solution' of the soldier's early morning dream: Let's get this damn thing over with today and get the hell home.
Or of the little child who tried to nurse at her dead mother's breast.
Calley is a young American fighting man who, sad for him, for us all, thought he was doing what he did. He said he had been very lucky.
No Eichmann, this Calley, Calley is an American, a product of the American way, an American man. He is a New Yorker and an American as Colonel Saucen's chicken, Joe Narnath's wrist, as a Holiday Inn, as Neil Armstrong's wrist.
"I was sent to kill an enemy because his philosophy was wrong," he says. "I re-read it, and I realized it."
Calley was a war baby, born in Miami in the middle of a war in 1943 when people waited in line for sugar, and befriended, while they hated the guts of, and fought with, the enemy. Americans bought war bonds and planted Victory gardens and worried about the second front, a time when 2 fingers in a 'V' meant "victory". It was, as it is today, a time when the patriotism of just about everyone and guilt on the part of the poor young men uncleough to be 4-P in a time when the only heroes wore uniforms were braves who fought and "shipping over" and "the duration."
★★★
Certainly, Calley was the boy next door at one time in his life. The neighbors of his youth remember him as "a wonderful boy," "respectful, reserved, quiet and cooperative," "just an average American boy," "Rusty" (also played would do), "Sandy," and "L. William L. Calley of Myla are probably much the same as those of any other 27-year-old American man—the baseball cards and bubble gum, homework, Friday afternoons and Saturday mornings, the sinking Sunday night feeling that he was not on the big sheet talk of amazing deeds so perfect that they emerge from the tongue as faux accomplis.
The impulse is almost irreasible to portray Calley as "Husty" Calley, the boy next door who is living proof that war is hell and that the American government should use force against the cruelty and inhumanity of prolonged combat.
From Calley's own admission, he came from an emotionally cold family, one that had never been close. But by the time he was in high school, Calley was popular with his buddies and with the girls and
3. The image contains a series of horizontal lines with varying widths and spacing, creating a patterned appearance. To recognize this as a text-only image, one would look for distinct markings or patterns that are not commonly found in standard fonts. However, without additional context or labels, it's challenging to determine the intended meaning of these lines. A more precise interpretation could involve recognizing the visual style used for them, which seems random but may be part of a larger design scheme. If they are part of a document, the font style and layout might suggest an authoritative or formal tone. Alternatively, if they are part of a digital interface, the design could be part of a user interface element.
was able to make people laugh by saying the right thing at the right time. A short 5 foot 4 inches, he was too small for varsity sports but enjoyed sandlot football, skin-diving and water-skiing. Calley spent two years in college at Academy and returned to graduate from Edison High School in Miami. This was where his academic career ended; he flunked out of junior college just a year. By this time, his boyish face belied what I knew him to be. He smoked three to four packages of cigarettes a day, age of 19 was being treated for a stomach ache.
"It was a time when Americans bought war bonds and planted Victory gardens and worried about the second front . . ."
After Calley dropped out of college, he began a string of unrelated jobs—distwasher, bellhop, railroad switchman for the East Coast Railway, strike-bound at the time, and freight-train conductor. He got into trouble in 1964 for letting several cars get loose from a locomotive and smash into a superintendent end. "He was a hard worker. I like it," he recalled, "when questioned recently by a newspaper.
Calley's family life underwent stress at this time. His father's sales business declined and his mother became mortally ill with cancer. The Calleys were forced to sell the family house in Miami and move to their summer cabin in North Carolina. "Rust" was inscribed in Fiorida. It was a difficult period for him.
In 1965, he began to work his way across the country, wandering toward the west. In Albauqueño, New Mexico, in 1968 he enlisted in the Army as a combat engineer and that time, he was recommended for Infantry O.C.S. at Fort Benning, Ga. Upon graduation, he was sent to the Army's second lieutenant and soon shipped out to Vietnam.
Perhaps because of his troubles at home and his restlessness after dropping out, Calley liked the Army. The Army with its traditions and ceremonies and distinct feeling of camaraderie and camaraderie among most people realize, particularly among its officer corps. Despite the constant moves and shifting of jobs, the professional Army, at least the pre-Vietnam escalation Army, is a closely knit, small town environment which exists incongruously in both its culture and contingency plans in the event of global war.
And Calley felt the Army killed him. Being singled up as 'officer material' in heddy stuff for a 23-8 battle, he was shaken.
★★★
Calley liked it in South Vietnam. He liked having a playmate. He liked being the boss. He volunteered for a six-month extension of his Vietnamese tour after his normal one-year tour of duty was up in November 1968 and he had to work from April to September 1969 when he was called to his division headquarters and told that an order was in from the Department of the Army reassuming him to Fort McClellan, Alabama. Below the jibble of numbers and Army insignia, he made instructions: Immediately on arrival in CONUS combat forces of the Inspector General, Washington, D.C.
Calley, God help him, thought at first he was getting "a medal or something." He thought it was
CONUS, for those not militarily oriented, is the Continental United States and the Inspector General. It is the equivalent of an omnipotent entity or impartial or impartial Supreme Being has irreverently been called "the big IN the sky." The IG's office looks into things, big and small, and decides upon the rightness or wrongness.
When the six-foot-four colonel in the Inspector general's office in Washington, D.C., D.C. told him that he could go home, Mr. Clinton said.
"What did I do that was wrong? Killing's wrong. I realized that. But that's what my country asked me to do."
operations on "16 March 2018, in about the village of Mylai" in South Vietnam, Calley thought it was "the sillest thing he had ever heard of." But soon the seriousness of the charge dawned on him. After that, his car turned up to his hotel and the fear and introspection began to put down a year later for publication in Esquire magazine, followed: "What did I do that was wrong. Killing's wrong. I realized that. But that's my country asked me do. I sat there and I couldn't help. And then I went to Mylai, and they didn't bother me. I had accomplished my mission there. I had found and I had closed with the enemy, and I'd no other way to do. And now the people who were accusing me were sent me to Mylai, the people of the United States."
"Why didn't stand on a corner like everyone else and say, 'I won't go. It wasn't wrong,'" he asks himself. "And we were the smartest people in the average American kid caught in a world he didn't make, fighting a war he didn't understand for an America growing restless with that nasty little enemy." He is right to tolerant of its war-minded President, growing sick
of body counts, kill ratios, hearts and minds, pacification, KIA's, SAM's, Hueys, captured documents, turning points, and lights at the ends of tunnels.
But you start to research the Myal story and you find the impulse is no longer irresistible; it’s quite resistable. It’s almost impossible to imagine why you can hold up your head in this first place. The Seymour Hersh article in Harper’s tells it all; the newspapers accounts tell it. But what took Hersh 30 pages to record is told in another way. She writes that whose images burn into the blackness behind your incredulous eyes. A slain woman lives crumpled in some grass. Her mouth holds onto the rim of a straw hat, the kind worn by Vietnamese peasants. Her husband has his hands covered in masks of Chinese theatre. Heaped bodies in a ditch. You wonder how they could have attained such grotesque positions. A body, naked from the waist down, lies with legs spread-eagled, hands covering their faces. They look like small buttocks exposed to the air. Its shoulders look as if they are somehow pressed into the buttocks of the spread-eagled body. But no, that’s impossible, and then it hits you. The baby’s head must be off.
"An atom bomb on Hiroshima isn't a massacre, but people's a massacre, I don't understand," he said.
Calle waits in Fort Benning to be tried by a military court. He seems to have already been tried and found guilty or innocent by most Americans, and as he said, even the President called it a fact. He says that he will be learning things at his court-martial. For one thing, he asks, what is a massacre?
"I'll act as if I'm never secure. As if everyone in Vietnam's going to do me in."
bear people saying here. 'Everyone there is a V.C.:' He says that in O.C.S. he heard over and over: 'Be sharp! Be on your guard!' As soon as you think these people won't kill you—jap 'and' He told himself before he go to Vietnam, 'I'll act as if I am.' And he goes on, 'You're the military's going to do in. As if everyone's bad.'
Undoubtedly, O.C.S. was right and Calley was right in this respect. It's that kind of war. You don't know who the enemy is. Everyone wears black pajamas and it's a touchy situation. Kids of 12 and up can be killed in combat. An American major an adviser to a South Vietnamese unit, gets shot in the back of the head by his Vietnamese counterpart. It's that kind of war. Men come back from it to their wives and kids and jump at the sound of cap pistols going off somewhere in a game of cowboys and Indians.
Sip again into an understanding, compassionate, war is hell" face of mind. The image of the body in battle illustrates the strength and resilience.
But how do you judge a man in war when you haven't been in a war, yourself?
Perhaps, no one can attempt to judge Calley but a bunch of infantry types who have been there and among the ones who've survived the stress of combat and who remember their reactions and their moral struggles. And that's why Calley will be tried at Fort Benning, the home of the Invasion branch. It's only fair, and he deserves at least this.
Indirectly, he deserves more. While his role in the war is yet to be decided by a military tribunal, his role in American history is emerging. Viewed in one form as an example of prowling American revolution for the Vietnam war. Viewed in another, it could represent the American test case of the Nuremberg principle which is included in the instructions on warfare issued to U.S. Army officers in 1952 and the subsequent to orders of the government or a superior officer does not absolve a defendant from responsibility. Every officer, every man must conduct himself on the belief that he has moral duties to those arising from any human relation."
Calley, in an accidental, off-handed way, has brought to the fore the dark, searching questions of the morality of war to a country whose images of violence have been used as technology. Wayne in wide screen and technicolor: obedient letters marching across a page of a war novel, transformed, and brought to you in your local library, with the power to make little television screen in the comfort of your own can of Schiltz and a box of Vert-thin pretzels.
Bad Karma
A laurel wreath and a slightly wilten olive sprig presented to Bob Docking, Vern (the stomoper) and Dr. Roy for their heroes of late in leading the Liberian party to a sweeping statewide victory.
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
An AIt-American college newspaper
Published at the University of Kansas daily during the time that the publication was on the Mail subscription rates at $1 a semester, $10 a year. Second edition in 2004. Subjects include goods, services and employment; advertised offerings of companies in the region; origin. Opinions expressed are not necessarily those of the university of Kansas or the State of Kentucky. Editor Dodd
An All-American college newspaper
Griff & the Unicorn
By Sokoloff
"Copyright 1970, University Daily Kansan"