An essay in last Sunday’s New York Times marveled at the spate of new Holocaust movies arriving for the Christmas season. Movies fulfilling the pledge to “never forget” have become a genre, wrote film critic A.O. Scott—a feel-good genre emphasizing “hope and overcoming rather than despair and destruction.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Besides reading the files, Nelson and military historian Nicholas Turse tracked down veterans associated with them—perpetrators, enabling commanders, whistle-blowers, and investigators and custodians. A team of officers “operated in secret for five years,” Nelson writes. “During that time, they amassed nine thousand pages of evidence implicating U.S. troops in a wide range of atrocities.” But all that evidence “led to no major actions or public accounting.”
Only one soldier was convicted for his role in the My Lai slaughter, in which as many as 500 Vietnamese villagers were killed by U.S. troops. That was lieutenant William Calley, convicted in 1970 of premeditated murder and sentenced to life in prison. President Nixon immediately intervened, and in the end Calley was behind bars for only four and a half months.
Two years ago, Nelson and Turse wrote two long articles based on the army archives for the Los Angeles Times.
It’s also an issue Americans can pretend to have put behind them. Unlike Germany, left crushed, divided, and occupied after World War II, the U.S. has gone on to other wars. Among the officers assigned to the archives was retired brigadier general John Johns, who late in the Vietnam war did a study of counterinsurgency and after the war was assigned to rewrite the army’s ethics training manual. What that exercise taught him, says Nelson, is that “there isn’t any sort of training that will prevent war crimes. He makes a persuasive case against outside forces like the U.S. ever going into counterinsurgency operations. Whatever your training, war crimes will happen, civilians will turn against you, and you’ll lose.”
