Oh Calley, Poor Calley

FREE CALLEY reads the bumper sticker (next to another reading "Don't Forget the POW's"). After all, war is war and people get killed, so why pick on one man for doing what happens all the time?

FREE MANON AND CALLEY answers the lapel button. If one murderer should go free, why not both?

"I was only following orders, sir," says the soldier in The Battle Hymn of Lt. Calley, a new pop record. (This might be as big as Harper Valley PTA, says its distributor.) How can a soldier be punished for doing as he was told?

Observations II:

A handful of draft boards across the country have resigned since the Calley conviction, refusing to induct men who might, like Calley, be ordered to kill and later find themselves charged with murder. One board in central Massachusetts has announced that it will still perform most of its clerical duties but will not induct any men.

Immediately after Calley was convicted, several veterans of World War II and Korea turned themselves in to local jails, insisting that they should be locked up. They claimed to have committed war crimes that made them at least as guilty as Lt. Calley.

As Calley walked from the courtroom after being convicted, the crowd outside applauded loudly.

Nixon, meanwhile, sensing a political tunnel wave, announced that he would personally review Calley's case. The prosecutor in the Calley trial then wrote an eloquent rebuke to Nixon, criticizing his incursion into the military murder case appeal procedure. Now Democratic Party politicians are gloating over Nixon's blunder, since he will eventually (before the elections?) have to overrule either the army trial officers or his middle American constituency.

IT IS tempting to view all this with some amusement, to watch the government and the military screwing each other while each seeks to maximize good results and minimize embarrassment. But there has been some serious reflection over this case, and the huge public reaction to Calley's conviction demands notice.

Calley is a simple sort of soldier, from a working-class family and not too bright. Most American families who think the ADA is some sort of weed-killer know someone personally very much like Calley. News reports about "ground fire at Fire-base Six" and antiwar slogans about napalm can seem quite divorced from everyday realities of American life, but Calley is someone to identify with.

In spite of the loud antiwar demonstrations of past years, an appalling ignorance of the nature of the Vietnam war is widespread. Until the Calley trial, many people didn't know what a Free Fire Zone was, didn't know that it is calculated American policy to kill anything that moved. Calley's trial gave the needed personal tie to the war for many Americans to take an interest in what is going on. Why, they ask, is Calley being prosecuted for doing what any good soldier in his position would do?

Of course, their first reaction, as the bumper stickers point out, is to say that war is necessarily brutal, that murder in war is not murder, that women and children are still "the enemy." Calley, then, becomes the victim of an ungrateful government.

But what to do then with Capt. Medina? -who says that the entire country shares the guilt with Calley since "he and I did not dictate policy in Vietnam." The policy is the crime, a point obvious to Medina and Calley, and through them, a point made apparent to the people who sympathize with the soldiers' duty.

If the My Lai case were dropped and if the country were building a national spirit for the war drive, perhaps this point could be forgotten. But there will be more My Lai prosecutions, including one of Col. Henderson for covering up the news of the massacre. And more importantly, publicity is finally arriving for Vietnam veterans who are announcing that American war policy is brutal and criminal. The Winter Soldier Investigations and this week's war crimes tribunals in Washington, D. C., should trigger the same curiosity as news about Calley.

When the war is ended, it will probably not be because of "the right reasons." Political consciousness and a historical perspective divorced from American propaganda are not easily attainable on a large scale. But an immediate end to the war is imperative even if only to salvage what is left of Southeast Asia. Constant emphasis on the criminal and brutal American war policy can only help. There will be no more Calleys only when there are no more Americans in Vietnam.