Bucha and My Lai
Lucian K. Truscott IV (Truscott Daily)
Almost all of them were 18 years old, inducted the moment
they had become eligible for the draft, and had never been away from home, or
even their hometowns, in their lives. I spent six weeks in the summer of
1967 as a “third lieutenant” doing what West Point called Army Orientation
Training, whereby cadets were given regular jobs in the army as leadership
training. I was assigned to be an executive officer of an armor advanced
individual training company at Fort Knox, and it was my job at least one night
a week to serve as Duty Officer for the battalion. It was when I was
making my nighttime rounds through the barracks that I heard the trainees in
their bunks sobbing openly for their mothers.
It wasn’t ordinary homesickness that these boys were suffering
from. The company was nearly at the end of its 12-week training program,
so they had already received their orders for the duty stations they would be
assigned to after graduating. More than two-thirds of them already had
orders to Vietnam. There were only a very few sergeants assigned to the
training brigade because so many non-commissioned officers (NCOs for short)
were serving in Vietnam. But the sergeants assigned to train the company
to drive tanks and shoot them were brutal in the tales they told about what the
young soldiers would face when they were in combat overseas – punji stakes
tipped with human excrement, so-called bouncing-betty grenades placed as booby
traps that sprang out of the ground and sprayed the poor soldier who stepped on
one with deadly shrapnel, ambushes that lit up the night with tracer rounds and
explosions, guys the sergeants knew who had lost their arms or legs or even
both…
There was a good reason what I heard in the barracks at
night was so pitiful. The boys weren’t just crying because they missed
their mothers and fathers; they were frightened of what awaited them in
Vietnam, and they had good reason to be. At least some of them would die
over there, 9,000 miles from home in a country many of them were just now hearing
about for the first time.
Seeing the images from Bucha of Ukrainian women and men
lying dead in the streets brought back the memory of when I covered the trial
of Lt. “Rusty” Calley, the second lieutenant who commanded the platoon that
shot more than 300 civilians to death point blank in My Lai, Vietnam in March
of 1968. Many of the dead in My Lai were left at the bottom of a ditch,
like some of the dead in Bucha.
Calley testified that he was ordered to kill everyone in
the village because “they were all VC,” or Viet Cong. Calley, in turn,
gave the same order to his soldiers, most of whom had been drafted in 1967, the
same year I was training that company in Fort Knox. Most were teenagers,
like my trainees. When they had testified earlier in the trial, some of
the members of the platoon who pulled the triggers on the guns that killed the
people in the village of My Lai said they believed Lt. Calley when he told them
“they are all VC.”
It sounds incredible, doesn’t it? That senior
officers in the American army could have ordered such a massacre, and that the
order could have been passed along by a second lieutenant to his enlisted men,
that they all believed what they had been told, that the village was full of
the enemy, and the “enemy” turned out to include old women and children.
It’s even more incredible when you think that some
Russian superior officer or non-commissioned officer probably ordered a unit of
Russian soldiers to shoot the people of Bucha, and gave them a reason, too –
that they were all Nazis, or something else that seems far-fetched to us, but
could have sounded perfectly logical to them.
And it’s incredible to think about the Russian soldiers
who did it. We don’t know yet if they were conscripts – read:
draftees – or Russians who volunteered to serve in the army as
professionals. It’s incredible to think that like the American soldiers
who committed the massacre of My Lai, they were human beings who were capable
of such monstrous acts.
Why? Why were these young American and Russian men
capable of such evil? Perhaps the Russians were like the men in Calley’s
platoon, who had been drafted under Project 100,000. Maybe that’s why
they believed such patent bullshit, that the village was full of the enemy.
Perhaps the Russian commander, the man who gave the order in Bucha,
was like Calley himself, who was also drafted under Project 100,000.
Calley qualified for Officer Candidate School, we learned, because he was one
of the few soldiers in his training company who had a high school diploma, and
his scores on the qualification exam had been higher than those of his fellow
trainees.
We cannot excuse either Calley or his soldiers, and
certainly we cannot excuse the Russian soldiers who killed the people of Bucha
by shooting them at point blank range the way Calley’s soldiers shot the people
of My Lai. Calley deserved to be tried and convicted of his crimes in My
Lai, and he would have served time in Leavenworth for what he did, had not
Nixon effectively commuted his sentence. His superiors deserved to have
been tried and convicted for ordering the massacre. The Russian
commanders who ordered the killings in Bucha deserve the same thing, and so do
the soldiers who did the killing. But the soldiers who did the killing in
My Lai were never charged, never came to trial, never served a day in
prison. And neither will the Russians who committed the crimes in Bucha,
because trust me, the International Criminal Court in The Hague will never
bring any of them to trial.
But consider this: the images you’ve seen of a
street in Bucha lined with blown-up Russian tanks and APCs are evidence that at
least some justice has already been meted out by the Ukrainian army.
Every destroyed Russian tank you’ve seen contained three Russian soldiers who
are now dead: a driver, a gunner, and a tank commander. The
slant-nose APCs destroyed in Bucha most likely contained a squad of infantry
and a driver and vehicle commander – from eight to ten Russian soldiers.
Those armored vehicles have proven to be death traps. Thousands have died
terrible deaths as they were transformed into fiery coffins by Ukrainian
missiles and artillery.
Putin and his generals are not only destroying the
country of Ukraine and killing its soldiers and many of its civilian
citizens. They have sent what must now be tens of thousands of young
Russian men to their deaths. And for what? For a lie, that they are
ridding Ukraine of Nazis who do not exist and freeing the Ukrainian people from
a dictatorship that exists only in Putin’s imagination.
Terrible, terrible things happen in wars: massacres
like My Lai and Bucha; total destruction of cities like Mariupol and some of
the suburbs of Kyiv and Kharkiv; the random murder of civilians by artillery
and rocket shelling. And the senseless deaths of Ukrainian soldiers and
Russian soldiers, too – some of them teenage boys and young men barely old
enough to drink liquor legally, to marry or sign a legal contract or get a
driver’s license.
It is an old, old truth that old men start the wars that
young men, and now young women, are sent to die in. It was true of
Vietnam and it was true of Iraq and Afghanistan, and it is true of Ukraine, and
it will be true of all the wars in the future.
It’s important to remember this: that it is not
only the mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers of the war dead who cry
at night. It is the soldiers who do the killing, too, many of whom are
yet children. This is not to excuse them. It is to state a tragic
fact of war…all wars.
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