Their mission was by now a familiar one: To enter a village reported to be harboring Viet Cong soldiers and take them by surprise. But, as so often was the case in that tragic and misbegotten war, the enemy proved elusive. Only old men, women and children were on hand to greet the troops when they arrived. On the instructions of their commander, the young American soldiers rustled the unarmed Vietnamese civilians out of their huts, gathered them into a clearing in the center of their hamlet, and murdered them.
The date: March 16, 1968. The place: MyLai in the Quang Ngai province of South Vietnam-most notably the hamlet history remembers as MyLai 4, where Charlie Company commander, Lieutenant William L. Calley, Jr., ordered the slaughter of hundreds of old men, women and children, unarmed civilians gunned down by machine guns and rifles or blown to pieces by grenades.
None of the five hundred American servicemen involved at MyLai-including the fifty direct participants in the killings and some 200 witnesses-reported this incident, though it blatantly constituted a violation of the Geneva Convention and Law of Land Warfare from the U. S. Army Field Manual. Both state that orders to harm non-combatants are illegal and not to be obeyed. A soldier who overheard talk of the massacre in a bar blew the whistle, and this a year later, after his stint in the military was up. The Army finally charged six soldiers with war crimes. Only one, Lieutenant Calley himself, was convicted. He served three years time.
More than thirty years later, today once again the ghosts of Vietnam return to haunt us. One of our most distinguished public servants, U. S. Senator and now President of the New School, Bob Kerrey, is at the center of a public firestorm over his part in the killing of at least 13 unarmed women and children in a midnight raid in Thanh Phong, a tiny hamlet in the Mekong Delta. As should surprise no one-given the remove of half a lifetime-memories differ as to what exactly happened on the night of February 25, 1969. One member of then Lieutenant Kerrey's squad and several Vietnamese eyewitnesses recall a scene reminiscent of MyLai; Senator Kerrey himself and others under his command picture themselves returning fire in the darkness, with the women and children innocent but not intended casualties.
Some Americans, including Jonathan Schell, have called for an investigation. Others have raised questions of a double standard in the media and among the public, contrasting, for instance, the unforgiving attitude toward the four New York City policemen who killed Amadou Diallo, with the relative eagerness to forgive Mr. Kerrey. And indeed, most commentators, including Senator Kerrey's colleagues, have been sympathetic, reminding Americans of Kerrey's own loss of a leg in Vietnam and the inevitable ambiguities of wartime morality, played out as it is in the heat of combat with one's own survival balanced in the scales of rectitude.
I have met Bob Kerrey a few times and admire him. One of the most thoughtful and independent-minded Senators of his generation, he has been unusually courageous in promoting unpopular convictions, especially in warning our citizens of the future consequences of maintaining the status quo of our entitlement programs. But I have also sensed that he carries deep within himself what a mutual friend and admirer described to me the other evening as a certain sadness and also a tentativeness with respect to his ambitions. For instance, he rarely boasted of his Bronze Star, not even mentioning it in his autobiography. Now we know why. As Kerrey himself told the New York Times, "I don't feel like I did anything heroic that evening. Quite the contrary."
In fact, Kerrey too was a casualty of his crime. "I cannot be what I once was. Carefree, no nightmares, no pain, no remorse, no regrets, feeling in church like God was smiling warmly down upon me as if I was the most special thing on earth. That's what it was before, and that's not the way it is now." No punishment that we might inflict today on Bob Kerrey-including the punishment of media exposure-could compare to the thirty years of time already spent under the sentence of his own conscience. Yet in one sense Jonathan Schell is right. We should open an investigation, not of Senator Kerrey's actions, but of our own history and hearts.
The first question we should ask ourselves is not "Why do bad things happen to good people" but "Why do good people do bad things?"
In his searching study of evil, People of the Lie, M. Scott Peck (who also wrote The Road Less Traveled) offers his observations about the evil manifest at MyLai. For those of us haunted once again in the person of Senator Kerrey by the ghost of Vietnam, Peck's framing of MyLai is illuminating. First, he points out that human groups behave much like individuals, but in a more primitive and immature way. Specialized groups in particular are prone to what might in an individual be called narcissistic behavior. A narcissist thinks only of himself. The evil consequences of such narcissism are compounded in groups such as Charlie Company, or indeed Kerrey's Raiders, which existed for one specialized purpose only: to search for and destroy Viet Cong. Peck (who served as a military psychiatrist and chaired the panel that studied MyLai) also notes that the life of a soldier is one of chronic stress, and that stress often leads to moral regression. One result of this is what might be called "psychic numbing," or emotional self-anesthesia. In one way, this is conducive to survival; in another, it cloaks one's consciousness of evil.
Beyond this, when threatened, like wounded animals human beings too can become particularly vicious or dangerous. In Vietnam-given that the entire enterprise was wounded and threatened-additional pressure came from Headquarters and Washington to avoid the continuing and embarrassing defeat of America's vaunted military might. Any investigation of the evil perpetrated in Vietnam must therefore begin not with Lieutenant Bob Kerrey (or even his callous company commander), but with President Lyndon Johnson and Defense Secretary Robert MacNamara. Evil is always supported by lies, and from the very beginning, with the Gulf of Tonkin incident a deliberate fraud to influence public opinion, the responsibility for consequent evil in the hamlets and rice paddies rests first in the White House and the Pentagon.
Rarely can evil in wartime be isolated cleanly or addressed symptomatically. As Peck writes, the brand of killing at MyLai (or Thanh Phong) was only "a misstep in the ritualistic dance of death we call war, . . . a form of large-scale killing that we humans consider an acceptable instrument of national policy." Most banefully when the cause itself is narcissistic, in the heat of battle specific instances of evil emerge predictably from the hidden, generic evil that in certain ways is more pernicious, cloaked as it often is in the rhetoric of patriotism. This was certainly true of our nation's experience in Vietnam. As Aldous Huxley writes in The Devils of Loudon, "Those who crusade not for God in themselves, but against the devil in others, never succeed in making the world better, but leave it either as it was, or sometimes even perceptibly worse than it was, before the crusade began. By thinking primarily of evil we tend, however excellent our intentions, to create occasions for evil to manifest itself."
When Jesus said that we should judge not, lest we be judged, he was not calling for a suspension of judgment, but a prioritization of judgment, lest in recognizing the evil manifest by another's deeds we overlook the only evil we can surely do something about, namely our own. With that chastening reminder, let me therefore bring this sermon home: first, with respect to the Timothy McVeigh execution scheduled for later this week; second, regarding the President's revival of a Star Wars missile defense initiative; and, finally, all the way back home to the porch of personal memory.
There are three degrees of evil. Call them Evil in the First Degree, Evil in the Second Degree, and Loveslaughter, or accidental evil, especially the kind that we sometimes sponsor without even noticing. In the worst case scenario, Bob Kerrey was guilty of Evil in the Second Degree, a crime of committed in the heat of the moment. For this, he has from the outset been deeply, if not publicly, repentant. Timothy McVeigh is clearly a First-Degree Evildoer: his murder of 171 civilians was premeditated and for it he appears completely unrepentant. McVeigh deserves to die and will, with the blood of his crime staining his entire book of life.
The question remains, should his blood be on our hands? "Those who campaign not for God in themselves, but against the devil in others" unwittingly risk inheriting history's greatest curse, which might be cast in this simple warning: "Choose your enemies carefully, for you will become like them." Just look at what our fear of Communism led to in Vietnam. We imitated our enemies and became like them. Drawing a like comparison, McVeigh himself reports his own execution by serving as the devil's sportscaster: "Freedom 171, The United States of America 1."
In his fine new book, In Our Own Best Interest: How Human Rights Protects us All, Past UUA President and now President of Amnesty International USA, Bill Schulz addresses the irony of capital punishment. After pointing out that dozens of people on death row (including some who were actually executed) have subsequently been proven innocent, Schulz asks this larger question. "If government action . . .provides a model for citizens to follow, what model does the death penalty provide? When the government executes capital offenders, it is sending two contradictory messages to 280 million people. It is sending the message that it presumably wants to send-that is, if you commit a crime of like order, this is what will happen to you-but it is also sending the message that violence is the province of the powerful; that violence signifies victory, success, triumph, retribution, and toughness."
The Bible may demand an eye for an eye, but do we rape rapists? Do we applaud when Muslim's follow the Koran and cut off a robber's hand? I could no more easily defend Lieutenant Kerrey's murder of women and children by noting that many American servicemen lost their lives to armed women and children in Vietnam than I can rationalize the institution of the Death Penalty as a punishment for murder in this country.
President Bush's Strategic Defense Initiative is even more seductive a putative deterrent than is capital punishment. Disguised as a prophylactic, it is actually a peace-seeking missile aimed at the very heart of an already precarious international nuclear balance. The first casualty of this so-called shield will be all the arms reduction and anti-proliferation agreements painstakingly hammered out over the past four decades. SDI is not a shield; it is a double-edged sword.
Forget for a moment about the 100 billion-dollar cost and the inevitable cuts in social programs that this hemorrhage of money will induce. And forget about the unfounded confidence in Washington that SDI will actually work. Think only about the danger it poses to world peace and the specter it resurrects of nuclear Armageddon. Among the ghosts of Vietnam and the Cold War, this is by far the most haunting. And yet its evil is almost completely veiled by the group narcissism of its respectable and powerful defenders.
Viewed in the context of original sin, ponder Scott Peck's broader observation on the problem of evil: "The problem is not a defect of conscience but the effort to deny the conscience its due. We become evil by attempting to hide from ourselves. The wickedness of the evil is not committed directly, but indirectly as a part of this cover-up process. Evil originates not in the absence of guilt but in the effort to escape it." In this spirit, with respect to the evil veiled by the rhetoric supporting both capital punishment and the Strategic Defense Initiative, I invite you to join us in trying to lift these veils by enlisting either in our Task Force to End the Death Penalty or in our Nuclear Disarmament Task Force. Just drop me a note and I will get you in touch with those who are leading these small but significant efforts to weigh into the moral balance of our own time.
Finally, even if you are already doing everything you can to fight the inertia of state sponsored evil, I invite you to look a little more deeply into your own heart and mind. Begin with memory. We all doctor our memories, often to escape the full brunt of their indictment. Kerrey himself said to the Times reporter when first confronted with evidence of the events surrounding Thanh Phong, "Part of living with the memory, some of those memories, is to forget them." Later, in an E-mail, he wrote, "My memory of this event is clouded by the fog of the evening, age and desire."
That is a remarkably honest and telling statement. How many of our own memories are clouded by the fog of some evening long ago and by age and by desire. Peck warns us to beware the beguilements of forgetting. We cannot do so purely or entirely. Psychic-numbing and partial amnesia are at work every day of our lives. To a degree they help us survive. But they also mute our conscience and therefore foster evil. Since to combat evil we first must expose it, the best thing that each one of us could possibly do-and do this very afternoon-is to dredge through the swamp of buried memory and make vivid once again something for which we are deeply and rightfully ashamed. To cultivate the saving grace of humility and thereby free our judgments from hypocrisy, we must reopen our own conscience for business. And then ask ourselves this. How far have I come from that midnight residence? How far have I traveled toward the light? Here Bob Kerrey's own humility and subsequent service might even serve as a model.
As All Souls Church School member, Eva Leven, said last Sunday in her Credo in our Coming of Age Service, our lives don't come equipped with erasers. But we can resharpen their points. By not hiding from ourselves, memory of the evil we have sponsored and the owning of our guilt can enhance both our capacity for forgiveness and our prospects for moral renewal.
We may not be guilty of First or even of Second Degree Evil, but all of us are guilty of Loveslaughter. I know that I am. Blessedly, though we cannot rewrite the past, we can learn from it, both our nation's past and our own.
At the Roosevelt Four Freedom Ceremonies in Hyde Park on Friday, as we honored our WW II veterans in a profoundly moving ceremony, I was reminded once again of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.'s definition of history. History is to a nation what memory is to a person. When presenting the Freedom from Fear medals, Tom Brokaw pointed out that upon his return one of the recipients, Lee Archer (a Black Fighter pilot from the famed Tuskegee Airmen with 169 combat missions), was not welcome in a US military officer's club because of his race.
I presented the Freedom of Faith medal to Johnnie Mae Carr, a stalwart freedom fighter who stood with Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rosa Parks in Montgomery, Alabama. As a leader in the struggle for Civil Rights there for fifty of her ninety years, among her many other accomplishments Johnnie Carr integrated the Montgomery School system. In accepting her medal, she said that one thing and one thing only has saved her. The one thing that has inspired and redeemed her all these many years is love. "I love everyone," she said. "I love all the mayors and governors. I love each and every one of you. We can make it together if we will only share our stories. And listen to one another. And forgive. I hope God gives me ten more years to do just that. I somehow feel I've only just begun."
We too only have just begun.
Amen. I love you. May God forgive and bless us,
each and every one.