Calley's overdue apology can restore our humanity

I wished I’d been there, among the audience in my hometown of Columbus, Ga., when Lt. William Calley stood before that Kiwanis group last week and apologized for his part in the massacre that was My Lai.

Calley, in an unsteady voice, broke 40 years of silence when he confessed, “There is not a day that goes by that I do not feel remorse for what happened that day in My Lai. I feel remorse for the Vietnamese who were killed, for their families, for the American soldiers involved and their families. I am very sorry.”

Twice I approached Calley myself and asked him politely about his part in My Lai, and about how, in light of all that, Vietnam veterans and their families were subsequently treated.

He spoke to me both times, briefly. The first time in a phone call, the second time in the lobby of V. V. Vick Jeweler, the family business he helped manage after he was released from jail.

Each time we spoke I came away with the same feeling: how could such a soft-spoken man be involved in the slaughter of hundreds of Vietnamese?

I had turned 14 the week Calley went on trial in November, 1970, in nearby Fort Benning, and even though I attended one of Georgia’s finest academic high schools at the time — Columbus High — never once was My Lai or Lt. Calley a topic for discussion. Years later, I asked my high school English teacher why no classroom teacher ever mentioned Calley or the trials.

“Where you given a directive not to speak of it?” I asked.

“No,” Mrs. Sewell said. “It just wasn’t part of the polite society we lived in at the time.”

What Calley and others did that day was cold-blooded murder. As surely as if he snuck in through a window and cut the throats of a family as they lay sleeping. Only in this case, it wasn’t just one family but hundreds of innocent Vietnamese.

While mothers cried out for mercy, if not for them, than surely for their children, Calley continued to pull the trigger, and in so doing denied his own humanity and that of each victim slain. He wasn’t the only one taking aim at the hearts of a people terrorized. He just happened to be the only one convicted for it.

Unlike some, however, I’ve never felt any empathy for him over that. For a good chunk of my life, Calley’s actions simply left me feeling angry and confused. My father had been killed in Vietnam, two years prior to My Lai.

Such war deaths weren’t treated like those of today’s military. There was no news crews or ceremonies with dignitaries. My father’s death barely warranted headline news in his hometown paper.

One of the more difficult things for me to cope with as a child growing up under the long-shadow cast by Lt. Calley was the polite silence that Columbus has always afforded its military neighbor.

That silence never, ever seemed polite to me. It felt like shame. For many years, following the My Lai trials, I felt ashamed that my father died in Vietnam. I wondered, did he also kill innocent people the way Calley and his crew had done?

It was all so confusing, trying to sort it out without benefit of counselor or teacher or even one of my father’s infantry buddies to help explain the difference between my father’s service and that of Lt. Calley’s. All I really understood is that I wasn’t supposed to talk about the Vietnam War or my father’s death there. So I kept my confusion, grief and rage to myself.

My mother, who never remarried because she never loved anyone as much as she did our father, is 73 and just now beginning to go through the stages of grief that she didn’t have time to deal with back when she was widowed at 29. She’s finally allowed herself to feel angry about all that she lost to that war.

“Your dad got off easy,” she said to me just the other day.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“He didn’t have to deal with everything I’ve dealt with,” she replied.

It hurt to hear her express such feelings but I understand why she said it. Her life has been incomplete without Dad at her side.

To some it may seem like Calley is getting off easy, too.

I wasn’t the least bit surprised those Columbusites took to their feet and gave Calley a round of applause in response to his apology. The people in my hometown have always offered Calley more grace than he deserved.

There was a time when I would have been angry over that, but not any more. Ever since I made a trek in 2003 to Vietnam and heard first-hand the stories of the Vietnamese and their sufferings, my perspective changed. I realized that whatever suffering I had endured had been nothing in contrast to that of the Vietnamese.

Yet, they did not harbor the anger the way I did. I asked one Vietnamese fellow why that was. Like me, Peter lost his father to that war, too, but because his father had served with the South Vietnamese, his father was considered a traitor. His family was not given any government support even though his mother had seven children to care for. Life was often desperate for them.

Yet, Peter explained, “You are right when believing the Vietnamese seem to be happier. Some things are forgotten so quickly by our people.”

“Why is that?” I asked.

“Historically, wars took place in Vietnam so many times. A 1,000 years of Chinese domination, a 100 years of French domination and 30 years of Civil War. On the battlefields we fought the enemy bravely, but if the day after, they came back not wearing their uniforms we would take them as friends. We could only survive by doing that. We could not live with the pains and hatreds inside.”

I once asked Lt. Calley what he thought about the way our nation judged its Vietnam Veterans and the way that war was fought.

“I think Vietnam is always troubling to everybody,” he said.

I suspect it’s been far more troubling for Calley than any of the rest of us can imagine.

Peter’s right, though.

The only way to survive is to make peace with the things that pain us most, even when making that peace means confessing to unimaginable horrors.

If I’d been among that crowd in Columbus, I would have been the first to my feet, applauding Lt. Calley’s confession.

An apology does not right the wrongs we’ve inflicted upon others, but it can restore our humanity.

Karen Spears Zacharias is author of “After the Flag has been Folded” (William Morrow). Her next book, “Will Jesus Buy Me a Doublewide?: ‘Cause I Need More Room for My Plasma TV,” will be released in 2010. Contact her through her web site at www.karenzach.com.