In an Aug. 28 editorial, The New York Times applauded a belated "note of personal regret from former Lt. William Calley for his role in the massacre of Vietnamese civilians at My Lai in 1968. But neither the Times nor any other leading U.S. news outlet has ever suggested that remorse might also be due from Colin Powell, who as a young Army major helped cover up the crime.
Powell's role in rebuffing an early appeal from a GI for an investigation of Americal Division abuses of Vietnamese -- encompassing My Lai -- was an important early marker in Powell's career as he climbed the ladder of Pentagon and Washington success by never standing up for a principle that made a superior uncomfortable.
That pattern continued through the Iran-Contra scandal in the 1980s and culminated in the deadly falsehoods that Powell presented to the United Nations in 2003 justifying the invasion of Iraq.
For his part, Calley told a Kiwanis Club gathering in Columbus, Georgia, that "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.
Calley's remorse may be decades overdue but at least he has paid a price for his role as the senior officer on the ground during the massacre. By contrast, Powell, who helped keep the slaughter under wraps several months after the fact, has enjoyed a long career of endless praise as an American hero.
In view of Calley's recent remorse and the Times editorial, we are republishing below a part of a series on Powell's real record that I co-authored with Norman Solomon in 1996. The story deals with Powell's two tours in Vietnam. (For more details on Powell's biography, see the book, Neck Deep.)
Early Days in Vietnam
On Jan. 17, 1963, in South Vietnam's monsoon season, U.S. Army Capt. Colin Powell jumped from a military helicopter into a densely forested combat zone of the A Shau Valley, not far from the Laotian border.
Carrying an M-2 carbine, Capt. Powell was starting his first -- and only -- combat assignment. He was the new adviser to a 400-man unit of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN). Across jungle terrain, these South Vietnamese government troops were arrayed against a combined force of North Vietnamese regulars and local anti-government guerrillas known as the Viet Cong.
The 25-year-old Powell was arriving at a pivotal moment in the Vietnam War. To forestall a communist victory, President John F. Kennedy had dispatched teams of Green Beret advisers to assist the ARVN, a force suffering from poor discipline, ineffective tactics and bad morale.
Already, many U.S. advisers, most notably the legendary Col. John Paul Vann, were voicing concerns about the ARVN's brutality toward civilians. Vann feared that the dominant counterinsurgency strategy of destroying rural villages and forcibly relocating inhabitants while hunting down enemy forces was driving the people into the arms of the Viet Cong.
But as Colin Powell arrived, he was untainted by these worries. He was a gung-ho young Army officer with visions of glory. He brimmed with trust in the wisdom of his superiors. Capt. Powell also felt the deepest sympathy for the ARVN troops under his command, but only a cold contempt for the enemy.
Soon after his arrival, Powell and his ARVN unit left for a protracted patrol that fought leeches as well as Viet Cong ambushes. From the soggy jungle brush, the Viet Cong would strike suddenly against the advancing government soldiers. Often invisible to Powell and his men, the VC would inflict a few casualties and slip back into the jungles.
In My American Journey, Powell recounted his reaction when he spotted his first dead Viet Cong. "He lay on his back, gazing up at us with sightless eyes," Powell wrote. "I felt nothing, certainly not sympathy. I had seen too much death and suffering on our side to care anything about what happened on theirs."
While success against the armed enemy was rare, Powell's ARVN unit punished the civilian population systematically. As the soldiers marched through mountainous jungle, they destroyed the food and the homes of the region's Montagnards, who were suspected of sympathizing with the Viet Cong. Old women would cry hysterically as their ancestral homes and worldly possessions were consumed by fire.
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