The Generals: American Military Command From World War II to Today by Thomas E. Ricks

Author:Thomas E. Ricks
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781594204043
Publisher: Penguin Press
Published: 2012-10-30T07:00:00+00:00

A stunning Army study of Army officers

My Lai held one more surprise for Gen. Westmoreland. When Gen. Peers finished his report on the cover-up, he delivered a separate, confidential memorandum to Westmoreland. My Lai, Peers warned, was not just a matter of a criminal platoon leader or even a rotten battalion. Rather, Peers had come to believe that the Army officer corps had drifted far from its stated values. It had become an organization in which lying and hypocrisy were widespread and tolerated, perhaps encouraged and required. What concerned him most was that “so many people in command positions—perhaps as many as fifty—had information that something most unusual had occurred during the My Lai operation and yet did nothing about it. . . . Had any of these persons made their knowledge known to the proper investigative authorities, the whole blanket of obscurity covering the incident would have been rolled back and the true facts brought to light.” Why had so few Army officers done the right thing? Why had a helicopter pilot been the only one to speak up on the day of the killings, and why was an enlisted soldier the one to write the letter that triggered the investigation? Where was the officer corps? Peers recommended that the chief of staff order a review of the state of Army ethics and morals.

One of the most striking paragraphs in Peers’s lengthy memo to Westmoreland addressed this failure of leadership:

Because men’s lives are at stake in combat, there can be no acceptance of mediocre leadership nor mediocrity in performance of other duties relating to the support of combat. Failures in leadership or in the performance of duty in combat are due cause for and should demand the removal or reassignment of the officer concerned to positions of lesser responsibility.

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