Union Soldiers and the Persistence of Restraint in War

Lecture at the U.S. Military Academy
November 15, 1995

U.S. B-17 bombers over Mariensberg, Germany, in 1943.
During World War II the distinction between combatant and noncombatant--never
very strong to begin with--collapsed entirely. Many see the American Civil War
as a crucial watershed in which the distinction began to blur.

Of course, beyond a certain threshold of intimacy it was impossible to hide my true subject of study. To reassure friends that I was not some kind of warfare enthusiast, I would tell them my area of specialization: the ethical aspects of war. This, it turned out, wasn't much better. "`The ethics of war,'" they would say in effect, "is a contradiction in terms." Variants on this statement constantly came my way. For many, talk of war and morality has an oil-and-water quality. The two don't seem to mix.

It is not unusual to hear people insisting that in war the justifications do not really matter; that, as General Sherman declared, "War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it." Certainly talk about ethics in war has always had detractors. Some, like the ancient Athenians, have considered warfare an exercise in cold-eyed expedience, a moral no-man's-land in which "the strong do what they can and the weak accept what they must." Others have echoed Leo Tolstoy's scathing contempt toward those who "prate about the rules of warfare." "War," he makes Prince Andrei declare in War and Peace, "is not a polite recreation but the vilest thing in life, and we ought to understand that and not play at war." By the first view, morality in warfare in a farce; by the second, a repugnant game. But both assert that morality has no place on the battlefield: In war, all forms of violence are permissible, all ethical judgments suspended.

Nevertheless, however naive or even offensive the "ethics of war" may sound, in practice they are not dreamy ideals but simple reality. Those who wage war routinely seek to justify themselves on moral grounds, something they would hardly bother to do if moral claims did not matter. During the Civil War, General Grant spoke of the destruction of civilian property as a "humane" policy that ultimately saved the lives of Federals and Confederates alike; Sherman said in defense of his order exiling the citizens of Atlanta: "God will judge. . . whether it be more humane to fight with a town of women at our back or to remove them in time to places of safety among their own people." Even in battle the violence is not wholly unrestrained. We call it permissible to shoot soldiers in open fight, but not wounded men lying helpless on the ground. We say that troops attempting to surrender should not be cut down, that prisoners of war should be decently fed and clothed. Each of these statements represents a moral judgment, and few would argue that they are trivial or meaningless. But there is a judgment more important than any of these: the distinction drawn between the fighting man, who is a proper object for attack, and the noncombatant, who is not.

Ruins of Columbia, S.C. after its destruction in February 1865.Responsibility for the burning of the city
remains controversial, but Union soldiers certainly played a role.

The classic picture of the North's hard war against Southern civilians runs something like this: The Civil War began as a contest between armies, characterized by laudable restraint on the part of generals such as Robert E. Lee and George B. McClellan. Then generals like Ulysses S. Grant, Philip Sheridan, and above all, William T. Sherman, created a new brand of warfare in which the objective was not simply the enemy's armies but also his economic resources and population. Military historian Walter Millis described the change this way: "Earlier wars had concentrated upon the capture or destruction of enemy armies in the field. The Civil War was one of the first in which `strategic warfare' assumed a dominant role." The clash of armies in open battle alone could no longer achieve decisive results. Industrialization and mass political participation had led to "a kind of siege warfare in which now the whole people were involved . . . a struggle over communications and resources, blockade, the capture of rail lines, the devastation of the productive farm areas, the terrorization of civilians, the women and children behind the lines."

Millis' description was dreadful enough, but the Southern mythology of the North's hard war--enshrined in films like Gone With the Wind and paintings like the one on the screen--went further. Sherman's troops, declared the Southern historian John Bennett Walters, "left behind them a trail of terror and desolation, burned homes and towns, devastated fields and plundered storehouses, and a record for systematic torture, pillage, and vandalism unequaled in American history." Even in 1994--130 years after Sherman began his famous March to the Sea--the North Carolina Secretary of Cultural Resources could still threaten to block a proposed monument to Sherman's soldiers at Bentonville, the state's principal Civil War battleground. The troops, she said, had been commanded by a man "more evil than Ivan the Terrible or Genghis Khan." The state commander of the Sons of Confederate Veterans agreed: "Monuments should be erected to heroes. These were no heroes. They were thieves, murderers, rapists, arsonists, trespassers."

Few Civil War historians would go that far. But most would agree with Gerald F. Linderman's assessment, offered in his fine study Embattled Courage, that in the war's final year the Federals practiced a "warfare of terror" against Southern civilians. Linderman's assessment, based upon an extensive survey of soldiers diaries and letters as well as official correspondence, is reasonable, and accords with other worthwhile studies. It is also an assessment I shared for a number of years, and my essay at Kings was thoroughly consistent with an interpretation that emphasized the terror and destructiveness of the North's hard war against Southern property. But eventually I became troubled, for official Union policy plainly did not contemplate such indiscriminate destruction. And although wanton depredations certainly occurred, I discovered almost no instances in which white Southerners were killed, assaulted, or raped. Indeed, my reading of the evidence did not sustain a portrayal of unrestrained destruction even of property.

When I wrote "The Erosion of Noncombatant Immunity" at Kings, I assumed that part of the problem lay with the sources available to me in London--they simply were not extensive enough to let me fully document the campaigns of fire and vandalism that engulfed the South during the Civil War. Not until some years later, when I returned to the subject for my doctoral dissertation at Ohio State, did I realize that the existing picture of the North's hard war policy was in some respects misleading. Although a number of historians had realized that Southern tales of a wanton apocalypse were overblown, each of them had tended to stress the destructive aspects of the North's hard war policy. They had noted the limits of Union conduct toward Southern civilians but they had not given the evidence of restraint the same importance they gave to the destruction of property. And the dominant portrayal was one of hardened veterans no longer animated by moral considerations.

This was an interpretation I originally shared. But time and again I ran across evidence that did not fit easily into it, and after a while it seemed to me that the dominant theme of the Union hard war operations was as less an erosion of values than an on-going tension between competing sets of values.

Union soldiers clearly came to understand the need to destroy Southern war resources and they also embraced the conviction that some Southern civilians deserved punishment for their role in starting or sustaining the war. But the same sense of justice that created this desire for retribution also insisted that punishment should fall upon the guilty. The result was indeed severity, but it was a directed severity aimed--and for the most part, aimed effectively--at certain portions of the Confederate population and economic infrastructure.

This can be seen in many Federal orders concerning conduct toward Southern civilians. Union commanders in the latter years of the war typically divided these civilians into three classes: loyal Unionists, who merited protection and who should be paid for goods requisitioned; neutral or passive citizens, who might also be protected but who remained subject to forced loans and military requisitions, with receipts given but payment to be made after the war upon proof of loyalty; and active secessionists.

In my research I was surprised by how frequently this trinary scheme appeared in Federal correspondence and also with its persistence. It also seems, by and large, to have been obeyed by rank-and-file soldiers. When George Landrum's sister expressed dismay that he had seized an Alabama farmer's wheat to feed his horse, Landrum's justification was specific. "The old fellow voted for secession twice, and is now getting his rights, and I would rather have him starve than the horse. My horse is doing all in his power for the Nation and the old man all he can against it." While encamped near Iuka, Mississippi, Edward A. Webb reported, Some of the Boys went to a Secesh house and asked where they could get some good water to drink Says he there is a frog pond good enough for you Northern thieves we come back and told the Major--he told us to go and get what we wanted so of course we went and took Corn Sweet Potatoes Water Mellon Chickens Turkey Geese Sheep Pigs Calves and every thing else we could find So you See that he did not make much out of us. . . .

The desire for a just retribution appears often in soldier letters and diaries. William T. Patterson, a sergeant in Sheridan's army, reflected the anguish that attended his commander's decision to burn private homes in retaliation for the murder of a Union staff officer. "This evening the citizens are removing their goods," Patterson wrote. "The work of destruction is commencing in the suburbs of the town. Now it is dark a squad of cavalry has just passed coming from the country where they have been carrying out the General's order. The whole country around is wrapped in flames, the heavens are aglow with the light thereof." He went on to describe the civilians' reactions: "such mourning, such lamentations, such crying and pleading for mercy. I never saw nor never want to see again, some were wild, crazy, mad, some cry[ing] for help while others would throw their arms around yankee soldiers necks and implore mercy." Then a report came that the order had been countermanded. "I hope it will not be enforced," Patterson wrote.

Patterson's brigade commander, Brigadier General Thomas F. Wildes went in person to ask Sheridan to revoke the order. Sheridan, who respected Wildes for his fighting qualities, heeded the request. The officer who was to execute the burning received the counterorder five minutes before his men were to apply the torch. "When I announced the order," the officer recalled, "there was louder cheering than there ever was when we made a bayonet charge." A short time later, Patterson recorded, a couple of cavalrymen rode by, loaded with plunder, only to be halted by Patterson's outraged colonel and arrested.

"Truly," the Ohio sergeant believed, "war is cruelty." But his reluctance to see the population around him de-housed stemmed less from soft-heartedness than from a desire to see justice done. If the people had lived in the secesionist lower Shenandoah Valley, he wrote, he could have approved the burning, "but this place is the most loyal or at least most innocent of any I have seen the Valley." Such considerations mattered to Federal soldiers. Even in 1864, after years of warfare, most of them still retained a basic morality. Although not averse to destruction, they wanted to see the hard hand of war descend on those who deserved it, and usually only in rough proportion to the extent of their sins.

This element of morality is critical to understanding the combination of severity and restraint that marked Union conduct during the war's final year. It clearly did not prevent destruction on a scale that desolated much of the South, but it channeled it in some directions and away from others. Public and quasi-public property like railroads, warehouses and factories received the rough ministrations of Federal troops more often than private property. Plantations--the lairs of the slave-holding aristocracy--were targeted far more often than small farms. Policy dictated that the Southern population be divided according to the loyal, neutral and actively disloyal, with different standards of conduct for each.

The question remains, however: Why did Union soldiers continue to exercise restraint? The notion that they were part of a more chivalrous age won't suffice. Certainly what had gone before was far from benign. If one hallmark of modern total war is the erosion of the barrier between combatant and noncombatant, one must recognize that the barrier itself had acquired substance barely a century before the guns spoke at Fort Sumter. Until then, invading armies routinely considered the civilians in their path as enemies to be beaten, robbed, raped, or even killed. Europe had a tradition of brutal conduct going back hundreds of years. The Devastation of the Palatinate in 1688-1689, to name but one incident, offered an example of systematic destruction that made Sheridan's razing of the Shenandoah Valley seem comparatively restrained. Even the "age of limited war" in the eighteenth century can be exaggerated. When one acknowledges the gusto with which colonists annihilated whole tribes of American Indians, to say nothing of the ease with which the western Allies as well as totalitarian regimes embraced area bombing against population centers, the restraint of Union armies in the Civil War acquires fresh salience.

Any explanation must begin with the fact that official policy intended restraint to be exercised. The Federal government deliberately chose to conduct the war largely as a contest between two nations, despite the fact that it explicitly denied the Confederacy's right to exist. It applied the insurrectionary principle sparingly. Had it done so broadly and consistently, captured Confederate soldiers and civilians who gave aid and comfort to the Confederate regime might well have faced execution. Instead the Federal government threw its moral and legal authority squarely behind the preservation of distinctions between combatants and noncombatants.

Field commanders too reinforced the distinction through an endless stream of general orders that forbade pillaging and wanton destruction. Critics who cite the orders as evidence of continued depredations miss the crucial point. In war, nothing undercuts the claims of personal conscience faster than the demands of public authority. The syllogism in Shakespeare's Henry V--"If his cause be wrong, our obedience to the king wipes the crime of it out of us"--has a long and melancholy history. Many soldiers, decent in themselves, have willingly performed the most sickening tasks in the name of duty. By insisting on proper conduct toward civilians, Union generals encouraged rather than corroded the better angels of their soldiers' nature.

The persistence of morality among the soldiers forms a second part of the explanation. In their correspondence, both official and personal, justice is a frequent theme, a concern occasionally robust enough to balk at expedients urged by higher authority. Many soldiers would have understood the sentiments of a Union colonel in West Virginia. Faced with much guerrilla activity in his district and an order from Major General David Hunter to burn houses near the sites where bushwhacking occurred, he demurred nevertheless. "To men who have taken the oath of allegiance unless charges could be made and sustained, I do not feel authorized to apply General Hunter's order. . . . I would not hesitate, but it is an important and serious matter, and should not be done hastily, or in the wrong place. . . . I would rather spare two secesh than burn up one Union man's property."

A third explanatory feature was the similarity of white Southerners to their Northern counterparts. The claims of morality are stronger when one can recognize the enemy's human face. Despite regional idiosyncracies, Union soldiers and Southern civilians shared the same language, the same heritage, and much the same culture. The comments of Federal soldiers on white Southerners often noted oddities and differences, but it is misleading to suggest that these indicate a depersonalization of the enemy. Far from depicting an alien people, the soldiers' descriptions often brought enemy civilians vividly to life. Sergeant Rufus Mead, for instance, enjoyed talking to a secessionist woman: "[S]he would talk like a steamboat." Many soldiers empathized with the plight of Southern civilians even when they approved of the stern measures against them. Of Sherman's evacuation order, an Ohio army surgeon wrote his wife, "It seems very hard but serves them right for most of the women of the south are generally stronger secess [sic] than the men." Such sentiments did not prevent him from asking in the next sentence, "How would you like to be made to leave Marietta [Ohio] with your family and have to find a new home?"

The Southern whites who least resembled Northern men were the poor, and the soldiers' comments concerning them are most unflattering. But the condition of the poor whites reflected less an alien breed than the degenerative effects of slavery, which focused attention back on the slaveholding aristocracy. A Pennsylvania cavalryman serving in northern Virginia opined that the South contained only two kinds of residence: "The one are the mansions of the wealthy and are generally fine and elegant and the other are the huts of the poorer classes and the slaves which are wretched houses. The neat little home of the northern laborer is nowhere to be found in the south." Another soldier wrote, "The poor class are all loyal or would be if they dared, but they are really more enslaved than the negroes. . . ."

Such observations introduce the final component that helps explain the persistence of restraint: the Union soldiers' political sensitivity. As Lincoln maintained, they were "thinking bayonets," the product of universal white male suffrage, stump speeches, torchlight political rallies, and unabashedly partisan newspapers--in short, members of one of the most politically aware societies on earth. They debated politics around the campfire and in their letters home. Not content with that, a considerable number bombarded local newspapers with epistles on the conduct of the war. They rejected conciliation because it did not accord with their opinion of what was really required to end the rebellion. But by and large they observed the distinctions, not only between combatants and noncombatants but also between Unionist, passive, and secessionist civilians, because such distinctions made political as well as moral sense to them.

I wish I could say that restraint has always characterized the American soldier in action. Unfortunately, that is not the case. Spattered throughout our military history have been instances in which American troops have deliberately killed noncombatants: helpless prisoners, wounded soldiers, defenseless men, women, and children. This was true even during the Civil War era. In November 1864, for example, a force of Colorado volunteers--citizen-soldiers just like their eastern counterparts--fell upon a large encampment of Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians at Sand Creek, Colorado. Despite the fact that these Indians had already announced their intent to surrender to U.S. authorities, despite the fact that they put up almost no resistance even after the Colorado volunteers opened fire, at least two hundred of the five hundred Native Americans were killed--two thirds of them women and children. The Colorado volunteers raped some of the women before killing them; they mutilated Indian corpses; and a few days afterward paraded trimphantly through the streets of Denver with the scalps of their victims.

Similar atrocities occurred thirty-five years later in the Philippine War that broke out when the United States occupied the Philippine Islands after the Spanish-American War. In a January 1902 sweep against Filipino guerrillas, for example, American soldiers killed "men, women and children, prisoners and captives, active insurgents and suspected people, from lads of ten and up, an idea prevailing that the Filipino . . . was little better than a dog."

The most recent atrocity to attract significant attention took place in the hamlet of My Lai 4 in March 1968, when a company of American infantry slaughtered over four hundred unresisting South Vietnamese men, women, and children. Many of the killings were done at the order of a platoon leader, Lieutenant William Calley, who personally shot as many as one hundred Vietnamese with an M-16 rifle. Other soldiers also killed--sometimes when ordered to do so, sometimes by their own choice--and also contributed acts of torture, brutality, and sexual abuse.

It would be misleading to suggest that these actions were typical of American conduct in the Indian Wars, the Philippine insurrection, or the struggle in Vietnam. Thankfully, they were not, though the historical record in all three conflicts remains hotly contested and there are many historians disquieted by American conduct in them. My point is simply to underscore that there is nothing magical about American soldiers; they possess no special moral rectitude denied the rest of humanity. Under certain circumstances, American soldiers have cast aside restaint and assaulted, tortured, raped and murdered noncombatants in the past. And, it is fair to say, they will do so again unless we understand why such things happen and take the necessary steps to prevent it.

Under what circumstances have such atrocities occurred? Do they share discernable patterns? It seems to me that they do, in at least four respects. The most obvious pattern in American atrocities is that the victims have typically been non-white. They have been Native Americans, Filipinos, Japanese, and Vietnamese. The racial dimension here is obvious. Such people look differently, talk differently, behave differently, and are easier to regard as less human than oneself.

A second pattern is that American atrocities typically occur in the context of nonconventional or guerrilla warfare. In such struggles the line between combatant and noncombatant is deliberately and systematically obscured. The soldiers who entered My Lai believed that many of the civilians were either members of the Viet Cong or, at a minimum, knew which villagers were. Under such circumstances it becomes easy to believe that every civilian is an enemy.

A third feature of American atrocities is that they occur in the context of enemies who have themselves committed atrocities. The Sand Creek massacre, for example, took place after a Native American uprising in which a number of whites were brutally slain and mutilated, most particularly the Hungate family: husband, wife, two small children. The killings I described in the Philippines took place after the infamous Balangiga massacre in which a U.S. company was ambushed, slaughtered, and mutilated. The My Lai massacre occurred after the company that did the killings had suffered a number of casualties from booby traps.

But neither racial and cultural differences, nor the realities of nonconventional warfare, nor bad behavior on the part of the enemy seem in themselves sufficient to trigger atrocities. I am struck by a fourth pattern evident in American atrocities, which has to do with leadership: not simply a failure in leadership, by which commanders abdicate their responsibility to control their soldiers, but rather active leadership in which commanders encourage their soldiers to undertake atrocious behavior. At Sand Creek the U.S. commander, Colonel John Chivington, insisted on attacking the Cheyenne and Arapaho despite vocal protests from other officers. During the Philippine War, the prelude to atrocity was often orders like the one given by Brigadier General Jacob Smith: "I want no prisoners. I wish you to kill and burn, the more you kill and burn the better it will please me." At My Lai, the stage for massacre was set when Captain Ernest Medina issued orders that, at best, were reckless about the lives of Vietnamese civilians and at worst actually enjoined his men to "waste the village."

With these examples in mind, we can compare the continued restraint of Union soldiers during the Civil War with instances that produced a breakdown of restraint. I am most impressed by the fact that American massacres have largely been "crimes of obedience," in which soldiers did as they were ordered to do by higher authority. Frequently the orders were direct and unequivocal; sometimes they were more in the nature of broad hints; but always they occurred in the context of a command authority that had exhibited impatience with the notion that noncombatants should be accorded moral protection. Here the local command authority is key. In all three instances--Sand Creek, the Philippines, and My Lai--the official government policy was the same as for the Civil War: a commitment to the preservation of distinctions between combatants and noncombatants. But in all three instances the local commander undercut rather than supported the official policy.

Even so, it is reasonable to suppose that these local commanders would never have reached the point of taking the last, fatal step into atrocity were it not for an official climate that promised tacit acceptance of such measures. The governor of Colorado was under considerable political pressure to squelch what was rumored to be an imminent war of extermination on the part of the Indians. A number of American commanders in the Philippines permitted extreme measures to be taken against civilians and prisoners--torture, forced relocation, the destruction of property--without always being particular about how these activities were carried out. The same was sometimes true in Vietnam, where the emphasis on search-and-destroy missions and the "body count" sometimes created a climate of recklessness with regard to civilian casualties.

Intervention by the government followed all three of these massacres: there was a Congressional inquiry into the Sand Creek massacre, Gen. Smith was court-martialed for his conduct in the Philippines, and Lt. Calley was tried and convicted for his role in the My Lai massacre. But what is striking in all three instances is the reluctance with which higher authority responded, particularly in the case of the My Lai massacre. There was no investigation into the killings for more than a year after they took place. Indeed, but for the courage of a Vietnam veteran who heard stories of the killings from men who had been there, believed them, and reported what he had heard to his congressman, we might never have heard of My Lai. And except for the fortuitous presence of an Army photographer, who took the photos you've seen tonight, we might not have believed what we heard. Even the court-martial of Lt. Calley was at best a token effort compared with the number of officers who shared responsibility for the cover-up if not the killings.

So official prescription is not enough. Too often, official policy can seem to be a mere paper exercise--like the cursory briefings on the laws of war given to each Vietnam era soldier while in basic training and again when he first reached Vietnam. There must be a will on the part of commanders to enforce them, and more importantly, a conviction on the part of all officers to the moral justice of the laws of war.

Even then, my work with Union soldiers has deeply impressed me with the importance of the preservation of a larger moral context. I said before that one reason that Union soldiers exercised appropriate restraint was because such restraint made moral and political sense to them. The persistence of a moral and political compass occurred in part because the Union citizen-soldiers retained strong ties to their home communities--members of which marched and fought beside them. But it also occurred because Union soldiers by and large believed in the indivisibility of the moral universe. Gerald Linderman has sensitively detailed how Civil War soldiers believed that effective combat performance was an outgrowth of courage, which was in turn inseparable from other virtues: duty, forbearance, temperance, religious faith. This is one reason that Union generals viewed even unauthorized foraging with real distaste. Brigadier General James W. Denver, for example, deplored acts of pillaging and theft by troops. "I do not see how men claiming to be enlightened and educated can do such things," he wrote his wife, adding that he and his fellow officers were trying to stop "these lawless acts." His discomfort stemmed from more than mere soft-heartedness. "If allowed to go on it will not be long before the soldier will be sunk in the cowardly plunderer--for men loaded with plunder are always cowards,--and instead of an army we will have an undisciplined mob. Selfpreservation to say nothing of humanity requires that discipline be maintained. . . ."

Denver's comment helps to explain why Union commanders did not immediately embrace a hard war policy once the conciliatory policy of the war's first year had been repudiated. Military men have long been great sentimentalists, largely because sentiment--duty, patriotism, honor, courage--helps them to master the arduous tasks that befall them. As C.S. Lewis has acutely observed, "In battle it is not logic that will keep the reluctant nerves and muscles at their post in the third hour of the bombardment. The crudest sentimentalism . . . about a flag or a country or a regiment will be of more use." And as General Denver realized, it was at best an uncertain business to extinguish certain kinds of sentiment and expect the rest to function. The rectitude that made soldiers spare the property of civilians might appear unrelated to the discipline that sustained men in battle. But many Civil War officers believed the moral fabric of soldiers was all of a piece; it could not be casually rent.

In contrast to Civil War soldiers, it seems to me that modern military culture often deliberately creates a divided moral world, usually with the laudable intention of preparing young soldiers for combat. During my basic training at Fort Sill, for example, we were socialized to be conscientious in the performance of our duties, hard-working--to say the least!--and stoic in the face of hardship. Such values are squarely in line with conventional morality and are, I would argue, a healthy influence on anybody. But some of the informal military culture had a frankly nihilist bent to it--an emphasis on aggressiveness and callousness that was so casually accepted we rarely gave it much conscious thought. In the notebooks I kept during basic training I recorded quite a few marching cadences and rowdy songs taught to us by the drill sergeants. Most of them were and are unprintable. A few, if you stopped to consider them seriously, were frankly amoral. For example, en route to the mess hall we were obliged to sing the following to the tune of "Jesus Loves the Little Children":

Napalm loves the little children
All the children of the world
Red, yellow, black and white
Napalm sticks to them just right
Napalm loves the little children of the world

At the time, I thought "The Napalm Song" was unimaginative and rather over the top, but essentially harmless. The example of the Union soldiers, however, has made me reconsider. While most of them sang lustily for the hanging of Jeff Davis to a sour apple tree, few would have been comfortable with a song that celebrated the burning alive of children. And they would have thought it strange that we could be comfortable with such a thing. It seems to me worth considering that the Union soldiers understood something worth knowing: that it is important to preserve the moral order at all times. It is dangerous to uphold in fun behavior that if practiced would be barbaric.

In accordance with their belief in a solid moral universe, Union soldiers extended that universe to encompass the enemy. This did not prevent them from fighting against the Confederacy with a dedication and spirit of self-sacrifice that is worthy of our admiration and even awe, but it permitted them to regard the enemy as an honorable adversary. From his work with Vietnam veterans afflicted with post traumatic stress disorder, Jonathan Shay believes that "the veteran's self-respect never fully recovers so long as he is unable to see the enemy as worthy. In the words of one of our patients, a war against subhuman vermin `has no honor.'" As I said earlier, restraint persisted during the Civil War because Northern soldiers were able to see the human face of their enemy and extend them the respect due a worthy adversary. The dehumanization of the enemy not only creates a climate that can lead to atrocities, it can also have damaging effects on the soldier. Dr. Shay believes "The impulse to dehumanize and disrespect the enemy must be resisted whether its basis is religious, nationalistic, or racist. The soldier's physical and psychological survival is at stake."

In closing, I would like you to reflect for a moment on this image. It is a closeup of a South Vietnamese woman living in My Lai 4 on the morning of March 16, 1968. American soldiers have rounded her up along with dozens of her family and neighbors, and moments after this photo is snapped, they will shoot these people down in cold blood. I doubt seriously whether Lt. Calley or the men of his platoon could ever have imagined themselves doing such a thing before they came to Vietnam. They were able to do it because their fears and frustrations, their inability to see these people as full human beings, and perhaps also the nihilism spawned by an informal but insidious military culture rendered them unaware of the moral enormity of what they were doing. The soldiers who participated in the killing, or watched while it occurred, will have to live with what they did for the rest of their lives.

I am convinced that their fate could also be ours--that if fate had placed us in that platoon that day we would probably have behaved no differently. I say this because a formidable psychological literature has documented how strongly most of us respond to the demands of authority, how prone we are to respond to frustration with aggression, and how inhibited we are to stand up for what is right when everyone around us seems of a different mind. If we are to prevent atrocities in the future, we have to begin doing it now, by maintaining as we strongly as we can the "moral world," by making sure that respect for noncombatant immunity is a part of our informal military culture as well as official prescription, and by resisting the urge to dehumanize our enemies. Atrocities occur in a context in which the moral world has become so distorted as to demonize or dehumanize our enemies. In fact, in such situations the moral world has collapsed, with grievous consequences not only to the civilians in the path of war but also to the soldiers themselves.

By contrast, the "moral world" of the Union soldiers remained intact. Because of that, they were able to wage a destructive war against Southern property without extending that war to encompass the wanton desolation of homes and villages or the killing of Southern civilians. And because of that, they were able to destroy the Confederacy without destroying the moral bonds that alone could have led to a complete reunion of the country. More importantly, they remained true to the values of the society that bred them, and in so doing helped keep this nation one worth preserving. And finally, when the war was over they were able to return to their homes and families knowing that they had discharged their duties faithfully and honorably. And they have bequeathed to us a lesson: that the effective conduct of war need not extinguish the light of moral reason.

Copyright © 1996 Mark Grimsley