“Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius.” This infamous command—translated as “Kill them all. God will know His own”—is attributed to Arnaud Amalric, the papal legate during the 1209 Albigensian Crusade. While the phrase was recorded years after the Siege of Béziers and its exact wording is debated, its spirit perfectly captured the resulting slaughter. Unable or unwilling to distinguish the "heretical" Cathars from the "faithful" Catholics, the crusaders massacred the entire population without distinction, leaving tens of thousands dead.
This chilling sentiment resurfaced recently in reports regarding the Secretary of Defense—or "Secretary of Revenge," depending on your perspective. It was alleged that he, or someone high in the chain of command, made disparaging remarks about the occupants of boats fleeing Venezuela. While officials have issued the expected denials, the decision to launch a second strike against the survivors speaks louder than any official statement. The actions themselves seem to invoke the spirit of that phrase, regardless of whether the words were actually spoken.
For centuries, humanity has clung to the dangerous myth that we must "purge the wicked." Originally a religious concept, this belief allows people to bypass their own conscience by claiming they are doing God’s work. The result is always the same: the dehumanization of the "other." From ancient tribal massacres to the industrialized killing of the Holocaust and the indiscriminate Allied bombing of cities, the pattern holds. Today, this refusal to discriminate between "good" and "bad" persists. It is evident in the devastation of Gaza and in the American treatment of immigrants, where innocent children are cast aside alongside criminals. It is a lazy, often racist, abdication of moral duty: the belief that if they are different, they are disposable. (1)
Mary McCarthy’s reporting on the My Lai trials uncovers a haunting exchange between Captain Medina and his men. Asked if they should spare women and children, Medina’s order was: “Kill everything that moves.” This mindset resulted in the 1968 massacre of hundreds of unarmed South Vietnamese civilians. While the event is infamous, the legal aftermath is just as troubling. Despite the involvement of various officers, Lieutenant Calley was the only one convicted. My Lai serves as a grim case study in how the psychology of warfare and the politics of justice can allow such atrocities—and the leaders who authorize them—to escape full accountability.McCarthy’s Medina (1972) is not simply an account of a court-martial. It is an anatomy of moral evasion—legal, institutional, and psychological—played out in the aftermath of the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam War. The book centers on the 1971 court-martial of Captain Ernest L. Medina, commander of Charlie Company, whose unit carried out the slaughter of Vietnamese civilians at My Lai on March 16, 1968. Medina was acquitted. McCarthy’s question is not why—but how it could ever have been otherwise.
McCarthy begins with atmosphere. The Medina trial, she observes, felt dead on arrival. Compared with the earlier and more sensational prosecution of Lieutenant William Calley, Medina’s trial was widely regarded as dull, repetitive, and pointless. Press interest faded quickly. Jurors appeared bored. Even the lawyers behaved as though the outcome were foreordained. The courtroom became, in McCarthy’s words, a kind of bureaucratic waiting room—full of procedure but empty of moral force
This sense of futility is crucial. McCarthy suggests that boredom itself is a moral signal: the massacre was already being normalized, absorbed into routine. Medina was charged not only with personally shooting civilians but—more gravely—with responsibility for the mass killing of more than one hundred people by his men. His defense rested on distance and ignorance. He admitted to shooting a woman and possibly ordering a child shot under confused circumstances, but denied knowing about the broader massacre while it was occurring. He claimed he had remained largely on the perimeter of the operation, unaware of what was unfolding inside the hamlet.
McCarthy is meticulous in showing how this defense succeeded not because it was persuasive in a moral sense, but because it fit perfectly within the Army’s structural logic. Command responsibility was treated as narrowly technical: if Medina did not see the killings, did not order them explicitly, and did not intend mass murder, then the law could look away.
One of McCarthy’s sharpest insights is that My Lai was prosecuted as a series of isolated acts rather than as a single, integrated crime. Each defendant—Calley, Medina, Henderson, others—was tried separately, before different juries, under different evidentiary constraints. High-level officers were administratively absolved or never charged at all. This fragmentation, McCarthy argues, made justice impossible. My Lai was a collective atrocity, embedded in planning, intelligence failures, rules of engagement, and command culture. Trying it piecemeal ensured that responsibility dissolved upward and outward until it vanished entirely .
McCarthy repeatedly contrasts perspectives: the infantrymen on the ground, the officers in helicopters, the generals receiving reports far from the scene. She reconstructs the vertical hierarchy of the operation—who was flying where, who could see what, who heard complaints, and who did nothing.
Especially damning is the official after-action report, which claimed a successful engagement with enemy forces despite an implausible body-count-to-weapons ratio. McCarthy treats this not as a clerical error but as an indictment: the numbers themselves should have triggered alarm. Instead, they produced commendations.
A recurring theme in Medina is the role of language. Orders to “destroy the village,” “waste the area,” or “get rid of” inhabitants were framed as tactical necessities. Refugee creation was treated as normal policy. Killing civilians was officially condemned—yet structurally enabled. But, and Linder has shown, "GIs joked that "anything that's dead and isn't white is a VC" for body count purposes. Angered by a local population that said nothing about the VC's whereabouts, soldiers took to calling natives "gooks." (3) The dehumanization was fully engaged; reading current stories from the administration about immigrants shows a similar engagement. (4)
McCarthy shows how Medina could sincerely believe himself humane and restrained while presiding over devastation. His briefing the night before the operation—burn houses, kill livestock, destroy crops—left the fate of the people deliberately vague. Once civilians were conceptually erased, their physical erasure followed with grim ease.
In the end, McCarthy does not argue that Medina was innocent. Nor does she claim the prosecution proved its case. Her deeper claim is that the trial itself was unequal to the crime. Legal technicalities crowded out moral reckoning. Witnesses contradicted one another, evidence blurred, and exhaustion set in. The court became preoccupied with immunity doctrines, hearsay rules, and procedural minutiae while the central fact—that a village had been annihilated—receded into abstraction. The verdict, acquittal, thus felt less like an exoneration than a confirmation: the system was functioning exactly as designed. Ironically, Months later, when a perjury prosecution was no longer possible, Medina admitted that he had suppressed evidence and lied to the brigade commander about the number of civilians killed.
For four decades, the United States willfully maintained a legal system that offered a get-out-of-jail-free card to soldiers who committed murder overseas, provided they took off the uniform before they were caught. This was not an accidental loophole; it was the result of a deliberate, decades-long policy choice.
This jurisdictional gap was created by the 1955 Supreme Court decision in Toth v. Quarles, (2) which ruled that military courts could not try ex-servicemen. The My Lai massacre starkly exposed this problem. When veteran Ronald Ridenhour’s letters detailing the atrocity finally triggered an investigation in 1969, many members of Charlie Company had already returned to civilian life. Ultimately, the government did not prefer charges against these veterans, validating the long-held fear that, in effect, they could "literally get away with murder."
What makes this failure so profound is that Congress was not merely unaware of this “undesirable situation”; it actively debated and rejected solutions for decades. Key figures like Senator Sam Ervin championed closing the gap, but his primary motivation was not to prosecute war criminals. Instead, he sought to ensure any accused Americans were tried in U.S. courts with full constitutional protections—a mindset that prioritized American sovereignty above all else. This fierce protectionism, combined with executive branch opposition citing the "practical difficulties" and "financial burden" of trying cases, ensured that administrative convenience was prioritized over justice for mass murder. For forty years, a discharge from the military could serve as a grant of immunity. (3)
(1) Gen. Curtis LeMay, who ordered the firebombing of Japanese cities, said, "Killing Japanese didn't bother me very much at that time. I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal." Instead, he was promoted to U.S. Air Force chief of staff. It's the banality of evil.
(2) https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/us-supreme-court/350/11.html
(3) Linder, Douglas, An Introduction to the My Lai Courts-Martial (2007). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1029398 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1029398 There was a complete atmosphere of dehumanization toward the Vietnamese regardless of affiliation. "Calley's utter lack ofrespect for the indigenous population was apparent to all in the company. According to one soldier, "if they wanted to do something wrong, it was alright with Calley." Seymour Hersh wrote that by March of 1968 "many in the company had given in to an easy pattern of violence." Soldiers systematically beat unarmed civilians. Some civilians were murdered. Whole villages were burned. Wells were poisoned. Rapes were common.
(4) Trump has repeatedly referred to non-white immigrants as “animals,” “garbage,” “criminals”, “rapists,” “Non-humans,” and numerous other epithets.
N.B. The idea of "banality of evil" comes from Hannah Arendt's 1963 book, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. For a book reporting on the refusal of some German soldiers to participate in mass killing, see my review of Christopher Browning's Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland
For anyone with the time and stomach for it, the entire Peers Panel report, some 20,000 pages of witness interviews and the multiple trials' transcripts are available from the Library of Congress:
Report of the Department of the Army Review of the Preliminary Investigations into the My Lai Incident)
Volume I: The Investigative Report (The main summary and findings): Download PDF from the Library of Congress
The Peers Inquiry (Main Collection Page): This page provides access to Volume I, the testimony in Volume II, and various hearings. Library of Congress - Military Legal Resources
Famous Trials Archive: This site provides a helpful summary and digitized excerpts of the findings, specific to the actions of Captain Medina and Charlie Company. Famous Trials - The Peers Report
Lt. General Peers, in charge of the investigation, was unhappy with all the "not guilty" verdicts. Peers expressed his disapproval, writing "I cannot agree with the verdict. If his actions are judged as acceptable standards for an officer in his position, the Army is indeed in deep trouble. (Henderson and Medina verdicts.)
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