Before there was a yawning cultural divide over Donald Trump, there was a yawning cultural divide over William L. Calley, who, The Washington Post revealed this week, died this past April at 80. The Calley Gap and the Trump Gap are different ways of describing the same cultural breach.
Calley divided the country into two groups. The first, broadly but not exclusively working class, pledged support for the former Army lieutenant, who was court-martialed for murdering 504 innocent civilians in South Vietnam. Today this same group pledges fealty to a former president convicted on 34 counts of felony fraud.
The second group, broadly but not exclusively of the professional-managerial class, was repelled by Calley and his supporters. Today this group is similarly repelled by Trump and his supporters.
Let me state before proceeding further that there are two important differences between Calley and Trump. The first is that—even in a combat setting—murder is a much worse offense than criminal fraud. The second difference is that, whereas Trump’s claims to victimhood are 100 percent hooey—the man is a billionaire who committed crimes with impunity, both in and out of office—Calley really was a victim (though hardly an innocent one), in the sense that the Army made him the fall guy for the March 1968 My Lai massacre. In the end, not even Calley’s commanding officer, Captain Ernest Medina, who was present in My Lai, was punished. Higher-ups, meanwhile, never answered for covering up Calley’s crime, which they swept under the rug for more than a year until an Army whistleblower and the investigative reporter Seymour Hersh forced them to act.
The My Lai massacre occurred during the Tet Offensive, a series of attacks in 1968 by the North Vietnamese People’s Army and its guerrilla allies in the south, the Viet Cong. A group of five platoons called Charlie Company suffered heavy losses as it conducted search-and-destroy missions in South Vietnamese villages and hamlets. The difference between who was a civilian and who was Viet Cong was usually unclear. U.S. troops addressed this problem by declaring certain areas “free-fire zones” and distributing leaflets advising civilians to leave the area. But as is true today when Israeli soldiers make similar efforts in Gaza, the civilians often had no place to go.