Marine officers publicly denied Vietnamese atrocities weeks after the Calley conviction

Evidence

A soldier’s soldier, North grew increasingly frustrated with Americans who didn’t buy into this myth, and he didn’t just mean antiwar protestors. He also blamed the media. In the summer of 1971, just months after William Calley was convicted on twenty-two counts of murder in the My Lai massacre, North and two other marine captains addressed a letter to the three major television networks, and to conservative columnist William F. Buckley Jr., criticizing reporting on “alleged” atrocities and war crimes and rejecting any implication of broader complicity. “None of us have ever witnessed, participated in, or been cognizant of, a single instance wherein any Vietnamese noncombatant, North or South, was treated in anything less than a humane fashion,” they attested. American soldiers were the good guys, and the public needed to know this. — Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne, 282

Categorization

• XREF: Evidence for the book’s broader continuity claim: the ‘good guys’ myth-making doctrine precedes the evangelical framing and later fuses with it in North.