The wounded squirmed on the floor, reaching past dead bodies as they crawled in the muck, covered thickly with blood and twisting among each other like giant fishing worms. We cleaned out the hooch, evacuated the wounded, washed at a nearby well, and went back to our war. By the next day this incident was over, a little piece of history in the long and ugly journey of a combat tour. But in the coming months as I reflected on them, the killings at My Loc raised an important distinction, which has become even more relevant with the media firestorm over Bob Kerrey's ill-fated SEAL patrol in the Mekong Delta. But in a guerrilla war, the support or control of the local population, rather than the conquest of territory, is the ultimate objective.
Civilians become enmeshed in the actual fighting, inseparable from it.
They fight among themselves for political dominance of a local area. They form an infrastructure and quietly support one side or the other when it moves through their village. They suffer greatly when battles are fought on top of them, and when emotions overcome logic and troops snap, as at My Lai. But the villagers of My Loc and others like them, clearly non-combatants, were killed purely as a matter of political control, for having met with a South Vietnamese government official and given some legitimacy to his authority. Any American who directed a similar slaughter, or participated in it, would have been court-martialed.