As I read the accounts in this piece of the various colonels and sergeants and generals who time after time came across actual evidence that the officials had known—their predecessors had known of what had been happening ,of what had happened at My Lai 4, and had covered it up—I can empathize entirely with their position. It was my position as I read the thousands of pages, as I read the final pages and discovered that what I was reading was a cover-up, stamped Top Secret, sensitive, of a 25-year atrocity. The question that I faced: Do I continue to collaborate or not, in concealing this? What is to be served by my bringing it out? Is anything to be served? What should I do?One thing that he points out in the conclusions to this, incidentally, is that there is a lack of procedures in the army for really doing anything. There are no procedures for the reporting of a war crime to superior officers when the officers participated in or sanctioned the crime in question. Well, this will be an issue in my trial, no doubt. I am honestly curious as to what people who will be trying me or prosecuting me think I should have done with that information, since it did have to do with deception, crimes of various kinds by my superiors in the Executive Branch—by the president. We don’t have procedures for that, but that’s something that perhaps can be repaired. But how did it come about that Americans have been able to do this and had been able to cover it up, the same issue as I say that’s raised here in the trial? And I think some of the answers are in this article, if you read it carefully.There’s bureaucratic failings here. As one person coming across it, I was told bluntly from time to time that if an accident occurred, don’t worry about it, we’ll cover you. I recognize that attitude. Another one, some stuff that’s almost very difficult even now for an American to read, some of it has a gallows humor, a grisly, awful, sick humor to it. A colonel on the Peers Commission investigating this atrocity was particularly upset by Sergeant Michael Bernhardt, the man who turned his rifle to the ground and refused direct orders from his platoon leader Calley to fire during the day on the civilians, knowing he was doing this at the risk of his life. Bernhardt particularly irritated Franklin, who testified that he’d been told about many rapes and murders. Upon being asked by Franklin to give a specific example, he told of a woman carrying baskets who had been shot when she ignored a request to stop running. Franklin responded, “Well, can you think of a better way to stop people that are running than doing that?” He said, “You’re still wearing the uniform and you’re portraying people that wear the uniform as really animals.” A year later, Colonel Franklin himself was charged by a fellow officer, Colonel Herbert, with several counts of dereliction of duty and failure to comply, of at least five Vietnamese prisoners and the electric torture of a sixth. I had the privilege of meeting Herbert recently at an ACLU dinner in Atlanta where he is now, which gave us an award, both of us, from the Atlanta ACLU. The caption for the thing was a caption from a Ring Lardner’s story, which is a quote. He describes his daughter at one point when he’s driving around and around the block and says, “‘Daddy are you lost,’ she asked tenderly. ‘Shut up,’ he explained.” And the dedication to Herbert and me and two other local people was, “We are presenting our award this year to four Americans who tried tenderly to tell their government it had lost its way.”Other people: Mrs. Win T. Bai, who was raped and then forced to serve as a human mine detector, during this operation. One could almost understand Colonel Franklin’s reaction to this. What are you telling us about Americans? How could this be happening? But the answer is really again on this page, and that’s from the chaplain of the American division, who explained why he did not bother to report what he knew of the incident to certain people in the division at the judge advocate general’s office. He said, “I’d gone over there from time to time and I’d become absolutely convinced that as far as the U.S. army was concerned, there was no such thing as murder of a Vietnamese civilian.” Now what exactly does that mean? Well, something quite precise. As we all know, a dead Vietnamese is a dead Viet Cong. If it’s dead it couldn’t be—Viet Cong of course is the key word there—couldn’t be a civilian, couldn’t be an atrocity, couldn’t be murder, so by definition there’s no possibility of murder.