Books: Barrack-Room Ballad

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LIEUTENANT CALLEY/HIS OWN STORY, as told to John Sack. 181 pages. Viking. $4.95.

The parts of this memoir that deal with My Lai are mainly taken verbatim from Lieut. Calley's trial testimony. Readers who like to see Calley as scapegoat and martyr can read again his claim that the star prosecution witnesses were lying, and reflect on the lieutenant's reassertion that at My Lai he was acting not as a responsible individual but as the blind agent of the American people. What makes the book interesting are Calley's recollections of the months before and after My Lai.

Calley got into the Army in the first place almost by accident, when he ran out of gas and money in Albuquerque and decided to enlist. He talks in a convincing colloquial way about such things as pizza-pie-throwing contests at OCS, a one-day "wartime romance" with a Vietnamese prostitute named Yvonne, and the repeated indoctrination to kill, as well as to serve the almighty body count. According to Calley, almost nothing was said either about protecting civilians or adhering to the Geneva Convention. For three months after arriving in Viet Nam, just after the Tet offensive, Calley's company suffered heavy losses chasing an unseen enemy through mined rice paddies. Calley developed "a mild panic" that grew into hatred of the Vietnamese as Calley's patrols took repeated sniper and mortar fire from villages. The My Lai massacre followed at the height of this confusion and frustration, a sad confluence of bad training, bad leadership, bad intelligence and worse judgment.

It is ironic that the Calley memoir should produce funny and persuasive accounts of the frustrations that came from trooping around the rain forests of Southeast Asia. The first time he called for a full-sized field artillery strike he was bowled over. "BOOMBOOM! BOOMBOOM! And the world lit up: the house, the trees, the world was blowing away. It was a slow-motion movie of some atomic bomb, and I knew everyone in America had heard it. President Johnson! Congress!"

Marriage Proposals. On a night-ambush patrol, he tried to place his men quietly in a cornfield, but "it kept going crunch . . . I dropped my rifle once and I couldn't find it. I realized, God I'm spooking the water buffalos, and 1 have herds overrunning me. I'm waking the V.C. nation up."

My Lai took less than a day. Being 'First Lieut. William L. Calley Jr. of the My Lai massacre" is a role that Calley has endured for almost 2½ years. He seems candid enough in his portrayal of the jokes (four marriage proposals by mail) and pains of being alternately public menace or martyr. He conceives of himself now as a reflection of a conscience-stricken nation. "I must be a reflection they'll want to look at." As his trial began, Calley, says to himself, "I had a greater responsibility than the prosecutor." Every time television cameras turned on him, Calley thought: "I've got a big piece of spinach between my teeth."