When To Disobey

Of many events competing for the headlines, some hit me harder because of links to my experience. The shooting of two National Guard members feels personal; they came from West Virginia, where I grew up. Anti-vax policies haunt me after decades of work to help cut global polio cases by 99.9 percent. ICE activity and resistance grab my attention especially in Rogers Park, Chicago, very near my former home.

Two recent news items take me back to the Vietnam era, when my now-deceased husband served a four-year enlistment in the U.S. Army. On hearing that U.S. troops had killed hundreds of unarmed civilians in the village of My Lai, he denounced not only the officer who gave the order but every soldier who followed it. His military training, he told me, had clearly spelled out how to tell a legal from an illegal order, and the duty to obey the first and disobey the second.

A couple of weeks ago, six lawmakers released a video notifying members of the military of the obligation not to obey an unlawful order. Regardless of the lawmakers’ purpose, wisdom, or actual target audience, they weren’t saying anything our men and women in uniform didn't already know.

Questions of legality now surround Congressional inquiries into U.S. strikes on suspected Venezuelan drug boats and the killing of two survivors clinging to the wreckage. This called to mind another statement from my soldier husband. We’re not a military dictatorship, he said. It’s for the elected and appointed civilian officials to decide questions of policy, and for the military to carry out those decisions impartially, within legal bounds. Ultimately, it’s for us voters to make our voices heard.

Image: My Lai, Vietnam, March 16, 1968. Photo by Ronald Haeberle, then U.S. Army combat photographer, cropped.