The following are excerpts from "Life," "Time," "Newsweek," and the Minneapolis "Tribune," relating to two murders which shocked the American people.  The first took place in Chicago during July of 1966 and was on the front page of every paper in the country only hours later; it will be referred to as "Speck."  The second took place in Vietnam, during July of 1968 and didn't hit the papers until twenty-two months later; it will be referred to as "Mylai."  The first must have been by far the bigger crime.
 

Speck: In an incredible, nearly soundless orgy of mutilation and murder that took place in the early morning hours, a single male intruder herded together and murdered, with packing-house precision, eight pretty student nurses.
Mylai: The army, Monday, ordered a lieutenant court-martialed on charges of the premeditated murder of 109 Vietnamese, in the alleged massacre at Song My village.
 

Speck: "In my six years as coroner, and in many years as police surgeon, I have never seen anything as bad.  This is the crime of the century."
Mylai: "The people who ordered it probably didn't think it would look so bad," says Sgt. Michael A. Bernhardt.
 

Speck: . . . a heart-rending, stomach-turning spectacle.
Mylai: The South Vietnamese government, which has conducted its own investigation, says that Mylai was "an act of war."
 

Speck: . . . savagely killed their eight friends.
Mylai: "So I might have killed 10 or 15 of them."
 

Speck: How can any man give himself over to such an exercise in savagery as the calm and methodical murder of eight other human beings?
Mylai: In one major accusation, Calley is accused of killing "an unknown number of Oriental human beings, not less than seventy . . . by shooting them with a rifle."
 

Speck: . . . poignancy was accentuated by the youth and decency of the victims.
Mylai: "This really tiny little kid--he only had a shirt on, nothing else--he came over to the pile and held the hand of one of the dead.  One of the GIs behind me dropped into a kneeling position, 30 meters from the kid, and killed him with a single shot."
 

Speck: . . . grisly dimensions of the massacre.
Mylai:  Medina got back on the horn and said, "I have a body count of 310."
 

Speck: What obscene signals from his brain drove his brute hands?
Mylai: "It was a ditch.  And so we started pushing them off and we started shooting them, so altogether we pushed them all (80 or so) off, and just started using automatics on them.  Men, women and children.  And babies."
 

Speck: . . . by any standard, it was one of the most horrifying crimes in U.S. history.
Mylai: Says the company's Corporal William Kern, "I can't figure out why everybody is so upset.  Especially Ridenhour, who wasn't even there.  How can it bother you if you're not even there?"
 

Speck: Above all, why?

The incident at Mylai was a "war atrocity," and that implies that there is something that happens in war that is not atrocious.  My draft lottery number is 291, so I am safe.  If my birthday had been the first one drawn, I would have worn that number ONE proudly, and it would not have been a bit more likely that I would ever serve in the armed forces of these United States.