Christopher Levesque
speaker
103 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Christopher Levesque’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
We have a picture that looks like that. It, to me, reads more as people on a road rather than people in a ditch. But it gives that same type of impression.
He's not the only one who's tried. He's the only one who's convicted. Oh, okay. Captain Medina was also tried. An enlisted soldier was also tried.
But the reason it all falls apart is that at Captain Medina's trial, where he was acquitted, the military judge running the trial, the court-martial, told that no one who had testified before Congress, but during the congressional investigations, could testify at Medina's trial.
And because there were essentially then no witnesses that could be used, there was a lack of evidence and Medina was acquitted. Part of the reason for that is that the chair of the Armed Services Committee and the congressman who ran the congressional investigation refused to release the transcripts of the witnesses who testified in their investigation.
All of the witnesses had testified in an executive session. It was closed. So their testimony wasn't released. And this military judge said, well, if we can't have that testimony, we're not going to allow those witnesses. And that's where it all falls apart. The public mood. Was very, very against not only the trials, but Callie's conviction. What was he charged with?
Callie was charged with murder. And the phrase they used was Vietnamese human beings. And he was eventually convicted of 22 counts.
Just him. Some people do get some reductions in rank, but not as the result of trials. Samuel Coaster, the commanding officer of the 23rd Infantry Division, received a reduction in rank from major general to brigadier general. He resigned his position as superintendent of West Point during the hearings. He was eventually cleared, but he kept that reduction in rank.
The thing he faced was that he and his assistant division commander, Brigadier General George Young had not followed regulations and reported the war crimes allegations. And so they faced reductions of rank and eventually soon retired from the service, even though they were cleared of things like having a cover-up.
Yes, and I don't remember where that quote came from, but it is the type of thing that he and other soldiers expressed regularly about the war. And Callie was not an especially introspective type of a person. Right. But that was the feeling of most of the people who served.
He was sentenced to life at hard labor, which is typically going to be somewhere like Fort Leavenworth, which is one of the prime locations for that type of a sentence. And that didn't really happen. So within three days of his conviction on March 31st of 1971, Calley was released to house arrest by President Richard Nixon.
Following that, Lieutenant General Albert O'Connor, the commanding general of the Third Army, used his own authority to commute Kelly's sentence to 20 years. And then Calley appealed this in district court and was freed on bond in February of 1974.
And the judge in that case held that the pretrial publicity and the House of Representatives refusal to release testimony meant that Calley couldn't have a fair trial. And so while the Army appealed that ruling, The new secretary of the Army, Howard Calloway, reviewed the conviction, reduced the sentence to 10 years. And this is part of the law. This is supposed to happen.
What this does is that it makes Calley eligible for parole because at this point he had served three years and four months and Army regulation made prisoners eligible for parole after they had completed a third of their sentence. Wow. But this isn't over yet. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the district court's ruling and returned Kenley to custody. in June of 1974.
Calley appealed again in September of 1974. So he was released again. The full Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit overturned it. The Army refused to put Calley back in prison for the last 10 days of his sentence. So at this point in September of 1974, Calley is out. Right.
This would normally be the end, but it kept going because Callie appealed the Fifth Circuit's decision because it meant he was still guilty. And it finally comes to a close, at least in terms of legal matters, when the Supreme Court refused to hear his appeal of the Fifth Circuit's decision in April of 1976.
So ultimately, he spends maybe three and a half years total in punishment for killing at least 22 people.
In Vietnam, it does not appear to have. We have changes to what's happening in Vietnam as a result of the election of Richard Nixon. He had promoted the process called Vietnamization, which involved withdrawing American troops and having the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, ARVN, do more of the work of defending South Vietnam. This led to a couple of changes in how we did things.
Ultimately, we are, toward the end of American involvement, just using air power. Congress starts getting to the point where they withhold funding for combat operations in Vietnam. And there are some combat refusals as a result of the Vietnamization policy. Because not only are we still not having a strategy of holding territory, but nobody wants to be the last person to die in Vietnam.
And so troops start refusing to take that hill or go on certain patrols. There's a famous revolt in the Navy where soldiers of the, I believe it was the Constellation,
essentially held a strike refusing to put sea so all of this is happening at the time and and the american public had been getting more skeptical of the war over the course of 1967 as casualties mounted and then really turned against it after ted yeah after vietnam though there is renewed focus and part of the reason this can happen is because we get the all-volunteer force after 1973.
Showing 81–100 of 103 · page 5 of 6
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