My Lai and Vietnam spell the end of an era for the United States Army. The old order is as dead as the horse cavalry, as dated as the prewar military of James Jones's From Here to Eternity. Visible things may not have changed much, but the meaning and spirit of military life have already been altered beyond repair, We will never look at the uniform in the same way, and soldiers will never again feel the same things about themselves.

The Calley case has laid bare a neglected fact: Of all the major nations and their armies, the United States and its army have been, in moral terms, the least able to deal with the type of situation Vietnam has presented.

The American style of war has always been the engineer's style—for West Point is, traditionally, a school for engineers. We apply technology to grossly defined problems. We seek our military solutions in logistics, sheer manpower and firepower, thus over- powering all discrimination and subtlety. We have no military caste; since the permanent expansion of our standing army in the 1940's, the influence of the old American military families and schools has been submerged, and with it the last vestige of the aristocratic military ethos.

During these last few months, in the furor surrounding the Calley trial, the Berrigan indictment and the exposure of F.B.I, documents stolen from its office in Media, Pennsylvania, many Americans have become aware, on a new dimension of intensity, of the way in which our public institutional life has become corrupted by governmental efforts to repress dissent. Much must be blamed on the Vietnamese war, to be sure. But public disgust over the war merely brought this corruption out in the open. Every revelation of the extent of the development of an internal police network to repress dissent has revealed that its roots go back not only to the early days of the Civil Rights movement but that it is a survivor of the McCarthy era of Red-baiting.

It is a truism that knowledge is power and that secret knowledge is secret power. Both are a threat to democratic governments. One of the reasons why the totalitarian governments of both Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany were able to enslave their peoples was the fact that their security police and intelligence agencies expanded their legitimate security functions to include widespread political surveillance of all persons suspected of being ”subversive.“

Inevitably, in an atmosphere of heightened political and social tensions, one man's liberal is another man's subversive. The definition of “subversive” can easily be expanded to include anyone who in any way opposes government policy or criticizes the established political and social order.