When it Ceases to be Chutzpah

I received a comment about this week's Chutzpah of the Week award, which demonstrated that the case I had cited occurs in other countries and other bureaucratic settings. Actually, I had been thinking about this (but still in a military setting) last night, when I was reading Robert Stone's review of Tom Bissell's new book, The Father of All Things: A Marine, His Son, and the Legacy of Vietnam, in The New York Review. The heart of this book is about a trip that the author made with his father, who had served as a Marine Corps officer in Vietnam and was wounded there, to return to visit Vietnam. Stone's review is highly favorable, but I was particularly struck by his own sense of priorities:

The most successful combination of the book's several elements—and the most harrowing—is the section that records both Bissells' visit to the hamlet of Tu Cong, notoriously misidentified by the US Army as My Lai, in Quang Ngai province. As "My Lai" it because and remains one of the famous atrocities of war and "an ethical catastrophe," in Tom Bissell's words, for the United States.

For those unfamiliar with this incident, the heart of the catastrophe involved at least a hundred children under the age of five dying under fire from our troops. I suspect the reason Stone put such a high value on this part of the book is because of what the elder Bissell told his son, "What you don't understand is that things like My Lai happened all the time on a much smaller scale." This, for me, had far more impact than any of the reflections, however sincere they may have been, of Robert McNamara in The Fog of War, simply because the elder Bissell was there on the ground, while McNamara was safe in his office dealing with the "fire" of nothing more than complex analytical reports. So it is that, while I would never accuse anyone living under fire (or threat of fire) of chutzpah, those conditions make the chutzpah of the bureaucrats who manipulate their fates all the more in need of recognition.