zhi, only a few miles north of Tamsui. Sanzhi is the native village of President Lee Teng-hui. The attack was planned before the landing of the reinforcements from China at Keelung on March 8. All of us, about 45, were armed. I carried a dummy Japanese Type 38 rifle. We learned how to fire blanks -- dummy rifles which could fire only blanks were used in military drills -- in middle school during Japanese occupation of Taiwan. Some of us were armed with real rifles and pistols surrendered by policemen in Tamsui. Our purpose was to obtain weapons the Japanese had left in the small arsenal. A classmate of Lee Teng-hui was our war party leader. Like Lee, he was made a lieutenant in the Japanese imperial army at the end of the Second World War. We were aboard a truck to get to the arsenal. Before reaching our destination, we were fired upon. The Chinese guards strafed with machine guns. Fortunately, none of us were wounded. Those were, I believe, warning shots. Our commander planned a pincers attack. One section advanced for a frontal attack, while another section would surprise the enemy from behind. That tactic didn't work. We had to retreat without obtaining any weapons. In retreat, a couple of us dropped their dummy rifles, which were later picked up by the Chinese guards and identified as those kept in the Tanjiang High School arsenal. Its principal and an athletic education teacher were arrested and summarily executed. So were half a dozen of us in our small war party.
After that episode, I encountered a number of patrols aboard two-ton army trucks on which machine guns were mounted. I witnessed a younger brother of my classmate shot to death by a machine gun bullet. We were together on the main street of Tamsui a gendarme patrol passed through to enforce martial law. My friend and I were able to find cover behind brick columns in the covered sidewalk. His brother couldn't find a column and squatted beside a cement garbage box and got hit on the head.
That incident compelled my father to take me to Hsinchu, where he worked as a branch bank manager. He told me and one of my cousins Hsinchu was a safe place, because the commander of the force enforcing martial law in the area was a native-born islander. Su Shao-wen, the commander, was a major general. He went to China from Taiwan in his youth and was graduated from Chiang's military academy. We found Hsinchu truly peaceful, while the killing was going on elsewhere in Taiwan. In fact, there was no curfew. My cousin and I were able to go to movies every night while we were in that peaceful city. It was peaceful because General Su made sure his troops obeyed Chiang's order against retaliation.
There might be other pockets of peace in Taiwan. If government troops obeyed Chiang's order, there was no shooting to kill on sight. Even General Chen Yi couldn't enforce discipline among the reinforcing troops who just did what they were told by their company commanders or platoon leaders. Chiang Kai-shek as commander-in-chief was responsible for the massacre. But he certainly was not the chief culprit. In fact, there were no chief culprits. Troops and their commanders who ordered summary executions were all culprits.
On March 16, 1968, all 347 villagers, most of them women and children, were massacred in My Lai, Vietnam, by a U.S. rifle company. The slaughter came to light, and altogether 26 officers and men were court-martialed for murder. Only one of them, Lieutenant William Calley, was convicted and sentenced to life in prison. President Richard M. Nixon freed him after he served four and a half months. Not even Calley's divisional commander was charged as a culprit, let alone President Nixon.
Has Donald Rumsfeld, ex-secretary of defense, been called a chief culprit for the slaughter of Iraqi prisoners of war and civilians in the American-led invasion to topple Saddam Hussein? Or is Tony Blair so charged?
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