Stand Watie Quotes
Poor Andy Nave was killed. He refused to surrender and was shot by Dick Fields. I felt sorry as he used to be quite friendly towards me before the war, but it could not be helped.
Watie, Stand. Letter. Cherokee Cavaliers: Forty Years of Cherokee History as Told in the Correspondence of the Ridge-Watie-Boudinot Family, edited by Edward Everett Dale and Gaston Litton, University of Oklahoma Press, 1939, p. 119.
A number of the American soldiers refused to obey Calley's illegal order. Some helped some villagers to escape, and a helicopter pilot landed betreen Callery's men and the villagers they were shooting at, and ordered his helicopter machine gun crew to fire on the soldiers if they did back off. The soldiers stopped firing at the civillians. However, his and other reports of the massacre were covered up by the military for a few years. Mai Lai was not the only major war crime perpetrated by Americans in the Vietnam War; there had been a few others. But given the years of fighting and the many opportunities war crimes violations under orders were quite rare. The Viet Cong had many more war crimes that they perpetrated, and our South Vietnamese allies repeatedly committed war crimes against their own people.
Stand Watie (Cherokee: ᏕᎦᏔᎦ, romanized: Degataga, lit. 'Stand firm'), also known as Standhope Uwatie, Tawkertawker, and Isaac S. Watie, was a leader of the Cherokee Nation. The nation allied with the Confederacy, and he was the only Native American to attain a general's rank in the Civil War, Confederacy or Union. He commanded the Confederate Indian cavalry of the Army of the Trans-Mississippi, made up mostly of Cherokee, Muskogee and Seminole. He was the last Confederate general in the field to cease hostilities at war's end.
