My Lai Massacre

11 Key excerpts on "My Lai Massacre"

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  Warring over Valor

  How Race and Gender Shaped American Military Heroism in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries

  • Simon Wendt(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Rutgers University Press

    (Publisher)

  From 1969 to 1971, the Army undertook three investigations, and the House Armed Services Committee held hearings on the My Lai assault. American journalists, led by Seymour Hersh, interviewed many of the participants for their own investigative reports. Legal and military historians have further analyzed the massacre. Much of this research tried to determine what happened, why it hap pened, and how the American public and political establishment responded. There is near unanimity that this was an illegal massacre of approximately 500 Vietnamese civilians, but why the massacre took place remains a subject of some debate. The three most likely causes are: (1) the mental breakdown of American soldiers and units fighting a guerilla enemy embedded in civilian communities; (2) the failure of leadership to control American soldiers’ interactions with civilians; and (3) U.S. military policy that measured success by “body counts” of casualties among Vietnamese communist forces. As German scholar Bernd Greiner argues, these factors led to more violence against civilians in Vietnam than in earlier American wars—violence that was epitomized by, but not limited to, My Lai. 5 Many of the journalists and scholars who have covered My Lai have noted that men such as Calley and Thompson were portrayed as heroes by different segments of the American public, but few have analyzed the effect of the massacre on the concept of military heroism. During and immediately after Calley’s court-martial trial, public support for Calley bordered on hero worship, stunning many of the journalists who covered the story. Richard Hammer, the New York Times reporter covering the trial, bemoaned the tragedy that Calley had become “a hero for our time.” Hammer found it “impossible to think of him as a hero or to consider his acts of heroic stature.” Legal scholar Michael Belknap called Calley an “unlikely hero” in his account of the lieutenant’s conviction and the popular backlash to it

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  This Time We Win

  Revisiting the Tet Offensive

  • James S Robbins(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Encounter Books

    (Publisher)

  Those who committed the crimes were doing the bidding of their superiors, and had the Tet Offensive turned out the way the North Vietnamese leadership had expected, they would have been hailed as heroes. In short, we regard My Lai as an atrocity; the enemy regarded Hue as a job well done. The belief grew that civilian killings like those at My Lai were commonplace in Vietnam, even routine. In 1970 lawyer Mark Lane, previously known for writing sensationalistic books promoting Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories, published Conversations with Americans, which was billed as “one of the most shocking, eye-opening books ever encountered in the annals of wartime reporting.” The book was based on interviews with American troops, and contained a number of confessions by Vietnam veterans who had participated in a variety of gruesome activities, vividly portrayed. Lane worked with the Vietnam Veterans Against the War to organize the “Winter Soldier Investigations,” a media event held in Detroit January 31-February 2, 1971, to publicize alleged war crimes and atrocities perpetrated by the U.S. military. 109 veterans and 16 civilians gathered in a Detroit hotel to tell similar tales of brutality and barbarity. This event led to hearings before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations that April, during which VVAW member John Kerry gave emotional testimony that brought him to national prominence and launched his political career. Other groups, such as the Committee of Concerned Asia Scholars, prominently represented by Noam Chomsky, trumpeted war crimes allegations at every turn. American troops were called baby killers and people spat on them. The entire conflict was delegitimized, and by 1975 it was easy enough to blank out South Vietnam when the country was in its death throes

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  War Crimes and Trials

  A Primary Source Guide

  • James Larry Taulbee(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • ABC-CLIO

    (Publisher)

  Distinguishing noncombatants from enemy fighters formed an everyday problem for American soldiers because the Viet Cong often wore the same clothing as villagers. As a solution to the problem, the U.S. military had designated areas seen as enemy “strongholds” as “free fire zones.” A “free fire zone” was an area where all friendly forces had supposedly been evacuated. Any remaining people were then presumed hostile. Within the borders of a free fire zone, military action could be used for complete destruction of objectives on the initiative of local commanders. The evacuation of “friendly” villagers necessary for establishing a free fire zone generated resentment in the local population, as did the destruction afterwards from frequent bombing missions and artillery attacks. “Pinkville” was in a free fire zone.

  THE MY LAI OPERATION

  The My Lai Massacre stands out as the most notorious U.S. military incident of the Vietnam War. Still, any discussion of the violations of the law of war in general, and at My Lai in particular, must be viewed against the background of the enemy’s activities. As emphasized in previous cases, while the actions of an enemy may explain a reaction, they do not justify it. The My Lai operation was designed as a classic search-and-destroy sweep intended to trap some of the estimated 250 Viet Cong operating in the area. Prior to this operation, such sweeps had not generated sustained direct contact with the VC, but Charlie Company still had suffered a significant number of losses to snipers, mines, and booby-trap incidents.

  My Lai 4 comprised a cluster of hamlets (small groups of houses) that formed part of the larger Son My village complex. The Americans believed that My Lai housed the headquarters of the Viet Cong local-force 48th Battalion, which had inflicted heavy losses on Charlie Company during the previous weeks. The U.S. plan called for an airmobile assault (delivery of troops by helicopter) into My Lai 4 to arrive shortly after the local women had departed for market.

  Instead when Calley’s platoon entered the hamlet, they found the village occupied by noncombatants, mainly the elderly, children, and women still cooking breakfast. The U.S. soldiers began indiscriminately shooting people as they ran from their huts. Survivors were systematically rounded up, led to a nearby ditch, and executed. As the unit continued its sweep of the hamlet, more villagers were killed and huts and bunkers destroyed by fire and explosives. The killing stopped only when Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson, an aero-scout pilot supporting the operation, landed his helicopter between the Americans and some fleeing Vietnamese and confronted the soldiers. By this time, Lt. Calley and the platoon had killed an estimated 350–500 Vietnamese civilians. One American soldier in Charlie Company had been wounded by friendly fire.

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  Yamashita's Ghost

  War Crimes, MacArthur's Justice, and Command Accountability

  • Allan A. Ryan(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • University Press of Kansas

    (Publisher)

  18 The Seventies My Lai On the morning of March 16, 1968, near the east coast of South Vietnam, Second Lieutenant William L. Calley led his platoon of twenty-five American soldiers on a combat assault operation in the village of My Lai, known as “Pinkville” or “My Lai 4” in local army parlance. Calley’s unit, three months in the country and untested by combat, was eager for action. Intelligence reports had identified My Lai 4 as the headquarters of a battalion of the North Vietnamese Army. On Saturday morning the civilians would have left for market, leaving the village to the enemy soldiers. The intelligence was wrong. The families who lived there had not gone to market, and there were no enemy soldiers. The next several hours were one of the most shameful chapters in American military history. The men of the platoon, led by Calley himself, murdered, raped, and brutalized hundreds of men, women, and children, laying waste to the community and nearly everyone in it. Children barely old enough to walk were cut down by automatic rifle fire; schoolgirls were raped and then murdered; old women were shot in the back as they tried to flee; the modest huts were set on fire; not even the animals were spared. Some 400 Vietnamese were murdered that day, the great majority of them women, children, and old men. By midday, the carnage was over, and the soldiers, spent and exhausted, returned to their base camp a few miles away. Reports were made of a victorious engagement with the enemy. The army public information office, as usual, issued a press release. The next day, the New York Times reported on an inside page, “American troops caught a North Vietnamese force in a pincer movement on the central coastal plain yesterday, killing 128 enemy soldiers in daylong fighting.” The operation took place “in an area of sand dunes and scrub brush” and brought the number of enemy dead that week to 569

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  Memory, Trauma, and Identity

  • Ron Eyerman(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  A war may cause moral injury to individual soldiers, to the military institutions that train and deploy them, and to the nation that legitimates the entire process. The killings at My Lai were of a traditional sort. They were hands-on and the enemy was dehumanized and lumped, literally, into a faceless mass. It was the unintended consequence of Haeberle’s photographs to put a face on the victims and, at the same time, transform the soldiers into perpetrators. The photographs, as Oliver insightfully points out, “replicate the gaze of the killers” without disclosing their agency (2006 : 133). At the time of their killing, no attempt was made to distinguish non-combatants and no prisoners were taken. Still, there was ambiguity of the sort that insurgent warfare makes possible. Also present was the possibility of shifting responsibility up the ladder, even for those who clearly felt they were doing wrong. For others though, any feelings of wrongdoing would come later, usually after they had left the organizational culture and formal control of the military. This time lapse is not the “latency period” one finds in psychoanalytic notions of trauma; it has more to do with moving from one moral universe to another. Shay speaks of modern warfare as a form of “captivity” that generates “a profound gulf” between the combatants and the community left behind. Accordingly, the veteran carries the “taint of the killer” when re-entering society (2003 : 152). Any such stigmatization and feelings of alienation are only intensified by negative reactions to the war itself. As is well documented, returning Vietnam veterans were not hailed as heroes and were often branded “baby-killers,” as were those, like President Lyndon Johnson, deemed responsible for their acts. The uniform was not proudly worn upon return, but was more often discarded as soon as possible

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  Atrocity and American Military Justice in Southeast Asia

  Trial by Army

  • Louise Barnett(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  Public pressure, from the uneducated working class that suffered and bled the most in Vietnam, ultimately brought about Calley’s release. After the guilty verdict, the White House was deluged with thousands of letters and telegrams, almost all expressing outrage at the conviction. They are typically handwritten, often in pencil, on cheap paper. Grammatically, they are akin to the testimony of the uneducated witnesses at Calley’s court-martial. This does not mean that their arguments are invalid. The letters say things like “he did his job and now this is how he’s repaid. If there is any blaming to do, he isn’t the only one.” This was a common, as well as a commonsensical, theme. One person wrote to Calley: “If you are truly guilty then many American civilians and your commanding officers are equally guilty.” A Vietnam veteran wrote that his unit never did anything on as large a scale as My Lai, but that if he were to total the number of “men, women, and children shot because they looked like VC or were too scared to stand still when we approached, you could double the number as were killed at My Lai.” The massacre became a symbol of the war, a large-scale example of the way it was in smaller actions throughout Vietnam.

  In a system where everyone’s value is measured by position in a hierarchy, it is hardly surprising that the logic of superior/inferior permeates everything. In action in the field, American soldiers did not hesitate to kill unarmed and unresisting Vietnamese civilians. For the soldiers at My Lai, the Vietnamese villagers that they sexually assaulted and brutally killed were recognizably not enemy soldiers, but they did belong to a lower order: they were dinks, gooks, Viet Cong sympathizers, or merely people hostile to the American side and thus assimilated to the enemy. Twenty-one men who heard the briefing given the day before the operation of 16 March testified that Captain Medina told them to kill every living thing. There was much controversy about whether Medina had said to kill women and children. He denied it, and many listeners could not remember, but some were certain that he had included them, not by saying “kill women and children,” but by more ambiguous statements. One soldier testified that Medina said that “he didn’t want to see anything living but GIs.” Another was asked: “You didn’t expect to meet any women and children in the village, did you?” He replied: “No, sir, just VC and VC sympathizers.” Still another said that someone had asked Medina if they were supposed to kill women and children, and the captain replied: “Kill everything that moves.” Another recalled that he had said: “Kill everything that breathes.” So, all distinctions were to be obliterated: the My Lai villagers of any age or sex belonged to a class of people who no longer had the right to move or breathe. They were to be killed along with the community water buffalos.

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  Censoring History

  Perspectives on Nationalism and War in the Twentieth Century

  • Laura E. Hein, Mark Selden(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Within my original sample of twelve, treatments of the war grew less competent, not more, with the passage of time. The only textbook among them to provide a serious treatment of My Lai, for example, was Discovering American History, published in 1974. Three others mentioned My Lai; published in 1975, 1983, and 1984, they were among the next oldest books in my sample. Eight books never mentioned My Lai or any similar incident or problem; their publication dates ranged from 1979 to 1990 and averaged 1985. The 1998 American People now joins the oldest with a competent treatment of My Lai. In contrast, Boorstin and Kelley grant just two sentences to My Lai, and their real purpose is to raise readers’ ire against the Vietcong: “Shortly after Tet, the American public was shocked to hear that United States troops had killed some 300 civilians, mostly women and children, in the little village of My Lai. The fact that the Viet Cong had murdered many hundreds of civilians during their month-long occupation of Hue was lost in the American distress over the atrocity committed by U.S. troops in My Lai.” Again, Hakim’s middle school textbook does better—she devotes a page to the massacre and includes an analysis by Neil Sheehan tying that incident to the more general policies of the U.S. military command. She alone also tells what happened to Lieutenant William Calley, who led the massacre. In its 1990 edition The American People had told of his reduction in sentence, but nothing about Calley survives the 1998 revision. Hakim also does something unusual in her discussion of Calley—she displays a point of view: “Lt. William Calley, Jr., who had directed much of the massacre (and who personally killed 109 Vietnamese, including babies), was the only soldier convicted of a crime. He was court-martialed and sentenced to life in prison at hard labor

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  Resolving Deep-Rooted Conflicts

  Essays on the Theory and Practice of Interactive Problem-Solving

  • Herbert C. Kelman, Werner Wintersteiner, Wilfried Graf, Werner Wintersteiner, Wilfried Graf(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Even to the extent that the actions at My Lai occurred spontaneously, without reference to superior orders, those committing them had ample reason to assume that such actions would not be punished and might even be tacitly approved by the military authorities. Actions similar to those at My Lai, although perhaps not on the same scale, were not uncommon in Vietnam, and the authorities had quite clearly shown a permissive attitude toward them. Not only had they failed to punish such acts in most cases, but the very strategies and tactics that they themselves consistently devised were based on the proposition that the civilian population of South Vietnam – regardless of whether it involved “hostile” or “friendly” elements – was totally expendable. Such policies as search-and-destroy missions, the establishment of free-shooting zones, the use of anti-personnel weapons, the bombing of entire villages if they were suspected of harboring guerrillas, the forced migration of masses of the rural population, and the defoliation of vast forest areas helped to legitimize acts of massive violence of the kind that occurred at My Lai.

  The events at My Lai suggest an orientation to authority based on unquestioning obedience to superior orders no matter how destructive the actions called for by these orders. Such obedience is specifically fostered in the course of military training and reinforced by the structure of the military authority situation. It also reflects, however, an ideological orientation that may be widespread in general populations. It seems that such an ideology – similar to although obviously rooted in different historical experiences and probably differing in many nuances from that suggested for Nazi Germany – is accepted by large numbers of Americans. In a national survey of public reactions to the Calley trial (Kelman and Lawrence, 1972), conducted a few weeks after the conviction of Lt. Calley had been announced, we asked respondents what they thought they would do if they were soldiers in Vietnam and were ordered by their superior officers to shoot all inhabitants of a village suspected of aiding the enemy, including old men, women, and children. Fifty-one percent of our sample said that they would follow orders and shoot; 33 percent said that they would refuse to shoot. We cannot infer, of course, from their responses to a hypothetical question what these individuals would actually do if they found themselves in the situation described. Our data do suggest, however, that they are prepared, in principle, to engage in mass violence if faced with authoritative orders to do so. They are certainly prepared to condone such actions; they regard obedience to orders under these circumstances – even if that means shooting unarmed civilians – as the normatively expected, the required, indeed the right and moral thing for the good citizen to do. In short, the cognitive and ideological grounding for mass violence in an authority situation seems to be present in large segments of the US population (and very probably of other populations as well; see, for example, Mann, 1973).

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  Morality's Muddy Waters

  Ethical Quandaries in Modern America

  • George Cotkin(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • University of Pennsylvania Press

    (Publisher)

  They also carried with them a desire for revenge, and they operated, as noted earlier, under orders that were at best ambiguous. Of course, they had to have sufficiently hardened themselves and dehumanized the Vietnamese in order to fit small children and others under the rubric of the enemy. Indeed, this theme of the “mutual dehumanization,” to use a phrase coined by Vietnam expert Bernard B. Fall, of the Americans and the Vietnamese is commonly employed to explain the massacre. 78 As the Americans did to the Japanese during the World War II, and vice versa, they came to see the enemy as less than human, reducing them to epithets such as “gook, dink, and slope.” The testimony of many of the My Lai killers and bystanders bears this out. In addition to rejecting “the humanity of the victims,” Americans became dehumanized in their own fashion. 79 No one would argue that dehumanization crept like a vine in the dark jungles of Vietnam, but it is simply inadequate to explain the extent of the killing that day. It is as much an effect as it is a cause. The killing began at the periphery, perhaps even in a way that comported with military procedure. Fearful of the incoming troops, some Vietnamese civilians might have attempted to run away to the relative safety of the bushes; perhaps, too, either they failed to understand Americans’ commands to stop or the soldiers shot first without any warning given. This early killing definitely set the stage for the massive destruction and murder that continued throughout the day. Let us return to Lieutenant Calley and his role. Calley believed that everyone in the village that day was marked for execution because they were members of the enemy or potential members of the enemy. If we can believe Calley’s later testimony at the trial, he was unable or unwilling to distinguish among potential enemy combatants, real combatants, and innocents

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  The Criminology of War

  • Ruth Jamieson(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Even to the extent that the actions at My Lai occurred spontaneously, without reference to superior orders, those committing them had ample reason to assume that such actions would not be punished and might even be tacitly approved by the military authorities. Actions similar to those at My Lai, though perhaps not on the same scale, were not uncommon in Vietnam, and the authorities had quite clearly shown a permissive attitude toward them. Not only had they failed to punish such acts in most cases, but the very strategies and tactics that they themselves consistently devised were based on the proposition that the civilian population of South Vietnam—regardless of whether it involved “hostile” or “friendly” elements—was totally expendable. Such policies as search-and-destroy missions, the establishment of free-shooting zones, the use of anti-personnel weapons, the bombing of entire villages if they were suspected of harboring guerrillas, the forced migration of masses of the rural population, and the defoliation of vast forest areas helped to legitimize acts of massive violence of the kind that occurred at My Lai.

  The events at My Lai suggest an orientation to authority based on unquestioning obedience to superior orders no matter how destructive the actions called for by these orders. Such obedience is specifically fostered in the course of military training and reinforced by the structure of the military authority situation. It also reflects, however, an ideological orientation that may be widespread in general populations. It seems that such an ideology—similar to though obviously rooted in different historical experiences and probably differing in many nuances from that suggested for Nazi Germany—is accepted by large numbers of Americans. In a national survey of public reactions to the Calley trial (Kelman & Lawrence, 1972), conducted a few weeks after the conviction of Lt. Calley had been announced, we asked respondents what they thought they would do if they were soldiers in Vietnam and were ordered by their superior officers to shoot all inhabitants of a village suspected of aiding the enemy, including old men, women, and children. Fifty-one percent of our sample said that they would follow orders and shoot; 33% said that they would refuse to shoot. We cannot infer, of course, from their responses to a hypothetical question what these individuals would actually do if they found themselves in the situation described. Our data do suggest, however, that they are prepared, in principle, to engage in mass violence if faced with authoritative orders to do so. They are certainly prepared to condone such actions; they regard obedience to orders under these circumstances—even if that means shooting unarmed civilians—as the normatively expected, the required, indeed the right and moral thing for the good citizen to do. In short, the cognitive and ideological grounding for mass violence in an authority situation seems to be present in large segments of the US population (and very probably of other populations as well; see, for example, Mann, 1973).

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  Colin Powell

  Imperfect Patriot

  • Jeffrey J. Matthews(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • University of Notre Dame Press

    (Publisher)

  * This was a complete reversal from Powell’s description in his response to Tom Glen’s damning letter.

  Two decades after My Lai, when asked by an interviewer about the massacre, Powell again described the Vietnamese civilian populace as hostile. “[It was] lousy Indian country,” he said. “I don’t mean to be ethnically or politically unconscious, but it was awful. There were nothing but VC in there. I’m not excusing what happened, but when you went in there, you were fighting everybody” (emphases added).92 Similarly, in his memoirs, Powell vividly describes the region surrounding My Lai: “I knew it had been a hellhole, a rough piece of territory inhabited by VC sympathizers. . . . Every time we sent units there, we could expect dozens of traumatic amputations at the evacuation hospital from mines and booby traps sown by enemy guerrillas and sympathetic peasants, including women, even children.”93 Consistent with his sworn statement in support of Donaldson, Powell’s 1995 book defended the American practice of shooting male peasants from helicopters. If Vietnamese men, he wrote, wore “black pajamas,” “looked remotely suspicious,” and “moved” after a warning shot, then they were killed. “Brutal?” Powell asked. “Maybe so. . . . The kill-or-be-killed nature of combat tends to dull fine perceptions of right and wrong.”94 *

  Glen’s accusation that many soldiers from the U.S. Army’s Eleventh Infantry routinely committed acts of violence against South Vietnamese civilians might have ended with General Cooksey’s defiant retort, but in late March 1969, while Powell and Donaldson were still stationed at Americal headquarters, Ron Ridenhour, another veteran of the division, penned his own letter about atrocities committed by U.S. soldiers in Vietnam. He sent copies of his detailed statement not just to the army’s upper echelon, but also to members of Congress, the secretary of state, and the president. Unlike Glen, Ridenhour provided a specific account of the My Lai Massacre and pleaded for a public investigation.95

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