Recalling the ‘insanity’ in My Lai
50 years ago, U.S. soldiers killed 504 Vietnamese civilians in one of history’s worst military crimes
Early morning on March 16, 1968, helicopters carrying U.S. soldiers flew into a tiny village on the eastern side of South Vietnam, bordering the South China Sea. They’d arrived by a series of hamlets, known as My Lai, expecting to find a boobytrapped stronghold of their enemy, the Viet Cong. Instead, all they saw were non-combatants: women, children, elderly men. Many of them were preparing for breakfast.
The Americans, about 100 soldiers from the Army’s Americal division, proceeded to massacre them. Over the next several hours, the civilians in My Lai and an adjacent settlement were shot and thrown in ditches. The body count: 504 people from more than 240 families. Some women were raped. Huts and homes were burned. Even the livestock was destroyed.
It was one of the worst American military crimes in history and still pierces the collective conscience of Vietnam War veterans. On Friday, an organization called the Vietnam Peace Commemoration Committee held a vigil in Lafayette Square across from the White House to acknowledge the American war crimes at My Lai.
Right after the attack, the soldiers — who had been told by their superiors the night before that everyone they’d see would be a Viet Cong guerrilla or sympathizer — kept quiet about what they’d done. For more than a year and a half, the public wouldn’t know about the atrocity. Top military officials initially tried to keep a lid on the killings and commanders even touted the mission to the press as a tactical feat. A United Press International wire service account published in newspapers March 16 reported that U.S. infantrymen “tangled with Communist forces threatening the northern city of Quang Ngai Saturday and U.S. spokesmen reported 128 guerrillas slain in the bitter fighting.” But a few paragraphs later, the article, unwittingly, contained an ominous foreshadowing: “Details of the fighting near Quang Ngai were sketchy.”
Soon, a government whistleblower and a promising journalist would expose the atrocity. In early 1969, Ronald Ridenhour, a veteran from Arizona, wrote a letter to the White House, Pentagon, State Department and numerous members of Congress, revealing his conversations with soldiers who participated or saw the attack. Ridenhour’s letter included details that made the allegations credible and worthy of investigation, including map co-ordinates of My Lai, witness names and the identities of the perpetrators, according to a congressional probe.
Ridenhour’s letters sparked a military investigation. By early September 1969, First Lt. William Laws Calley Jr., a 26-year- old college dropout from Miami who’d served as a platoon leader in the attack, was charged with the premeditated murder of 109 civilians. But the military only released the fact that Calley had been accused of murdering an unspecified number of people. Without knowing the magnitude of his crimes, the New York Times, for instance, only ran a fourparagraph Associated Press article on his arrest, running it on page 14. The press information officer “declined to give details of the case other than to say that the incident occurred in March, 1968, in Vietnam, and that the charge involves the deaths of more than one civilian,” according to the article.
Shortly after Calley had been charged, Seymour Hersh, a freelance reporter and former news aide to antiwar presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy, learned about My Lai from a lawyer opposed to the war. But he only got vague outlines. He started sniffing around. Eventually, he approached a Pentagon source. As he recalled in a New Yorker piece three years ago, the official slapped his hand against his knee, and said, “That boy Calley didn’t shoot anyone higher than this.” Now Hersh had what he needed to crack the story wide open. Eventually, he found that tiny Times article noting Calley’s full name and arrest. Then he visited Calley at Fort Benning, Ga., where he was being held. Incredibly, the Army allowed Hersh to read and takes note from Calley’s classified charging sheet — the document that showed Calley had been accused of killing 109 people. Even more incredible was that when Hersh completed his exposé and took it to Life and Look magazines, the editors rejected him. So Hersh took his story to the Dispatch News Service, which he described to the New Yorker as “a small antiwar news agency” in Washington. The story broke on the wires Nov. 12, 1969, and appeared in newspapers the next day.
With a dateline from Fort Benning, Hersh began his story this way: “Lt. William L. Calley Jr., 26 years old, is a mild-mannered, boyish-looking Vietnam combat veteran with the nickname ‘Rusty.’ The Army is completing an investigation of charges that he deliberately murdered at least 109 Vietnamese civilians in a search-and-destroy mission in March1968 in a Viet Cong stronghold known as ‘Pinkville.’ ”
Calley told Hersh he was merely following orders. His attorney, George W. Latimer, a former judge on the U.S. Court of Military Appeals, ridiculed the accusations against his client. “This is one case that should never have been brought,” Latimer said. “Whatever killing there was in a firefight in connection with the operation. You can’t afford to guess whether a civilian is a Viet Cong or not. Either they shoot you or you shoot them.”
Calley was the only officer convicted of playing a direct role in the massacre.
On March 29, 1971, Calley was found guilty of the premeditated murder of at least 22 Vietnamese civilians. He was sentenced to life in prison, but Nixon intervened and ordered that he serve under house arrest in a reduced sentence.
In early 1972, Hersh compiled all of his research and wrote a mammoth two-part series for the New Yorker. One soldier, Terry Reid of Milwaukee, described to Hersh what he’d seen when the onslaught erupted.
“As soon as they started opening up, it hit me that it was insanity. I walked to the rear. Pandemonium broke loose. It sounded insane — machine guns, grenades. One of the guys walked back, and I remember him saying, ‘We got sixty women, kids, and some old men.’ ”