My Lai massacre photographer laments US ‘carnage’ fifty years on

Fifty years after taking photos of an American massacre of Vietnamese villagers, a former US army photographer said he is sorry for the “carnage” his countrymen unleashed in one of the war’s worst atrocities.

Ronald Haeberle said he started snapping instinctively, capturing the chilling photos that would later expose the full extent of the My Lai massacre: 504 Vietnamese dead in a single day, mostly unarmed women and children.

“I wanted to remember what was happening there, I wanted to capture a moment in time, and I did,” he said while touring the My Lai massacre museum in the village on Friday, the 50th anniversary of the killings.

His images would eventually help to blow the lid on the cover-up of the massacre, as controversy over the killings cascaded up military ranks and eventually embroiled then-US president Richard Nixon.

The gruesome pictures, some depicting bare-bottomed babies face down in a ditch alongside piles of corpses, added fuel to a mounting antiwar movement in the United States and eventually led to several charges against military officers.

Haeberle was in My Lai, known as Son My by Vietnamese, with US troops on that day in 1968 for what he was told was an ambush to clear Viet Cong rebels from the rice-growing hamlet in central Vietnam, which was believed to be a hotbed of communist resistance.

But as he toured the village with another reporter, he realized most of the dead weren’t armed enemies.

“It was complete carnage what we witnessed inside the village, but it happened,” he said after a sombre ceremony Friday attended by hundreds of mourners, including massacre survivors, officials and American veterans of the Vietnam War.

“It was a tragedy, something happened that should not have happened. There was no combatants, they were all civilians,” he said.