Ernest Medina, acquitted in My Lai massacre, dies

Ernest L. Medina, the Army captain who was accused of overall responsibility for the March 1968 mass killings of unarmed South Vietnamese men, women and children by troops he commanded in what became known as the My Lai Massacre, but was acquitted at a court-martial, died Tuesday in Peshtigo, Wisconsin. He was 81.

His death was confirmed by the Thielen Funeral Home in Marinette, a nearby town where he had lived. The cause was not given.

On March 16, 1968, a month and a half after North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces launched the Tet offensive, wide-ranging attacks that stunned the U.S. military command in the Vietnam War, Medina and the three platoons of his infantry company entered the village of My Lai in South Vietnam’s south central coast region.

What happened over the hours that followed became one of darkest chapters of U.S. military history. An Army inquiry ultimately determined that 347 civilians were killed that day—shot, bayoneted or blasted with grenades. A Vietnamese memorial erected at the site has put the toll at 504.

But the mass killings were not exposed until November 1969, when the independent journalist Seymour Hersh, tipped off to the atrocity, wrote of it in a series of articles that brought him a Pulitzer Prize for international reporting.

The revelations were shocking in an America already divided over an increasingly unpopular war. But Medina and Lieutenant William L. Calley Jr., who was subsequently convicted of murder at a court-martial as the leader of the platoon that carried out the massacre, came to be viewed by many as scapegoats in an unwinnable conflict.

Medina and his men of Charlie Company, a unit in the 11th Brigade of the Americal Division, engaged in “search and destroy operations” in March 1968 aimed at clearing the Viet Cong from populated areas where they were presumed to have taken refuge.

According to Medina’s testimony at Calley’s court-martial, Army intelligence had advised that the villagers of My Lai would be doing their customary shopping at a nearby marketplace when the troops arrived. Those left in the village at that hour would supposedly be Viet Cong soldiers who had blended in with the population.

The intelligence was faulty. While Medina remained near his helicopter’s landing spot a few hundred yards outside My Lai, keeping in radio contact with his men, Calley, an inexperienced officer, and his equally green infantrymen rampaged through the village, encountering only unarmed civilians.

The massacre that unfolded did not conclude until a helicopter pilot, Chief Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson Jr., hovering with two crewmen to identify enemy positions by drawing expected Viet Cong fire, saw signs of mass killings, landed in the village, demanded at gunpoint that Calley halt the attack and alerted higher authorities by radio.

Calley was convicted of premeditated murder of least 22 civilians.