The truth of the My Lai massacre
Operation “Speedy Express”, between December 1968 and May 1969, was an extremely controversial strategy of the US military forces to ‘pacify’ the Mekong Delta and Kien Hoa and Vinh Binh provinces, which were considered staging posts and were criss-crossed with communications lines for NLF (National Liberation Front or Viet Cong).
The strategy involved night and ambush attacks, using repression and counter-insurgency tactics and it became infamous for the number of civilians’ deaths, estimated by the US themselves to be between 5,000 to 7, 000 with over 10,000 NLF combatants killed. It is now widely accepted that many of these 10,000 were non-combatants civilian deaths also, resulting from, for example, “free-fire areas” being instituted, whereby US military personnel were ordered to kill “anything that moved” within those areas. A recently declassified secret letter from a US Army Sargent to General Westmoreland, the US Commander in Vietnam, claiming that during the “Speedy Express” period, massacres on the scale of My Lai occurred “at least every month” for over a year. Numerous other letters made similar claims but were ignored.
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A group of civilians in My Lai being gathered by American soldiers for torture. (Photo: Ronald Haeberle) |
The US Army contingent involved in the “My Lai”/My Son massacre, Charlie Company, itself recorded a kill-ratio of over 140 Vietnamese enemy dead to one US serviceman dead and with very few weapons found, suggesting that many of these casualties were, in fact, civilians, and that both commanders and soldiers alike had become quite used to committing genocide, and as a result, they forgot the need to keep these atrocities covert or secret.
On 16 March 1968, a number of companies of the US army in South Vietnam were dropped into MY SON (the US army designated the collection of hamlets which made up the village of MY SON as “My Lai” on their maps; it is still called My Son today) and at least one of these companies had prepared a plan of premeditated murder against the entire population of these hamlets.
Before being shipped to South Vietnam, all of Charlie Company's soldiers went through advanced infantry training and basic unit training and they were taught how to correctly treat POWs and how to distinguish Vietcong from civilians by a senior-ranked Judge Advocate. These were not psychotic people before they were drafted. They were not homicidal maniacs before arriving in Vietnam. Rather, as a result of the persistent “dehumanising of the enemy” and ultimately presenting the hamlet of My Lai on a silver tray to the soldiers of Charlie Company with the ASSURANCE that there would be members of the 48th Viet Cong Battalion, on whom they could ‘take out their revenge and frustrations’.
It is completely wrong to say, as had been suggested by certain apologists, that they “were out in combat and they stumbled upon” anything! Calley and the other platoon leaders were briefed the day before that, in all probability at that time in the morning (about 7am) whoever was left in the village would be NLF (National Liberation Front or Viet Cong) or at the very least sympathisers, with the true villagers having gone to market by that time.
From the evidence given at the various courts-martial (despite numerous cover-ups), Calley’s immediate superior, Cpt Medina, was often quoted as saying "They're all VC, now go and get them", and was heard to reply to the question "Who is my enemy?" by saying, "Anybody that was running from us, hiding from us, or appeared to be the enemy. If a man was running, shoot him …. if a woman with a rifle was running, shoot her."
At Calley's trial, one defence witness testified that he remembered Medina instructing platoon leaders to destroy everything in the village that was "walking, crawling or growing".
Medina was also asked whether the order included the killing of women and children. Those present later gave differing accounts of Medina's response. Some, including platoon leaders, testified that the orders as they understood them were to kill all “guerrillas” and North Vietnamese combatants and "suspects" (including women and children, as well as all animals), to burn the village, and poison the wells.
There was no “stumbling upon” anything. Charlie Company was not engaged or fired upon when they entered the village (though armed men were spotted by helicopter some distance away from the village and weapons were later found there). Charlie company had a plan to wipe out that village and Charlie company were put “front and centre” because yes, this was not long after they had incurred heavy losses during the Tet offensive and yes, after they had also lost a popular sergeant to a land-mine, and because they wanted some blood revenge; if commanders wanted the civilian population wiped out so that the hamlet and the village could no longer shelter NLF, who better to entrust this task to, if not Charlie Company?
To say otherwise (and remember the evidence given later at the courts-martial are easily accessed) is the worst form of fake-news and is wholly disingenuous and disrespectful of the people who were murdered that day and the bravery of Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson (who risked his life and the lives of his men, by landing his helicopter between a group of women and small children and decrepit old men and an approaching group of US soldiers, and who was shunned and ostracised by his peers later, for giving evidence against Calley and who only received a medal/commendation 30 years later for protecting non-combatants).
It should be remembered that these were not “suspects who were shot while trying to escape”; they were rounded up into groups and put in the grass huts at the centre of the village; the hut was set on fire and if the terrified villagers tried to get out of the burning structure, they were either shot or bayoneted; or they were put in groups and marched out of the village, babies, old men/women, to the access road and then, at the edge of a ditch, sprayed with bullets from M16’s or marched to a ditch at the edge of the village and shot……men and women in their 70’s, and 80′, infants in arms, toddlers.
Nobody is quite sure of the number of people murdered that day, estimates vary from 347 to 504. At least three villagers were found at the bottoms of the wells where they had tried to hide from the attack; they were shot where they cowered, some died from drowning and some from direct gunshot wounds to the head.
Many of the younger women were gang-raped (some while still shielding their babies) and then had their female organs mutilated by bayonets?
An overdue but inadequate apology
Calley stated in Court-martial, that at some point, he instructed his men to halt the assault and eat lunch, which most calmly did, before returning to the job at hand, mass-murder.
26 soldiers were tried on various counts of murder, rape, assault and attempted murder, but only one person, Calley, was convicted, and that was on 22 “sample” counts of murder, meaning between 325 and 482 murders and other acts of barbarism have never been prosecuted.
Between March 1968 and November 1969 the US army did everything in their power to cover up the events of that day and even awarded medals and commendations to those involved, in spite of the fact that a number of witnesses wrote to members of the US Congress urging them to investigate (all of the congressmen but 2, ignored the letters.)
The story finally broke in the general media, including extensive explicit interviews with Calley and some of his Company, in November 1969, a year and 9 months after the massacre.
The courts-martial began in November 1970, as they proceeded, most charges were ultimately dropped.
Calley has repeatedly claimed that he “was following orders”, meaning he believed that he was innocent because these superior officer’s orders, and so he pleaded “not guilty”.
Calley, as a trained officer, without question, would have been made aware that a soldier or officer who breaks the law, cannot use as his defence the fact that he was following orders from a superior officer and NOT to do so would constitute a breach of military discipline for which the individual could be punished; this principle was established and formalised during the Nuremburg trials and the trials of Japanese war criminals.
He was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment with hard labour for the premeditated murders “of no fewer than 20 people” (in effect 21 people).
President Nixon ordered Calley to be released after a groundswell of public opinion expressed the view that US Army officers simply were not capable of such excesses.
Then he was held under house arrest until his appeals (1973 and 1974) which up-held his conviction but reduced the sentence from life to 20 years.
He was paroled by the Secretary of the Army in 1974 having served 3.5 years, mostly under house arrest in Fort Benning.
Nixon pardoned Calley in 1974, hoping to put an end to the anti-war protests the whole saga carried in the USA.
Calley remained silent on the incident, except to repeat that he had merely being following orders, until, coincidentally, one month after my trip to My Son, Calley made, what is considered to be his first public “apology” for the massacre while he was making a speech to a club, in Georgia, USA.
He said: “There is not a day that goes by that I do not feel remorse for what happened that day in My Lai", he told members of the club. "I feel remorse for the Vietnamese who were killed, for their families, for the American soldiers involved and their families. I am very sorry.... If you are asking why I did not stand up to them when I was given the orders, I will have to say that I was a 2nd lieutenant getting orders from my commander and I followed them foolishly, I guess.”
I was living in Hanoi in August 2009 and for those, like me, who realised the importance of Calley’s statement, there was a strange mixture of shock, surprise, gratitude, forgiveness and anger. But at the same time, it was recognised that this had been long overdue, even if it offered little to the surviving relatives of the massacre.
Franc Neary