My Lai Massacre My Lai

My Lai Massacre

My Lai remained a history as a symbol of the war's vicissitudes, of arbitrary killings and the entire irrationality of war. The slaughter of over 500 unarmed civilians in this village (other sources claim a figure around 300 civilians) cannot be justified by either their supposed participation in supporting the Vietcong in the region or their active participation in the war itself. However, it comes to show that war often plays by rules of its own, despite the constant attempt by the countries of the world to adopt international conventions that can protect the fate of civilians or prisoners, in general, of individuals who can no longer protect themselves.

The village of My Lai was situated in the Province of Quang Ngai, in South Vietnam, but reasonably close to the border with North Vietnam so as to be thoroughly infiltrated by Vietcong guerillas and to be identified as a Vietcong stronghold. Targeted by the U.S. because of these reasons, the resulting bombing campaigns brought about the destructions of most homes in the region and over 140,000 civilians remained homeless.

Distrust was thus high on both sides. On one hand, the Vietnamese civilians identifies the U.S. soldiers as individuals who were destroying homes and bombing innocent civilians rather than soldiers involved in keeping the country out of the Communist grip. The population detested the American soldier, perceived as an invader more than anything else. The local population often refused to give any details on Vietcong guerillas and their whereabouts in the area.

On the other hand, the American soldiers identified most of the civilians as either Vietcong or as individuals protecting/hiding the Vietcong guerillas. In any case, the local civilians were seen as potential enemies and were treated as such. Other issues added to the general state of tension in the region, irrationalities like the fact that many of the American soldiers decreed at some point that "anything that's dead and isn't white is a VC," which meant that anything killed could be added to the body count and could participate and argue that the general situation in the war was going well.

The Charlie Company that would become notorious for the My Lai massacre was led by Lt. Col. Frank Barker Jr., but one of the platoons leaders was Lt. William Calley, who would be directly involved in the killings. Many authors and analysts were keen to show that the massacre also came on a basis of lack of education for most of the American soldiers. Some sustain the idea that most of the soldiers had barely completed a high school degree and that most of the commanding militaries had scored very poorly on their military tests, including here W. Calley.

It is dubitable that a direct connection can actually be traced between lack of education and the events that occurred. First of all, there are numerous cases during wars when massacres are ordered by individuals with a high intellectual level. Napoleon is known to have massacred thousands of prisoners because he could not feed them. The atrocities of the Second World War were often committed by individuals with honorable military distinctions obtained in the past. The attempt to paint a picture to reflect a relationship between the behavior of the troops and the way they were prepared is not successful.

However, the stress of the continuous war, as well as the incertitude related to the location of the enemy, given the fact that in guerilla warfare is more difficult to identify and locate the enemy than in a traditional battle, can be presented as arguments aimed at defining a state of spirit that led to the events. Some have shown that this violent pattern had started developing for a certain period before the massacre. Systematic rape, as well as occasional murders, were common during the fighting periods for the American troops. The May Lai massacre came thus not as a separate moment in the evolution of the war, but as a culmination of events that had been building up throughout the previous months.

On March 14, 1968, as a prelude to the massacre, a sergeant was killed when a small group of American soldiers ran into a booby trap. Several others were wounded, including a sergeant that was blinded. This was an event that triggered a fresh feeling of hate towards the Vietnamese population, be it members of Vietcong or not. Reportedly, the Vietcong 48th Battalion was seen in the area, so the company was instructed that its mission would be to destroy the battalion, as well as the village of My Lai, where the battalion allegedly was located.

It is interesting to note at this point that the instructions given by Captain Medina regarding the women and children were intentionally very vague. Medina himself, as well as several of the soldiers, said that "I did not give any instructions as to what to do with women and children in the village." As we can see, the order is relatively vague, as some soldiers interpreted the lack of clear instructions as a go-ahead for the massacre of women and children in the village. It is hard to believe that Medina was not aware of the state of spirit dominant among his troops, especially given the previous events.

The three platoons that gave the assault on March 16 were led by Lt. William Calley, Lt. Stephen Brooks and Captain Medina. The attack began in the morning with the U.S. soldiers taking people out of their homes and interrogating them on the presence of Vietcong soldiers in their village. The killing started soon after that, with people being bayoneted or shot in the back of the head. From men, the murders moved on to women and children, as a group of elderly women were taken from the temple where they were praying, moved outside and shot at the back of the heads. Reportedly, Calley gave several specific orders for civilians to be executed, including one to one of the soldiers saying "Haven't you got rid of them yet? I want them dead. Waste them."

It is interesting to note the role played by Captain Medina in the war crimes that occurred in the village. Testimonies range from his being a passive actor in the crimes and taking no action to stop the killings to the fact that he was not even in the village at the time the massacre happened. According to his own testimony, he entered the village somewhere around 10 am and had not witnessed a single crime with his own eyes. However, there are several witnesses claiming that he was in the village some time around 9 am, which meant that he was a witness to most of the killings which started after 8 am and continued through this time.

Notably Chief Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson, who arrived in an army helicopter around 9 am, reported seeing numerous killings in execution style occurring throughout the village. It was he who would play a relative role in saving what had remained of the village civilian population. He transported by helicopter some of the survivors to a nearby hospital and ensured that no more shootings occurred. His orders were even clear to start firing on American troops if the killing didn't stop. At around 11 am, the murderous action had stopped, with up to 500 people killed in this war crime. The figures however are not certain, some confessing that "there were so many people killed that day it is hard for me to recall exactly how some of the people died," as U.S. Army Pvt. Harry Stanley said to C.I.D. investigators. Notably, there was no Vietcong soldier found in the village. Even more so, there was no individual in the village deemed to be of age or power to be used as a soldier by the Vietcong guerillas.

The dimension of the killing could not be grasped even by the direct participants. One of the reasons for this was that the different teams acted independently of one another and took part in different killings throughout the village, but were not aware about similar happenings in other areas. Nobody participated in all the points of slaughter in the village, so it was natural that the perception of the dimension of the slaughter would be smaller for those involved only in some of the points.

Many subsequent analysts consider the events following the actual massacre as similarly horrible in terms of the morality concerned in the cover up of the events and the so-called punishments given out to those involved in the war crimes. The initial investigation concluded that the massacre was accidental and that it had occurred because of artillery fire and that the casualties had simply been collateral victims caught in the fire exchange between the combatants. This continue throughout the period 1968-1970, during which numerous reports were filed reporting falsely the events that had occurred in My Lai and covering up the actual events. The assistant Chief of Staff of the American Division, Major Colin L. Powell, reported that "relations between American soldiers and the Vietnamese people are excellent."

However, photographer Ron Haeberle had witnessed the massacre and the pictures he subsequently showed were of a nature to both shock the public opinion and clearly present the facts. On the other hand, Ron Ridenhour, a soldier engaged in Vietnam, also found out about the details of the massacre and wrote all these in a letter that he sent to several governmental officials. It was enough to build a momentum for an investigation and a reaction at a governmental level.

The first serious investigation was headed by Colonel William Wilson, who interrogated Ron Ridenhour on the contents of his letter. Subsequently, warrant officer Thompson was also interrogated on details of the massacre as he had witnessed it from his helicopter and on the ground. His testimony included evaluations on the number of the killed individuals that he had witnessed in a nearby ditch. The report that Colonel Wilson completed was submitted to General William Peers and the investigation had already transformed, by this point, into a full-scale account of all the minute details of the massacre as it had happened.

The final Peers Report would contain entire volumes of the tragedy and would include interviews, photographs or testimonies of many of the individuals that had been, directly or indirectly, involved in the My Lai massacre. Some of the conclusions in this report were dramatic, detailing the violent acts including rapes and killings and mutilation of babies: "Its (1st Platoon) members were involved in widespread killing of Vietnamese inhabitants (compromised almost exclusively of old men, women and children)...members of the 2nd Platoon killed at least 60-70 Vietnamese men, women and children as they swept through the northern half of My Lai 4."

While at this point it seemed apparent that William Calley and others involved would be charged with mass murders, the game began to turn political, due to the implication this had both for Nixon's Presidency and his policies of engagement in Vietnam. Obviously, at this point, public support for the Vietnam War is approaching its lowest point and events such as My Lai can only potentially harden even more the negative perspective on war that the American peoples had. With such events, war appears as an obvious irrationality targeting and victimizing innocent civilians in a war-torn country.