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History > 20th century > Cold War > USA, Vietnam
Mỹ Lai massacre March 16, 1968
warning: graphic / distressing
Lt. William L. Calley, Jr. at Fort Benning, Ga., in 1971.
During his trial he showed no remorse for the killings of hundreds of Vietnamese civilians.
Photograph: Joe Holloway, Jr. Associated Press
William Calley, Convicted of Mass Murder in My Lai Massacre, Dies at 80 Hundreds of Vietnamese civilians died at the hands of American soldiers, but Lieutenant Calley was the only one found guilty. NYT July 29, 2024
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/29/
Vietnamese villagers killed by American soldiers during the My Lai massacre in 1968.
Photograph: Ronald S. Haeberle/The LIFE Images Collection, via Getty Images
The Truth Behind My Lai NYT March 16, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/16/
My Lai Massacre March 16 1968
Photograph: Ronald Haeberle TIME LIFE PICTURES/GETTY IMAGES
PICTURES WITH MEANING Peter Tatchell, human rights campaigner The Guardian Weekend 1 April 2006
Description: Unidentified Vietnamese man and child killed by US soldiers
Source: Report of Army review into My Lai incident, book 6, 14 March 1970 http://www.loc.gov/rr/frd/Military_Law/pdf/RDAR-Vol-IIIBook6.pdf March 16, 1968
Photograph: Ronald L. Haeberle Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Deadmanandchild.jpg
William Laws Calley Jr. 1943-2024
as a young Army lieutenant during the Vietnam War (he) was the only American convicted in the murder of hundreds of unarmed, unresisting Vietnamese civilians in the atrocity known as the My Lai Massacre
(...)
Nearly 56 years after the killings of as many as 500 women, children and older men by Americans who attacked with automatic weapons, grenades and bayonets; raped girls and women; mutilated bodies;
killed livestock, and burned the village, My Lai (pronounced Mee Lye) still reverberates as one of the worst outrages of a brutal and divisive war.
On the morning of March 16, 1968, Second Lieutenant Calley, a 24-year-old platoon leader who had been in Vietnam just three months, led about 100 men of Charlie Company into My Lai, an inland hamlet about halfway up the east coast of South Vietnam.
The Americans moved in under ambiguous orders, suggesting to some that anyone found in the hamlet, even women and children, might be Vietcong enemies.
While they met no resistance, the Americans swept in shooting.
Over the next few hours, horrors unfolded.
Witnesses said victims were rousted from huts, herded into an irrigation ditch or the village center and shot.
Villagers who refused to come out were killed in their huts by hand grenades or bursts of gunfire.
Others were shot as they emerged from hiding places.
Infants and children were bayoneted and shot, and an unknown number of females were raped and shot.
A military photographer took pictures.
Although Lieutenant Calley’s immediate superiors knew generally what had happened, the atrocity was covered up in military reports that called it a successful search-and-destroy mission.
It took nearly a year and a half — and persistent efforts by a few soldiers and an independent investigative journalist, Seymour M. Hersh, who later won a Pulitzer Prize for his disclosures — for investigations to grind forward and the story to reach a stunned world.
By then, Lieutenant Calley, a short, stocky man scorned by his troops and fellow officers as an insecure leader who could hardly read a map or a compass and who seemed to lack common sense in the field, had been promoted to first lieutenant and awarded a Bronze Star with oak leaf cluster and a Purple Heart.
On Sept. 6, 1969, he was charged with the mass murder of civilians at My Lai.
He was one of 25 people charged in the case, including two generals accused of misconduct.
But charges against the generals, and 10 other officers and 7 enlisted men accused of murder or suppression of evidence, were dropped.
Six men were court-martialed, but all except Lieutenant Calley were acquitted, among them Capt. Ernest Medina, the company commander.
Lieutenant Calley’s trial in Fort Benning, Ga., opened in November 1970.
He was accused of personally killing 102 civilians.
Many soldiers refused to testify.
But eight witnesses, in often shockingly graphic testimony, said the lieutenant had herded sobbing, cowering villagers into a ditch and the hamlet center and shot them in bunches, and had ordered his troops to kill as well.
The number of victims at My Lai was never fixed precisely.
The Army did not count the bodies.
The official American estimate was 347, but a Vietnamese memorial at the site lists 504 names, with ages ranging from 1 to 82.
Lieutenant Calley, in three days of testimony, expressed no remorse and insisted he had only followed orders by Captain Medina to kill all the villagers, quoting him as saying that everyone in the village was “the enemy.”
The captain denied saying that, insisting he had meant his order to apply only to enemy soldiers.
In March 1971, Lieutenant Calley was convicted of the premeditated murder of “not less than” 22 Vietnamese and sentenced to life in prison.
Americans, long divided over Vietnam, were overwhelmingly outraged, calling him a scapegoat for a long chain of command that had gone unpunished.
Many blamed the war itself, or said the lieutenant was only doing his duty.
The White House and Congress were flooded with protests over the sentence, if not the verdict. Gov.
Jimmy Carter of Georgia called it “a blow to troop morale.”
Governors in Utah, Indiana and Mississippi denounced the verdict.
Legislatures in Arkansas, Kansas, Texas, New Jersey and South Carolina asked for clemency.
Gov. George C. Wallace of Alabama demanded a presidential pardon.
Days after the sentencing, President Richard M. Nixon spared the lieutenant from prison, allowing him to remain in his bachelor apartment at Fort Benning, pending appeals.
In an ensuing roller-coaster of legal maneuvers, the fort’s commanding general reduced the life term to 20 years, and Secretary of the Army Howard Callaway cut it to 10 years and said Mr. Calley would be paroled after only one-third of that term.
In 1974, a federal judge in Georgia, J. Robert Elliott, overturned the conviction, saying Mr. Calley had been denied a fair trial because of prejudicial publicity.
The Army appealed, and Mr. Calley was confined to barracks at Fort Leavenworth, Kans., for three months.
He was then released on bail and never returned to custody.
In 1975, a federal appeals court in New Orleans reversed Judge Elliott and reinstated the conviction.
And in 1976, the United States Supreme Court refused to review the case, letting the conviction stand and closing a bitter chapter of national history.
By then, Mr. Calley had qualified for parole.
His life term had been whittled down to slightly more than three years of house arrest and barracks confinement that had ended in 1974.
(...)
After basic training at Fort Bliss, Tex., and clerical training at Fort Lewis, Wash., he applied for Officers’ Candidate School, and despite low aptitude test scores and lack of command presence was accepted because the Army needed platoon leaders.
He was commissioned in 1967 and assigned to C Company, First Battalion, 20th Infantry Regiment, 11th Brigade of the 23rd (Americal) Division, and trained at Schofield Barracks in Hawaii for deployment to Vietnam.
Charlie Company arrived in Vietnam in December 1967 and saw no immediate combat.
Typically, the men read comic books and smoked marijuana.
But as the Tet Offensive began in early 1968 with enemy strikes across South Vietnam, the company suffered numerous casualties and five deaths.
Increasingly aggressive counter-strikes against Vietcong forces in Quang Ngai Province preceded the My Lai Massacre.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/29/
https://www.npr.org/2024/07/30/
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/29/
Ernest Lou Medina 1936-2018
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
(...)
On March 16, 1968, a month and a half after North Vietnamese and Vietcong forces launched the Tet offensive, wide-ranging attacks that stunned the American military command in the Vietnam War, Captain 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 American 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.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/13/
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/13/
Lawrence Manley Colburn 1949-2016
Larry Colburn (...) intervened with two comrades to halt the massacre of unarmed Vietnamese civilians by United States soldiers in 1968 http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/16/world/asia/larry-colburn-my-lai-massacre-dies.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/16/world/asia/
March 16, 1968
Mi Lai
More than 500 civilians die in My Lai massacre. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/1026782.stm
March 16, 1968
My Lai massacre
The Mỹ Lai Massacre was the Vietnam War mass murder of unarmed South Vietnamese civilians by U.S. troops in Sơn Tịnh District, South Vietnam, on 16 March 1968.
Between 347 and 504 unarmed people were killed by U.S. Army soldiers from Company C, 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry Regiment and Company B, 4th Battalion, 3rd Infantry Regiment, 11th Brigade, 23rd (Americal) Infantry Division. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Lai_Massacre
https://www.loc.gov/rr/frd/Military_Law/Peers_inquiry.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/17/weekinreview/17liptak.html http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5133444
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/ http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/1026782.stm
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/29/
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jun/10/
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/13/
https://www.npr.org/2018/03/17/
https://www.npr.org/2018/03/16/
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/16/
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/16/world/asia/
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/10/us/
https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2010/jun/06/
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/23/us/23mylai.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/28/opinion/28fri3.html
https://www.npr.org/2009/08/23/
http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/24/
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/
https://www.npr.org/2006/01/07/
https://www.npr.org/2006/01/06/
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2006/jun/02/
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/special_report/1998/03/98/
https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/1971/mar/30/
http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/march/29/
http://www.loc.gov/rr/frd/Military_Law/pdf/
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