50 years ago, the My Lai massacre shamed the US military

[Reichsmarschall]

50 years ago, the My Lai massacre shamed the US military

MY LAI, Vietnam (AP) — The shudder of artillery fire woke the boy at 5:30 a.m. Three American soldiers appeared at his family’s home a couple of hours later and forced the mother and five children into their bomb shelter, a structure almost every rural home had during the Vietnam War, to keep residents safe.

One soldier set fire to the family’s thatched house while the others tossed grenades into the shelter. Protected under the torn bodies of his mother and his four siblings, 10-year-old Pham Thanh Cong was the only survivor.

It was March 16, 1968, 50 years ago. The American soldiers of Charlie Company, sent on what they were told was a mission to confront a crack outfit of their Vietcong enemies, met no resistance, but over three to four hours killed 504 unarmed civilians, mostly women, children and elderly men, in My Lai and a neighboring community. Vietnamese refer to the greater village where the killings occurred as Son My.

Pham Thanh Cong recalls the morning of March 16, 1968, when American soldiers were sent on what they were told was a mission to confront a crack outfit of their Vietcong enemies.

“We started hearing the screaming and moaning from our neighbors, which were followed by gunfire and grenade explosions, then the screaming and moaning stopped, and my mother knew that the American soldiers had killed people,” Cong recalled this week. “I was covered with the flesh and hair of my mother and sisters and brother.”

Knocked unconscious with injuries to his head and wounds on his torso from grenade fragments, Cong was saved that afternoon when his father came to retrieve the bodies.

The My Lai massacre was the most notorious episode in modern U.S. military history, but not an aberration in America’s war in Vietnam.

The U.S. military’s own records, filed discreetly away for three decades, described 300 other cases of what could fairly be described as war crimes. My Lai was distinguished by the shocking one-day death toll, the stomach-churning photographs and the gruesome details exposed by a high-level U.S. Army inquiry.

An official policy of free-fire zones — from which civilians were supposed to leave upon being warned — and an unofficial code of “kill anything that moves” meant Vietnamese were constantly at risk.

Estimates of civilians killed during the U.S. ground war in Vietnam from 1965 to 1973 are generally 1 million to 2 million.

In this Wednesday, March 14, 2018, photo, foot prints of villagers and U.S soldiers’ combat boots are reconstructed in My Lai memorial site in Son My, Vietnam.

The average U.S. soldier could not be sure who the enemy was, rarely encountering one directly. They were targeted by land mines, booby traps, snipers. They were told to help, but the Vietnamese were rarely welcoming. Quang Ngai province, where My Lai is located, was a hive of communist military activity.

Two days before the massacre, a booby trap killed a sergeant, blinded a GI and wounded several others on a Charlie Company patrol.

Soldiers later testified to the U.S. Army investigating commission that the bloodletting began quickly when Lt. William L. Calley Jr. led Charlie Company’s first platoon into My Lai that morning. One elderly man was bayoneted to death; another man was thrown alive into a well and killed with a hand grenade. Women and children were herded into a drainage ditch and slaughtered. Women and girls were gang-raped.

FILE - In this April 2, 1971, file photo, Lt. William L. Calley Jr. stands beside an anti-war poster in his quarters at Fort Benning, Ga., during the long wait for the verdict of the court martial.

“They went in with blood in their eyes and shot everything that moved,” recalled Hugh Thompson Jr., an army helicopter pilot who flew support for the mission in My Lai and — along with his two-man flight crew — are the only servicemen known to have actively intervened to try to stop the killing. They evacuated a handful of Vietnamese civilians on the point of being killed by his countrymen. Thompson also was one of several soldiers who became whistleblowers and eventually brought the outrage to public attention.

Calley was convicted in 1971 for the murders of 22 people during the rampage. He was sentenced to life in prison but served only three days because President Richard Nixon ordered his sentence reduced. He served three years of house arrest.

Calley, the only person convicted in the massacre, has avoided speaking about the matter with apparently just one exception. In 2009, at the urging of a friend, he spoke to the Kiwanis Club in Columbus, Georgia, near Fort Benning, where he had been court-martialed.

FILE- In this March 19, 1971, file photo, Lt. William L. Calley, Jr. ponders a thought as he waits for the verdict of a six-officer court martial deliberating his case in Fort Benning, Ga.

“There is not a day that goes by that I do not feel remorse for what happened that day in My Lai,” Calley said, according to an account of the meeting reported by the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer. “I feel remorse for the Vietnamese who were killed, for their families, for the American soldiers involved and their families. I am very sorry.” He said his mistake was following orders, which had been his defense when he was tried.

Fifty years after the massacre, and almost 43 years after the communist victory reunified Vietnam, most of the rancor is gone, at least publicly, between the nations. They normalized diplomatic relations in 1995, and the United States is now one of Vietnam’s top trading partners and investors. Cooperation on security and military matters has grown to the point where this month a U.S. Navy aircraft carrier made the first visit to a Vietnamese port since the war.

On Thursday, the province dedicated a shrine to the victims, including the members of 24 entire families.

“Son My has become an ultimate pain for the people of Quang Ngai province and the whole country,” provincial official Nguyen Minh Tri said at a dedication ceremony. “Fifty years have passed, and no one forgets Son My. For the next 100 years and probably 1,000 years, the events of Son My may not fade away in the memories of mankind.”

Cong, the young massacre survivor, went on to study and work in local government, and from 1992 until his retirement last year, headed the My Lai museum, which sits in part of the area where the massacre occurred.

In this Wednesday, March 14, 2018, photo, massacre survivor Pham Thanh Cong points at a scar caused by grenade fragments during the My Lai massacre in Son My, Vietnam.

He said he cannot forget the atrocities but he’s willing to forgive the soldiers to build better relations between the two countries.

“We have had enough losses and suffering from war, and we just wish our children and grandchildren would not have to go through those experiences. We desire peace, we want eternal peace,” he said

 

[Reichsmarschall]

The Photographer Who Showed the World What Really Happened at My Lai
By Evelyn Theiss | Photographs by Ronald L. Haeberle
March 15, 2018
This article is courtesy of FOTO, Getty Images’ new site dedicated to the best in visual storytelling. A version of this story appears at foto.gettyimages.com.

Graphic content could be disturbing to some readers.

Ron Haeberle was a combat photographer in Vietnam when he and the Army unit he was riding with — Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry Regiment — landed near the hamlet of My Lai on the morning of March 16, 1968. Villagers weren’t alarmed; American GIs had visited the region near the central Vietnamese coast before, without incident. But within minutes, an official Army report would later find, the troops opened fire. In the hours that followed, American forces killed hundreds of old men, women and children. They raped and tortured. They razed the village. When Haeberle’s shocking photographs of their atrocities were published — more than a year later — the pictures laid bare an appalling truth: American “boys” were as capable of unbridled savagery as any soldiers, anywhere.

I first met Ron Haeberle in 2009 when I was a reporter at the Cleveland Plain Dealer— the newspaper that, in November 1969, first published his My Lai photos. That story on the 40th anniversary of that landmark exposé was his first major interview since the story broke four decades earlier. Recently, FOTO asked me to approach Haeberle and ask if he would revisit the story for the 50th anniversary of the massacre. He agreed, and he and I returned to one of the darkest chapters in American history, and his role in bringing it to light.

The American helicopters that brought Company C soldiers to My Lai for the assault.

Ronald L. Haeberle—The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images

An American soldier fires his M16 rifle near My Lai on March 16, 1968.

Ronald L. Haeberle—The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images
Ron Haeberle was drafted in 1966, after attending Ohio University, where he was a photographer for the school paper. He ended up in Hawaii with the Army’s Public Information Office. By the end of 1967, it was beginning to look as if his “tour” would end there — a disappointing prospect. “As a photographer, I wanted to see what was happening in Vietnam for myself,” he told me. He requested a transfer, and was sent to Vietnam.

At 26 years old, he was older than most members of Charlie Company, where the average age was just 20. Charlie Company had been together for about a year before Haeberle joined it in March 1968, but Haeberle told me that when they landed at My Lai he had just met the men in his unit that morning. On that day, they were primed for action; Viet Cong troops were reported to be hiding in the hamlet. That information was wrong. But in the end, it didn’t matter. Almost as soon as they landed, he said, “I heard a lot of firing and thought, ‘Hell, we must be in a hot zone.’ But after a couple of minutes we weren’t taking any fire, so we started walking toward the village. I saw what appeared to be civilians. Then I saw a soldier firing at them. I could not figure out what was going on. I couldn’t comprehend it.”

His photograph of murdered villagers in My Lai appeared — in black and white, not in its original color — on the front page of the Cleveland Plain Dealer on Nov. 20, 1969. (Haeberle took the pictures not with his Army-issued Leica camera, but with his own camera, a Nikon; this meant they were not subject to the same oversight.) Most of the victims at My Lai were shot; some were bayoneted. Women and girls were raped, and then killed. At least one soldier later confessed to cutting out villagers’ tongues, and scalping others. My Lai was hardly the only instance of rape or and murder by U.S. troops in Vietnam. But in terms of intensity and scale — and because of Haeberle’s photographs — it remains the emblematic massacre of the war.

When this photo ran in LIFE, the caption noted that Haeberle "found the bodies above on a road leading from the village." This image later appeared on the front page of the Plain Dealer.

Ronald L. Haeberle—The LIFE Images Collection

An officer training candidate looks at pictures made by Ronald L. Haeberle, a former Army photographer, that appeared in the appeared in Nov. 20, 1969, issue of the Plain Dealer in Cleveland.

Bettmann Archive/Getty Images
Today, Ron Haeberle lives about 40 miles from downtown Cleveland, in an attractive house on a quiet cul de sac. His home is simply furnished, clean and orderly. Original works of art by Vietnamese artists, mostly abstracts, adorn the walls. One is a delicate needlework portrait of a woman, gracefully reaching an arm toward the sky.

The suddenness of the violence at My Lai was especially terrifying. Haeberle told me that he saw an old man with two small children walking toward U.S. troops, their belongings in a basket. “The old man was shouting, ‘No V.C.! No V.C.!’ to let the soldiers know he wasn’t Viet Cong,” Haeberle recalled. To his horror, the man and the children were cut down in front of him. “A soldier shot all three,” he said.

It was more than a year after the massacre before Haeberle approached the Plain Dealer with his photos, but he had begun sharing his My Lai pictures, in slideshow talks to civic groups and even local high schools, after he returned home to northern Ohio in the spring of 1968. The first slides he showed were innocuous: troops with smiling Vietnamese kids; medics helping villagers. Then images of dead and mutilated women and children filled the screen. “There was just disbelief,” Haeberle said of the reaction. “People said, ‘No, no, no. This cannot have happened.'”

An American soldier stokes the flames of houses that were burned during the massacre in My Lai on March 16, 1968.

Ronald L. Haeberle—The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images
At one point in the killing spree, Haeberle recalls, he and Army reporter Jay Roberts came upon a group of villagers huddled in fear after troops assaulted a number of young women. Haeberle took a photo of a tearful, frantic mother — and as he and Roberts moved on from the scene, rifle fire exploded behind them. “I thought the soldiers were interrogating them,” Haeberle told me. “Then I heard the firing. I couldn’t turn to look. But out of the corner of my eye, I saw them fall.”

Haeberle’s picture of terror and distress on these faces, young and old, in the midst of slaughter remains one of the 20th century’s most powerful photographs. When the Plain Dealer (and later, LIFE magazine) published it, along with a half-dozen others, the images graphically undercut much of what the U.S. had been claiming for years about the conduct and aims of the conflict. Anti-war protesters needed no persuading, but “average” Americans were suddenly asking, What are we doing in Vietnam?

Awful images, not all of them captured on camera, remain with Haeberle to this day: a soldier nonchalantly shooting a young boy; another riding a water buffalo, repeatedly stabbing it with his bayonet.

The massacre and attempt to cover it up was first reported by journalist Seymour Hersh and distributed by a small wire agency, Dispatch News Service, in the second week of November 1969. (Hersh won the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting for his work.) A week after Hersh’s article appeared in dozens of papers around the U.S., the Plain Dealer ran its own story — along with Haeberle’s photos to bolster the reports of a massacre.

Haeberle said it was an automatic response to continue taking pictures, even as the brutality escalated. “As a photographer, my role was to capture what was happening during the operation,” he told me. “I did feel that what I was shooting was historic, especially the carnage. I kept thinking, ‘This is not right.’ It was mind-boggling.” (Haeberle’s reflection, with camera, can be seen at the top of one picture, as he photographs a corpse in a well. “They told me they threw him down there to poison the water supply,” Haeberle said.)

A group of civilian women and children before being killed by the U.S. Army during the massacre.
Ronald L. Haeberle—The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images
Today, trying to make sense of the unfathomable, Haeberle recalls the message imparted to so many soldiers before their arrival in Vietnam. “We were told, ‘Life is meaningless to these people,'” he said, leaving unspoken the rest of that sentiment: The enemy is not like us. They’re not quite human.

By the late morning of March 16, bodies were scattered everywhere in My Lai. Elsewhere, soldiers had herded dozens of villagers into a roadside ditch and shot them. A few children survived by hiding under corpses. Haeberle says that he and Roberts attempted twice to tell Charlie Company Capt. Ernest Medina about what they had seen. When Medina faced a court martial in 1971, he was acquitted. (American helicopter pilot Hugh Thompson, gunner Lawrence Colburn, and crew chief Glenn Andreotta, who arrived in the midst of the massacre, were each awardedthe Soldier’s Medal for heroism on the 30th anniversary of My Lai, in recognition of their attempts to intervene and save villagers’ lives, while risking their own.)

Of the dozen or so officers and others in Charlie Company who eventually faced court martial, only Lt. William Calley was convicted. In the spring of 1971 he was found guilty of murder and sentenced to life in prison. President Richard Nixon reduced the sentence to house arrest; Calley served three and a half years in his quarters at Fort Benning, Ga. He is the only person found guilty in military or criminal court for the atrocities at My Lai; in 2009, he apologized. But Haeberle’s searing photos, along with stories in the Plain Dealer and other outlets in the fall of 1969, sparked outrage and soul-searching in much of America.

Two Vietnamese children on a road before they were shot by U.S. soldiers on March 16, 1968.
Ronald L. Haeberle—The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images
And they have stayed with Haeberle for half a century. He returned to My Lai in 2011, where he met Duc Tran Van, a survivor of the massacre. Duc was 8 years old in March 1968, and as Haeberle spoke with him, through an interpreter, he realized with a jolt that the woman he had photographed dead behind a rock 43 years earlier was Duc’s mother, Nguyen Thi Tau.

Duc told Haeberle that his mother urged him to run, with his 20-month-old sister, to their grandmother’s house. When he heard a helicopter above them, Duc threw himself to the ground to protect his sister, who was already wounded. Haeberle had captured that moment, as well.

Duc and Haeberle have since become friends, and the Army veteran has visited Duc in Germany, where he now lives. “Duc has a small shrine to his family in his home,” Haeberle said. “I took the last photo of his mother. So I gave him my camera, the Nikon I used at My Lai, for the shrine.” Haeberle has returned to My Lai several times, and will be there again on the 50th anniversary of the massacre.

Haeberle is a thoughtful, plainspoken man. He never sought the spotlight, but he gets some solace knowing that his pictures mattered. When I asked him if the publication of his pictures from My Lai changed the course of his own life, his response was characteristically muted. “How can we know that sort of thing?” he asked me. “What can we really know when we’re looking to the future? The photos made me more well-known than I might have been. But I just kept moving ahead.”

Survivors recall US massacre in My Lai
One of the most infamous moments in American military history.

12 Mar 2018

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As the 50th anniversary of the My Lai massacre approaches, survivors of the 1968 massacre spoke to the dpa news agency about the deaths of up to 504 civilians at the hands of US soldiers during the war in Vietnam.

Although 26 US soldiers were charged with war crimes, only the platoon leader Lieutenant William Calley was convicted of murder. Calley made his first public apology in 2009:

"There is not a day that goes by that I do not feel remorse for what happened that day in My Lai ... 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 second lieutenant getting orders from my commander and I followed them - foolishly, I guess."

March 16
Pham Thi Thuan had just woken up and was cooking potatoes when the Americans landed nearby and began killing her neighbours.

It was March 16, 1968, the height of the Vietnam War, and the men of the US Army's Company C were tasked with uprooting the Vietcong around Quang Ngai.

On that particular day, they were to enter Son My, which included the hamlet My Lai that would later lend its name to the massacre, to kill local fighters. Military intelligence had determined that the villagers were harbouring Vietcong, although Thuan denied this was the case.

"They first killed the people at the rice paddies, as well as the cattle," said Thuan, an 80-year-old rice farmer from Son My village.

"We just worked for ourselves," she said. Only a handful of weapons were captured, and the only American casualty that day was a soldier who deliberately shot himself in the foot.

WATCH: Former reporter discusses media's role in Vietnam war


Killing babies
American soldiers treated all the villagers, including women and children, as hostile. One of them, Private Paul Meadlo, recounted what he had done in a 1969 interview for CBS News.

"You just spray the area on them and so you can't know how many you killed 'cause they were going fast. So I might have killed 10 or 15 of them," he told interviewer Mike Wallace.

"Men, women, and children?" asked Wallace.

"Men, women, and children," he replied.

"And babies?"

"And babies."

WATCH: Vietnam's War Babies


Laughing soldiers
Pham Thanh Cong, the 61-year-old retired manager of Son My's memorial museum, lost his mother, three sisters and one brother. Cowering in their bomb shelter, the soldiers shot them before throwing a grenade into the bunker. Cong was saved because the bodies of his dead family members shielded him.

"When the soldiers received their orders, why did they follow?" he pondered during a recent meeting at the massacre site.

"They killed people without feeling. When the people were laid on the ground, they also laughed," he added.

Thuan was somewhat luckier. She was escorted to a nearby canal with her two children along with, by Vietnamese estimates, 170 others.

The soldiers opened fire and Thuan fell in, but the bullets missed her and her two small children, who were hiding underneath her, and she too was shielded by dead bodies.

Six survivors
According to the memorial museum, Thaun and her children were among just six people who survived in the ditch.

Thuan waited for hours, she said, for the Americans to go away.

"They relaxed at the bank and waited there, and we escaped after they moved to another place," said Thuan.

The massacre ended when American Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson noticed with alarm the actions of his fellow Americans as he flew his helicopter overhead.

"It looks to me like there's an awful lot of unnecessary killing going on down there," he said over the radio at the time. "Something ain't right about this."

Seeing a group of 11 survivors being chased by the soldiers, he landed his chopper in between the two groups.

He ordered his door gunner, Specialist Lawrence Colburn, to point his gun at the soldiers and open fire if they tried to attack anyone else. The soldiers stood back as Thompson called in helicopters to evacuate the civilians.

WATCH: So Close So Far Away


US-Vietnamese friendship
Despite what happened that day 50 years ago, both Cong and Thuan said they held no ill-will towards the American people.

"We love them. Thanks to them we have liberation today because they protested against the war," said Cong.

"I cannot forget, they killed people here, but we try to forgive them and look forward to the future," he added.

Thuan lauded the growing relations between the United States and Vietnam today, which has seen substantial improvement since the two countries re-established diplomatic ties in 1995.

"Today, the Vietnamese and Americans people cooperate to make friendship," she said.

"As we do that, we try to make sure there are no more massacres."

https://twitter.com/x/status/974659435086872577

https://twitter.com/x/status/974659573402521600

 

[Trango Towers]

abu gharaib...I could go on. but the massacres rapes and torture is rife even today

 

[Big Tank]

US Military is just a private force of Corporate Capitalists nothing damn else!

 

[rambro]

Vietnamese these days have pretty much forgotten a lot, especially agent orange, indiscriminate carpet and napalm bombing.

 

[war&peace]

Vietnamese these days have pretty much forgotten a lot, especially agent orange, indiscriminate carpet and napalm bombing.

Given the horrific war imposed by USA on Vietnam, I'm genuinely curious to know that when Vietnam-USA relations passed through the inflexion point? Right now Vietnamese appear to be very comfortably sitting in the lap of the power that killed millions of them half a century ago...

 

[rambro]

Given the horrific war imposed by USA on Vietnam, I'm genuinely curious to know that when Vietnam-USA relations passed through the inflexion point? Right now Vietnamese appear to be very comfortably sitting in the lap of the power that killed millions of them less than a century ago...

Beats me, Vietnam is just like Japan difference only the latter's government is a US puppet propped up after dropping 2 atomic bombs on 2 heavily populated cities.

Weirder, after so much war crimes around the globe US regime is never subjected to sanctions.

 

[war&peace]

Beats me, Vietnam is just like Japan difference only the latter's government is a US puppet propped up after dropping 2 atomic bombs on 2 heavily populated cities.

Weirder, after so much war crimes around the globe US regime is never subjected to sanctions.

Yeah the behaviour of these two nations is beyond my comprehension. Perhaps Japanese got too scared of the atomic bomb and the irony is that Japanese are too apologetic towards USA and the west but still they are not ready to offer an apology for the massacre of the Chinese people and still see China as the enemy and same goes these Vietnamese, they got killed by USA in million but today they have an affinity for their perpetrator and they regard China as their enemy... how come?

As for as, subjecting USA to the sanction is concerned, well the might is right..As long as west, Europe stands with USA, none can impose sanctions on it. So even if Germany may have some issues with USA, it won't distance itself from USA..just lip service. That's called western civilisation...basically a racist civilisation.

 

[rambro]

Yeah the behaviour of these two nations is beyond my comprehension. Perhaps Japanese got too scared of the atomic bomb and the irony is that Japanese are too apologetic towards USA and the west but still they are not ready to offer an apology for the massacre of the Chinese people and still see China as the enemy and same goes these Vietnamese, they got killed by USA in million but today they have an affinity for their perpetrator and they regard China as their enemy... how come?

As for as, subjecting USA to the sanction is concerned, well the might is right..As long as west, Europe stands with USA, none can impose sanctions on it. So even if Germany may have some issues with USA, it won't distance itself from USA..just lip service. That's called western civilisation...basically a racist civilisation.

I can only assume it is due to mainstream media.

We all grew up getting flooded with shows, so called documentaries etc from the west.

Must admit i used to see the west in a good light and non-democratic countries as not a place to be but luckily now i can SEE

 

[Viet]

Vietnamese these days have pretty much forgotten a lot, especially agent orange, indiscriminate carpet and napalm bombing.

No, My Lai is not forgotten.

 

[war&peace]

I can only assume it is due to mainstream media.

We all grew up getting flooded with shows, so called documentaries etc from the west.

Must admit i used to see the west in a good light and non-democratic countries as not a place to be but luckily now i can SEE

Well, Pakistanis or Malaysians being subjected to such brainwashing through the western media makes sense since , after all, we don't have such a history of war with USA..

But, I still find it difficult to understand, I mean there is something called inheritance and transfer of the knowledge from one generation to the next especially when it happened so recently....Japanese still celebrate / mourn the bombings and the survivors of the catastrophe are alive to this day and this was even more recent for Vietnamese.
I'm thinking more on the lines of Stockholm syndrome.