The My Lai Massacre is Committed
March 16th, 1968
(Note: While the image is AI generated, the research and writing was carried out by a human, me).
Today 56 years ago, members of the US military entered the Vietnamese village of Sơn Mỹ and tortured and killed, in a premeditated manner, up to 500 people, including elderly, women and children. Twenty individuals were also documented to have committed rapes. Afterward, the entire village was set ablaze. According to eyewitnesses, none of the victims mounted resistance. It is today regarded as an emblem of atrocities committed by the US military during the Vietnam War.
The American Public did not find out about it until Seymour Hersh broke the story over a year and a half later. The US military command had been made aware of the war crime earlier through a letter by a door gunner who had witnessed the aftermath of the carnage during an overflight, but attempted to keep its own investigation secret. Several other news outlets then reported additional details, including pictures of the bodies. The strategy of the pro-war Nixon administration for confronting this situation can be summarized by a direct quote of Secretary of Defense, Milton Laird, who said that he would like to “sweep it under the rug”. A cover-up campaign, led by National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger (and involving a young Colin Powell), included discrediting witnesses and questioning the journalists’ motives. In the end, though 26 personnel were charged with criminal offenses, only one, second Lt. William Calley, Jr., was convicted. His life sentence was commuted by Nixon to 3.5 years house arrest.
Interestingly, American public opinion on William Calley, and by extension, the massacre itself, was sharply divided at the time. Those who defended him tried to justify it in terms of the pressures on the soldiers brought on by the Vietnamese “hit and run” tactics and the Tet offensive a few weeks prior, which to them indicated that the US military needed to be more aggressive. Some also used the so-called “Eichmann defense”, that the soldiers were just “following orders”, though exactly what was ordered is subject to conflicting witness testimony. Be that as it may, one cannot help but suspect that behind these arguments there was a value system which assigned far less value to Vietnamese lives than American lives. We may be witnessing something similar today, in the sense that those who defend certain atrocities today tend to assign very little value to the lives of the victims. An academy-award winning documentary short which may be invaluable in helping to inoculate against this kind of devaluation of human life is “Interviews with My Lai Veterans”.
