Vietnam & After

My Lai: WGBH/PBS American Experience Documentary

One of the best resources about My Lai is the PBS American Experience documentary "My Lai". The web site provides links to other good sources of information about the massacre including trial transcripts,photographs and a timeline. You can watch the documentary online courtesy of WGBH.

War Crimes?

"The guiding practice of past war crimes prosecutions has been that crime is something that can only be charged against a loser. Perhaps this explains why successive presidents have felt so intensely anxious not to loose their war in Vietnam." - Daniel Ellsberg

From the rice paddies of My Lai to the sands of Haditha, the specter of injustice looms over the moral authority of the United States. No U.S. Commander-in-Chief has ever been prosecuted in an international court for war crimes. The allegation itself would seem absurd to most Americans living at any point in our nation's history. So, what is a war crime? If it is not the murdering of innocent civilians facilitated through military aero-technology from the sky above, then would a "face-to-face" killing of an innocent civilian constitute a war crime? And if so, how come so few American combatants have been prosecuted and sentenced for such crimes? So few have gone before a judge even when we are certain of many instances of deplorable acts of violence perpetrated by members of the U.S. Military.

Even after excluding the heinous effects of mass bombing campaigns on civilian populations, it seems that very few Americans have been brought to justice for war crimes, in the traditional sense of a "face-to-face" murder.

"It will be difficult, politically, to extend the notion of "crimes against humanity" to include Anglo-American wartime triumphs of firepower against civilians, as in Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, and now the free-fire zones of South Vietnam. Yet it would be shocking and perverse to condemn only rape and murder in wartime while continuing to tolerate the strategic bombing of noncombatants." - Daniel Ellsberg

Where is the line between human being and reality within us?

To people who have never seen war, the massacre at My Lai 4 on March 16, 1968 seems like the most henious crime soldiers could commit.  This was not something our American boys could do!  But it did happen, and our boys did it.

In 1969, a year after the massacre, an interview was published by the New York Times, in the words of Paul Meadlo, a  participant in the massacre:

                    "Why did I do it?  Because I felt like I was ordered to do it, and it seemed like that at the time,  I felt I was doing the right thing, because like I said I lost buddies.  I lost a damn good buddy, Bobby Wilson, and it was on my conscience.  So after I done it, I felt good, but later on that day, it was getting to me.  (My Lai Testimony, Experiences of War, pg.263).

Why did the three units of Charlie Company murder almost 500 innocent old men, women and children in My Lai 4?  Paul Meadlo stated that he was "ordered" to do it.  Yet, he admits to the "pleasure of revenge!"  Is there a confusion as to who the enemy was?  The VC and NVA were Asian in stature.  So were all the villagers in Vietnam!  Did these soldiers "dehumanize" an entire race of human beings, and subconsciously make all of their population the enemy?  Where do we draw the line at the murder of innocents?  Were they killed for aiding the enemy, or did it not really matter?  They were "defenseless gooks", and made an easy target for pent up retaliation.  Could hate and revenge have gotten so consumed that reality is meaningless on the battlefield?  Where is the "breaking point" between the human being and the murderer within us?  Are so many participants of war psychological casualties?  Why weren't the commanders of the field held responsible for the actions and mental fitness of their men?  Is this the way we conducted the war?

The morality of murder

                            "Thinking back on training, all they told us to do was

                             kill.  "Kill! Kill!"  "What is the spirit of the bayonet?"

                                       "To Kill!"

     Watching depravity and dehumanization leads to a deeper sense of depravity.  Accepting the circumstances around you in a depraved world makes you a part of that world.  Many GI's found themselves far away from reality in Vietnam and under such stress that the black and white of right and wrong became a blur.  According to Gibson in The Perfect War, the GI realized that nobody cared about him.  His own commanders ordered him into deadly missions to achieve numbers for their own personal advancements. His own government knowingly gave him faulty equipment.  Friendly fire incidents were too often unheeded to get the enemy, and the people who he fought for often didn't like him or neglected the enthusiasm to fight with him.  So, what was he fighting for?  The enemy that wanted to kill him was hidden all around him, and had a determination much stronger than his.  To combat this and survive, even his own buddies said it was "Okay" to protect himself by any means, and that killing civilians was not wrong.

     One story that hit home was about 50 GI's that were out on patrol.  They came across an old man and a little girl sitting on the road.  One GI said to another, "should I kill them?" "You know that he is counting how many of us there are, and that he will tell the VC so that they could ambush us down the road".  Would killing that man and child be the "morally right thing to do?".

     Depravity, fear, and watching your buddies get shredded by invisible gunfire is enough to make a person lose all sense of humanity.  The evil feeling of revenge killing has no face of innocents to who it may encounter as long as the satisfaction is acheived.  Such was the case of Lt. Calley at Mi Lai. The moment was ripe and the morality of murder was unleashed.

The My Lai Courts-Martial

Douglas O Linder of the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law has a website devoted to famous trials.  Among the "famous trials" featured are the Courts Martial of the My Lai defendents Calley and Medina.  Be sure to check out the links in the sidebar for a chronology, biographies and excerpts from the trial transcripts:

The My Lai Courts-Martial

Surviving the Slaughter

In order to understand the massacre in My Lai, one must examine it from two perspectives: The first perspective is the American soldiers who witnessed their fellow soldiers slaughtering innocent Vietnamese people and the second is of those who survived the massacre. A woman by the name of Ha Thi Qui, was among the Vietnamese that were targeted by American soldiers. The following is a snippet of her personal account of the massacre:

I was wounded in the backside. At first I felt very, very hot, and later on very cold. And they killed-you see, they fired a first time into the ditch, and many men, children, and women were killed. They cried, "Mother." They were screaming. The soldiers fired three more times and finished the cries of the people. The first time there were still people screaming. They fired a second time, and the third time it was finished, all the people were killed.

After reading Mrs. Qui's account, I can understand why the peasantry of Vietnam supported the NLF. The American soldiers whom some Vietnamese thought to be liberators of communism, turned on them and slaughtered them to death. This massacre left a mark on the minds of the people who survived and had a mind-altering change of thought in terms the way they viewed American forces, which played right into the hands of NLF propaganda to strengthen and gather support for their cause. In my opinion, this massacre sowed the seeds of a losing effort by American forces which ultimately leads to Vietnamization and the complete pull-out of forces in 1973.

Eyewitness To Butchery

As we all know, the massacre at My Lai has left an unremovable stain in the hearts and minds of people who witnessed the Vietnam War. A group of men got a first-hand view of the atrocity and one of these men is named Larry Colburn. Colburn and his fellow soldiers were aerial scouts, whose job was to bait the enemy to attack them and then have gunships take out the enemy. On March 16, 1968, Colburn's view of the war in Vietnam dramatically changed due to the events he witnessed while flying around in his OH-23 helicopter. The following is a snippet of what he saw:

We were hovering six free off the ground not more than twenty feet away when Captain Medina came over, kicked her, stepped back, and finished her off. He did it right in front of us. When we saw Medina do that, it all clicked. It was our guys doing the killing.

After reading Colburn's account of the My Lai massacre, I believe that the war in Vietnam was a big mistake. To read about American soldiers slaughtering innocent civilians for no reason is sickening to my stomach. To read about the massacre at My Lai caused me to think about the war in Iraq, in which countless civilians were killed and prisoners of the war were tortured and humiliated by American soldiers. I believe that any member of military who either authorizes or partcipates in the killing or torturing of innocent people and or enemy combatants in war should be punished severely because individuals such as Captain Medina should not walk free for crimes against humanity.

Director Oliver Stone Returns to Vietnam & My Lai

Oliver Stone has already made three movies on the Vietnam war starting in 1986 with "Platoon."   According to Time he is back in Vietnam getting ready to film "Pinkville," a movie about the My Lai massacre. 

According to Variety, Bruce Willis will be starring as General William Peers who led the Army investigation of the incident which resulted in the Peers report.

Time reporter Kay Johnson interviewed Stone in Danang.  She asked him why he was making this movie now.  Here is his response:

"Why now? Because of Iraq. That's a major reason. I had no intention of making a fourth Vietnam movie at all. But this last year — you know my feelings about the Iraq war of course — I think the time has unfortunately come back around to remember events like My Lai.

Why My Lai? Because it's a great story. I was [serving] in Vietnam at the time, and it really made an impression, and I think it changed the course of the war to a large degree. Americans were shocked, as well as the Vietnamese. You have to take into account that many Vietnamese villagers were neutral. It turned many neutral villagers against us. It was an interesting turning point."

Johnson also asked Stone if being a Vietnam veteran made it easier to understand what led to the My Lai incident.  Stone's answer astutely shifts the question from the responsibility of the individual soldiers involved to the bigger question of the war policy that created the situation:

"Not easy, but I can understand it. I mean, you saw a bit of it in Platoon. Not on this scale. But that's part of what the movie shows, visualizes, dramatizes — the peer pressure, the tension. [My Lai] happened. It's a fact. It's history. I'm not seeking to denigrate the average soldier. There was a breakdown in that division and there was a breakdown from the top. And I think it had a lot to do with the war policy, which was basically body counts, kill ratios, search and destroy, free-fire zones — these concepts, when they are allowed to grow, grow out of hand. And they got out of hand in many cases. My Lai is one of them."

Kay Johnson got Stone's reaction to President  Bush's Kansas City speech in which he compared the results of pulling out of Vietnam to what would happen if we left Iraq.  Stone has little patience with Bush:

"Now that's despicable. The man went to Yale, but he never went to class. Obviously he didn't learn history. Anyone who knows anything about Vietnam would know that it was not the American withdrawal that precipitated chaos in this area. It was quite the opposite. It was the American invasion that precipitated the chaos. I don't think he was a good student. I was in the same class with him at Yale — '68. I left, he stayed. But he didn't learn his lessons."

Did the American withdrawal precipitate chaos as the Bush administration claims?  Or was it "the American invasion that precipitated the chaos"?   What are the facts?