My Lai Incident

MY LAI INCIDENT

MY LAI INCIDENT. On 16 March 1968, U.S. Army soldiers of Company C, First Battalion, Twentieth Infantry of the Eleventh Infantry Brigade, Twenty-third (Americal) Infantry Division, while searching for a Viet-cong force at My Lai hamlet in Son My Village, Quang Ngai Province, South Vietnam, massacred two hundred to five hundred South Vietnamese civilians. Following revelations of the atrocity a year later, an army investigation headed by Lieutenant General William R. Peers implicated thirty soldiers in the commission and cover-up of the incident. Fourteen soldiers were charged with war crimes. All had their charges dismissed or were acquitted by courts-martial except First Lieutenant William L. Calley Jr., a Company C platoon leader, who was convicted of murdering twenty-two civilians and sentenced in March 1971 to life imprisonment. The public viewed Calley as a scapegoat, and his sentence was eventually reduced to ten years. After serving forty months of his sentence, all but three months confined to quarters, Calley was paroled by President Richard M. Nixon in November 1974. The My Lai incident increased disillusionment with the army's conduct of the Vietnam War, fueled growing antiwar sentiment, and underscored concerns within the army itself regarding the professionalism and ethics of its officer corps.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Hersh, Seymour M. Cover-up: The Army's Secret Investigation of the Massacre at My Lai. New York: Random House, 1972.

Peers, William R. The My Lai Inquiry. New York: Norton, 1979.

Vincent H. Demma

See also Atrocities in War ; Vietnam War ; and picture (overleaf) .

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