My Lai Massacre

My Lai Massacre (1968).In South Vietnam on 16 March 1968, American soldiers of Company C (Charlie) of Task Force Barker, Americal Division, assaulted the hamlet of My Lai (4), part of the village of Son My in Quang Ngai province. The entire Son My area was a stronghold of the Viet Cong and American units there had taken repeated casualties from snipers, land mines, and booby traps, without making any significant contact with the enemy. During a briefing prior to the assault, the commander of Charlie Company, Capt. Ernest L. Medina, had ordered his men to burn and destroy the hamlet of My Lai (4), which was said to be fortified and held by the 48th Viet Cong Battalion.

Contrary to expectations, no enemy forces were encountered during the assault on My Lai (4), yet the men of Charlie Company swept through the hamlet and systematically killed all the inhabitants—almost exclusively old men, women, and children. There were several rape killings and at least one gang rape. The total number of Vietnamese civilians killed could not be determined: it was at least 175 and may have exceeded 400.

The massacre at My Lai was successfully concealed within all command levels of the Americal Division for more than a year. In 1969, a letter sent by a serviceman not connected with the division, who had heard stories of a massacre, brought the incident to the attention of the secretary of defense and other government officials. A commission of inquiry, appointed by the secretary of the army and headed by Lt. Gen. W. R. Peers, eventually listed thirty individuals as implicated in various “commissions and omissions” related to the Son My operation. Criminal charges were proferred against sixteen of these. Five were tried by court‐martial, but only one individual, 1st Lt. William L. Calley, was found guilty.

On 29, March 1971, after a court‐martial of over four months, Calley was convicted of three counts of premeditated murder of not less than twenty‐two Vietnamese; he was sentenced to life imprisonment at hard labor. During several stages of review, Calley's life sentence was reduced to ten years' imprisonment; he was granted parole effective 19 November 1974. Captain Medina, Calley's company commander, was charged with involuntary manslaughter—failure to exercise proper control over his men engaged in unlawful homicide of at least 100 unidentified Vietnamese. He was acquitted because of the military judge's faulty instructions on the issue of command responsibility. Altogether, the legal consequences of the My Lai incident left much to be desired. General Peers on 2 December 1974 called it a “horrible thing, and we find we have only one man finally convicted and he's set free after doing a relatively small part of his sentence.”

Many Americans disagreed with this conclusion. President Nixon had been deluged with letters protesting Calley's conviction. The young lieutenant and his men, it was argued, had acted out of frustration and hatred of the Vietnamese who had killed and wounded their comrades. Calley's supporters on the right wing of the American political spectrum were sometimes joined by those in the Vietnam antiwar movement who regarded My Lai as merely a particularly horrible example of everyday American military tactics.

The environment of guerrilla warfare, a war without fronts, undoubtedly created a setting conducive to atrocities. Some apparent civilians were actually combatants who tossed grenades or planted booby traps. Yet these facts cannot provide legal exculpation for the cold‐blooded slaughter of old men, women, and children. Despite pressure for a high enemy casualty toll, most U.S. soldiers in Vietnam did not intentionally shoot unarmed villagers. Indeed, some U.S. soldiers tried to stop the slaughter at My Lai, notably the helicopter pilot Hugh Thompson. The My Lai massacre was not a typical occurrence. The openness of the fighting in Vietnam to journalistic coverage and the encouragement which the My Lai affair gave to other service people to come forward with reports of atrocities made it quite unlikely that any other massacre could escape attention. True, villagers were regularly killed in combat assaults on defended hamlets; but the rounding up and shooting of civilians was an unusual event, and the men involved in the massacre at My Lai knew it.

The final report of the Peers Commission listed perfunctory instruction in the laws of war in U.S. Army training as a contributory cause of the My Lai massacre. Since then, this aspect of training has been thoroughly revised. Service people are instructed that acting under superior orders is no defense to a charge of murder or other war crimes. New channels have been set up for the reporting of violations of the laws of war. It is to be hoped that these changes will prevent a recurrence of a dark chapter in the history of the U.S. Army.
[See also Army, U.S.: Since 1941; Leadership, Concepts of Military; Morale, Troop; Training and Indoctrination; Vietnam War: Military and Domestic Course; Vietnam War: Changing Interpretations.]

Bibliography

Joseph Goldstein, et al., eds., The My Lai Massacre and Its Cover‐up: The Peers Commission Report with a Supplement and Introductory Essay on the Limits of Law, 1976.
Guenter Lewy , America in Vietnam, 1978.

Guenter Lewy