My Lai incident

My Lai incident , in the Vietnam War, a massacre of Vietnamese civilians by U.S. soldiers. On Mar. 16, 1968, a unit of the U.S. army Americal division, led by Lt. William L. Calley, invaded the South Vietnamese hamlet of My Lai (more correctly, Son My), an alleged Viet Cong stronghold. In the course of combat operations, unarmed civilians, including women and children, were shot to death (the final army estimate for the number killed was 347). The incident remained unknown to the American public until the autumn of 1969, when a series of letters by a former soldier to government officials forced the army to take action. Several soldiers and veterans were charged with murder, and a number of officers were accused of dereliction of duty for covering up the incident. Special investigations by the U.S. army and the House of Representatives concluded that a massacre had in fact taken place. Of the many soldiers originally charged, only five were court-martialed, and one, Lt. Calley, convicted. On Mar. 29, 1971, he was found guilty of the premeditated murder of at least twenty-two Vietnamese civilians and sentenced to life imprisonment. His sentence was later reduced to 10 years, and in Sept., 1974, a federal district court overturned the conviction and Calley was released. The My Lai incident aroused widespread controversy and contributed to growing disillusionment in the United States with the Vietnam War. The U.S. army formally released a report on its investigation of the incident in Nov., 1974. In 1998 three U.S. soldiers saved Vietnamese civilians during the massacre were honored with the Soldier's Medal.

Bibliography: See R. Hammer, The Court-Martial of Lt. Calley (1971); S. M. Hersh, Mylai 4 (1970) and Cover-up (1972).

My Lai. The My Lai massacre was an atrocity committed by American troops during the Vietnam War. Charlie Company, Americal Division, was assigned to the My Lai area, where the National Liberation Front (known as the Viet Cong) fought with land mines, booby traps, and hit‐and‐run attacks. In the weeks before the massacre, Charlie Company suffered heavy casualties but never engaged the enemy. On 16 March 1968, one hundred soldiers were airlifted to My Lai. Although they received no fire and observed no enemy combatants, the unit advanced and began to shoot women, children, and old men who inhabited the village. Over the next four hours more than five hundred Vietnamese were murdered. A few G.I.s refused to obey orders. Pilot Hugh Thompson witnessed the slaughter from his helicopter, rescued a number of children, and had an armed confrontation with Lieutenant William Calley of Charlie Company, commander of the operation.

The My Lai massacre became public news in 1970 when an investigative report by Seymour Hersch appeared in the New York Times. The army charged twenty‐five soldiers in the incident, but only one, Lieutenant Calley, was found guilty. A bitter national debate ensued in which Calley was widely portrayed as a scapegoat. Some Americans insisted that My Lai was an aberration, while others, including antiwar Vietnam veterans, claimed that attacks on civilians in Vietnam were depressingly routine. Although President Richard M. Nixon commuted Calley's prison sentence in 1974, the My Lai massacre would generate controversy for years to come.
See also Sixties, The.

Bibliography

Seymour Hersch , My Lai‐4: A Report of the Massacre and Its Aftermath, 1970.
David L. Anderson , Facing My Lai, 1997.

Richard Moser

My Lai Massacre (1968) the most notorious incident of U.S. brutality in the Vietnam War. On March 16, U.S. soldiers, with orders to burn and destroy, entered My Lai, which was wrongly thought to be a Vietcong stronghold. Finding no enemy soldiers, they brutally raped several women and killed everyone (between 175–400 civilians), mostly old men, women, and children. The incident was covered up until mid 1969, when word unofficially reached Pentagon officials. The subsequent commission of inquiry implicated thirty soldiers, charged sixteen, court-martialed five, and found only one guilty, sentencing Lt. William L. Calley to life at hard labor for killing no fewer than twenty-two Vietnamese civilians. Many Americans thought Calley had acted understandably in the heat of battle; and left-wingers also insisted that My Lai was nothing out of the ordinary (for obviously different reasons). My Lai resulted in new procedures and instruction regarding the laws of war, perhaps making it easier for other U.S. soldiers to stop further atrocities from escaping the attention of both military officials and the press.