My Lai Massacre

The Vietnam War (1954–75) was one of the longest conflicts in the history of war. It was rife with countless atrocities, but none more brutal than the My Lai Massacre. On March 16, 1968, American soldiers conducted a search-and-destroy mission in the hamlet of My Lai 4, in the Quang Ngai province. Members of Charlie Company, First Battalion, 20th Infantry Division, commanded by Lieutenant William Calley Jr. (1943–), brutally tortured and murdered three hundred to five hundred unarmed, unresisting South Vietnamese women, children, and elderly men. They raped, sodomized, and mutilated many of the victims.

Initial reports in the press presented the massacre as nothing more than a fierce battle won by heroic American soldiers. The entire chain of command in the U.S. Army that was related to the brutality systematically covered up the events of that day and did nothing to punish the men involved. Instead, false reports and misinformation were fed to the media.

In the spring of 1969, former Charlie Company soldier Ronald Ridenhour (1946–1998) asked the U.S. House Armed Services Committee to investigate rumors of mass killings. He sent this request via letter to President Richard Nixon (1913–1994; served 1969–74), the State Department, the Pentagon, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and several members of Congress. Most recipients ignored Ridenhour's letter. Because the charges were so heinous, the Army was forced to investigate. To satisfy the public, someone had to pay for the massacre, the events of which were seriously downplayed by those involved. Calley was the one to be punished, and he was charged in September of that year with several counts of premeditated murder.

Freelance reporter Seymour Hersh (1937–) did not believe that the whole story behind the events at My Lai was being revealed, and he delved further into the incident. It was Hersh who uncovered the full story, and he published it in the New York Times on November 12, 1969. (In 1970, Hersh's My Lai reports won him the Pulitzer Prize for international reporting.) In the following weeks, the My Lai Massacre dominated newspaper, television, and radio. Life magazine devoted ten pages of heartbreaking photographs documenting the brutality wrought on a civilian village.

The My Lai Massacre could not be ignored. Americans fell into two camps after the publication of the tragedy. They either responded with denial that American soldiers could commit such atrocities, or they expressed outrage. Those who did not want to face the fact that such brutality could be waged on innocent people by the hands of young Americans considered the event a hoax; they believed the story was false. Nixon did nothing to help when he called it an isolated incident. Many war veterans, however, came forward to call the civilian killings typical. According to them, the My Lai Massacre was not a one-time event.

The controversy spurred the Army to create a commission to investigate further. Led by Lieutenant General William Peers (1914–1984), the commission indicted thirteen Americans for war crimes and twelve more for covering up the atrocities. Calley was sentenced to life in prison for premeditated murder in 1971. President Nixon ordered Calley released from prison two days later, pending appeal of his sentence. His sentence was later adjusted, and he served just four years and one-half month in military prison. No one else charged was ever convicted, for various reasons.

When news of the massacre reached the American public, it fueled an already strong and organized antiwar movement . The sheer brutality of the event reinforced what many in the peace movement had been saying all along, and it made those who were on the fringes of the movement more vocal and committed to demanding an end to the war. For some, the massacre proved that the men being drafted into Vietnam military service needed more and better training.