What happened to those US soldiers who massacred Vietnamese at My Lai in 1968

[Hans Mann]

Our report on America’s military court proceedings that followed the My Lai massacre
Remembering 16 March 1968



Unlike most tribunals, a military court does not explain its judgments. The long full trial proceedings in the case of Lieutenant William Calley left no room for doubt that he did in fact kill many unresisting Vietnamese villagers at My Lai 4, or Son My, or whatever the place is rightly called, when he was an infantry platoon commander three years ago. The number of victims could be, and was, disputed. The charge sheet had at least 102 men, women and children; the jury amended the figure to not less than 22. Mr Calley's defence never denied the killing, but maintained that it had been done under orders and in the belief that it was what his military duty required of him.

Either the jury made a conclusion of fact, that Mr Calley did not receive the orders he claimed, or it made a conclusion of law, that the orders were wrongful and should have been disobeyed. However, it did not have to say which of the two paths it took to arrive at the verdict, guilty of pre-meditated murder, pronounced on Monday, and at the sentence, life imprisonment. At some point, perhaps, the series of appeals which are promised by Mr Calley's defence lawyer will escape from the reticence of the military process into the relative light of the civilian courts. Certainly the rising legal and academic clamour about the rules of war as they have been applied in Vietnam will not leave the case alone.

There was a time when eminent lawyers like the late Thurman Arnold defended President Johnson's intervention in Vietnam as “the enforcement of the principle that Nuremberg announced to the world.” That principle was the criminality of aggressive war. But the Nuremberg and Tokyo tribunals of a quarter of a century ago also stated other principles—for instance, that responsibility for the manner in which war was conducted rested most heavily upon the commanders at the top. As the American prosecutor said in United States versus Von Leeb, “mitigation should be reserved for those upon whom superior orders are pressed down.” General Yamashita was hanged, after due process, for his failure to prevent the cruelties committed by his far-flung army. The Nuremberg prosecutor, General (now Professor) Telford Taylor, brooded on these memories in a recent scholarly book, “Nuremberg and Vietnam.” He concluded that the series of courts martial arising out of the Son My or My Lai massacre “cannot be fairly determined without full inquiry into the higher responsibilities” and that the moral health of the American Army will not be recovered until its leaders are willing to scrutinise their behaviour by the same standards that their revered predecessors applied to Yamashita 25 years ago.

It was the late General MacArthur who confirmed the death sentence on Yamashita. The scale of the uproar that has built up around these and related questions is illustrated by the bibliography of 33 book titles published last weekend by the New York Times Book Review, together with a vast review by a former war correspondent in Vietnam, Mr Neil Sheehan, demanding a general congressional inquiry into war crimes.

This does not stop Mr Calley getting a lot of sympathy in his misfortune. The inevitable stream of telegrams protesting against the verdict is pouring into the White House, the Defence Department and Congress. Two themes mark the protests: one that a dim junior officer is being made to bear guilt that belongs much higher up; the other, that what he did was in the nature of war and that the soldier's life is made impossible if his actions in the stress of battle are to be picked over and dissected afterwards by lawyers and officials.

In some ways the wave of sympathy distorts the facts. Since nearly six years and millions of words of news reporting have failed to disclose any other massacre by American troops on anything like the scale of Son My, the probability that Son My was in fact an extraordinary occurrence looks overwhelming. Whether Mr Calley understood that anything extraordinary had been done or not, the behaviour of many of the other people concerned—those who refused to join in, those who hushed it up and those who eventually talked—suggests that they knew it.

But Son My was also out of the ordinary in another way, as Professor Taylor says, in the candour with which the operation was carried on, with army photographers on the scene and commanders in helicopters circling overhead.

Considering all this, the performance of the Department of the Army in finding out what happened and deciding what judicial steps to take was unbelievably sluggish. A first investigation in 1968 was defeated by the bland denials of the brigade and divisional authorities. After the story had all come out in the press a senior general investigated the reason for the collapse of the first investigation.

He did his job thoroughly and as a result 14 officers were accused of various degrees of lying, concealment and failure to follow staff regulations. But the charges have been dropped or dismissed against all but one, the brigade commander. General Westmoreland, the Army's Chief of Staff, has recommended that the divisional general at the time be demoted to brigadier-general and that his assistant commander should be demoted from brigadier-general to colonel. The demotions, if they go through, are punishments. As the New York Times commented this week, “if the two officers are innocent, obviously they should not be punished.” Nobody has tried to explain how, if their part in the concealment of the massacre deserves to be punished at all, it can be adequately punished by demotion to brigadier-general and colonel.

One thing that is totally impossible is that Mr Calley alone is guilty. But, leaving aside the brigade commander who is charged with failing to tell what happened, only two men besides Mr Calley are at present faced with charges of having had a part in the massacre. Mr Calley's company commander, Captain Medina, who denied having given him orders to kill off the population, is charged with murder. Another officer of the task force, Captain Kotouc, is charged with maiming and assault. A warrant officer and a sergeant were accused of murder and acquitted. Charges against six other soldiers in Captain Medina's company have been dropped. Others had left the service by the time the fact of the massacre became public and the legal problem of bringing any of them to justice has not been solved.

Granted that Son My was not a usual event, it would still seem that the war has calloused a lot of consciences. The trial proceedings themselves, with their emphasis on the preponderance of women, children and infirm old men among the victims, gave evidence of how standards have slipped; nor is there anything in the accepted rules of war to justify the unnecessary killing of unarmed, unresisting men, however able-bodied. But the Vietcong do not exactly observe the provision of the Geneva Convention which says that a combatant must wear “a fixed distinctive sign recognisable at a distance.” Thus it has become commonplace in Vietnam for people to be treated as enemies even if they are not carrying arms and are not dressed, and are not seen to behave, like soldiers. Even women and children can, and sometimes do, plant booby-traps.

In the words of an American Air Force major, “in the mountains, just about anything that moves is considered to be Vietcong.” Son My is not in the mountains but it is in an old communist area and Lieutenant Calley's platoon, men of limited intellectual equipment in a state of nervous tension, entered it believing that every living thing was hostile. This does not justify what they did. They were, however, familiar with the practice by which villages and hamlets are routinely threatened with destruction with bombs or gunfire, as a penalty for having harboured the Vietcong, and with the doctrine of free fire or free strike zones, which orders the removal of the rural population from an area so that any persons remaining in it may, if sighted, be killed. Success in operations of this kind tends to be measured by the “body count,” a standard of military effectiveness which would be laughable if it were not sad.

Last year the trial of Lieutenant Duffy brought out the importance of the body count. Mr Duffy, it is not disputed, had a prisoner tied securely to a stake and when morning came had one of his sergeants shoot the man dead. At his trial Mr Duffy explained that his superiors expected, indeed insisted upon, a good body count and soldiers who turned in live prisoners were apt to encounter official disapproval. The curious thing about Mr Duffy's trial was that the military court revised its first verdict of murder, between judgment and sentencing, substituted a new verdict, of “involuntary manslaughter” and gave him only six months. Whatever else could be said of Mr Duffy's action, there was manifestly nothing involuntary about it. Court martial watchers concluded, therefore, that the court felt there was something in his contention that he thought he was only conforming to established policy and that it found in this a mitigating circumstance.

Aberrations like this in the observance of the rules of war may be liable to creep in as a result of some tactical brainwave or quirk of military bureaucracy but, once they are examined and brought to light, it is impossible for the American Army and the American Administration to do anything but disavow them and try to put them down. That the Vietcong and the North Vietnamese do worse things, and on a bigger scale, may be true but, as an argument, it is no help at all. Thus, while President Nixon exposed himself to censure for an indiscretion when he condemned the “massacre” at Son My at a time when judicial proceedings were pending, he could never have contemplated doing other than condemn it.

Similarly the Army as an institution cannot defend or explain or condone: if a side-effect of the callousing process that is inflicted upon American servicemen in Vietnam comes to its attention, it has to express its condemnation in the obvious way, by prosecuting the transgressors. In pressing for criminal convictions against Mr Duffy and Mr Calley, the army authorities were seeking to rebut the charge that inhuman actions are a consequence inherent in their strategic or tactical doctrines or in the use of military force itself as a political instrument. This they have to do in defence of not only the propriety of their policies, but also the legitimacy of the Army itself.

Our report on America?s military court proceedings that followed the My Lai massacre | The Economist

[Pragmatic]

when he was an infantry platoon commander three years ago.

[misskit]

That article is from 1971. I think William Calley is still alive.

[Hans Mann]

Yes, today is the 48th anniversary of the massacre.

[Black Heart]

That article is from 1971. I think William Calley is still alive.

Still alive apparently.

Not much info here after 2007. I assume he changed his name.

After release[edit]
Sometime in 2005 or 2006, Calley divorced his wife, Penny, whose father had employed him at the V.V. Vick jewelry store in Columbus, Georgia, since 1975, and moved to downtown Atlanta to live with his son, William Laws Calley III.[18] In October 2007, Calley agreed to be interviewed by the British newspaper the Daily Mail to discuss the massacre, saying, "Meet me in the lobby of the nearest bank at opening time tomorrow, and give me a certified check for $25,000, then I'll talk to you for precisely one hour."[19] When the journalist arrived to question Calley without a check, Calley left.

On August 19, 2009, while speaking to the Kiwanis Club of Greater Columbus, Calley issued an apology for his role in the My Lai massacre. Calley said:

There is not a day that goes by that I do not feel remorse for what happened that day in My Lai. I feel remorse for the Vietnamese who were killed, for their families, for the American soldiers involved and their families. I am very sorry.... If you are asking why I did not stand up to them when I was given the orders, I will have to say that I was a 2nd Lieutenant getting orders from my commander and I followed them—foolishly, I guess.[20][21]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Calley

[PeeCoffee]

Thank you for that reminder of this date in history.
A very sobering event indeed.

Sadly I remember the MLK April & JFK June assassinations in 1968.
Tomorrow is St Pattys.

[Pragmatic]

Tomorrow is St Pattys.

So all der Micks will be off watching porn.

St Patrick's Day inspired people to watch leprechaun porn

St Patrick's Day inspired people to watch leprechaun porn - Mirror Online

[Hans Mann]

Thank you for that reminder of this date in history.
A very sobering event indeed.

Sadly I remember the MLK April & JFK June assassinations in 1968.
Tomorrow is St Pattys.

1968 not a very good year in world history.

[harrybarracuda]

Thank you for that reminder of this date in history.
A very sobering event indeed.

Sadly I remember the MLK April & JFK June assassinations in 1968.
Tomorrow is St Pattys.

1968 not a very good year in world history.

I assume he means RFK.

[BaitongBoy]

Definitely not JFK...

[snakeeyes]

Calley Apologizes for 1968 My Lai Massacre

video
http://www.democracynow.org/2009/8/2...or_1968_my_lai

Over forty-one years after the My Lai Massacre, when US troops killed more than 500 men, women and children in Vietnam, the former Army lieutenant who was convicted for his role in the killings has publicly apologized. William Calley was the only US soldier held legally responsible for the slayings. He was convicted on twenty-two counts of murder, and his sentence was later commuted by President Reagan. Last week, William Calley publicly apologized for the first time, saying, “There is not a day that goes by that I do not feel remorse for what happened that day in My Lai." He added that he had been following orders. [includes rush transcript]
AMY GOODMAN: Finally, over forty-one years after the My Lai Massacre, when US troops killed more than 500 men, women and children in Vietnam, the former Army lieutenant who was convicted for his role in the killings has publicly apologized. William Calley was the only US soldier held legally responsible for the slayings. He was convicted on twenty-two counts of murder. His sentence was later commuted by President Reagan.
Last week, William Calley publicly apologized for the first time, while speaking at the Kiwanis Club of Greater Columbus in Georgia. He said, quote, “There is not a day that goes by that I do not feel remorse for what happened that day in My Lai." He added he had been following orders.
Although the My Lai Massacre took place March 16th, ’68, it wasn’t until November 12th, ’69 that the world found out about it. That’s when investigative journalist Seymour Hersh broke the story about the massacre and its cover-up. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for the exposé.
I want to turn now to the words of Seymour Hersh describing the My Lai Massacre and the role of the former Army lieutenant William Calley. I spoke to Hersh last year on the occasion of the fortieth anniversary of the massacre.

SEYMOUR HERSH: ...humping it in the boonies and in the villages and paddies of South Vietnam and never saw the enemy. Maybe they lost 15 or 20 percent of their company through snipers, land mines, etc., but they never engaged. And over the period of ten, eleven, twelve weeks, between the period they landed around New Year’s Day of ’68 until March 16th, they became increasingly brutal, so randomly going through a village and whacking people, sometimes an old man they saw. One soldier would just hit him with a rifle butt, and nobody said anything, because what happens inevitably is when you don’t see an organized enemy and you lose people, you lose your buddies and your mates, and you’re angry, you take it out on the villagers, you take it out on the civilian population. [...]
And so, one night they were told — the kids were told, “Tomorrow, you’re going to meet the enemy. The North Vietnamese — a regular North Vietnamese battalion is going to be there, and you’ll get a chance to get payback.” And the kids did then what they did then: the young soldiers toked it up, and the senior enlisted men and the officers drank it up. But they all got up at 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning, jumped on choppers and went to kill and be killed — you have to give them their due. And they got into the village, and there’s no soldiers there. The intelligence was bad, as it always is. And they gathered people. There was no fire at all, really, just old women, men and children making their — heating up water for their morning rice. And they gathered them eventually into three large ditches and began to execute them.
Calley was — become infamous, but there were five or six first and second lieutenants that were also organizing it. And as I later wrote and learned about — I spent a couple years sort of obsessing with, I wrote a couple books about it. One was about the cover-up. Almost, during the day, every senior officer, including the major general in charge of the Americal Division — this group was assigned to the Americal Division — all were flying over the area at one time, and pretty much everybody knew pretty much what was going on. There you are.
And I’ll tell you, Amy, just — there was one of the kids who did a lot of shooting, was a young man named Paul Meadlo from a little small hamlet called New Goshen, Indiana. And talk about repressed memory. I learned about this a year — almost a year and a half later. I was working in Washington as a freelance writer and began just — I had followed the war and knew what was going on in some visceral way and knew what was — there was something there. And I began — I finally got to the point where I began to find kids in the unit, and I was writing stories. I think I wrote five in five weeks as a freelancer. And it was just as the young boys talking over the weekend were ignored by the press, I had a hell of a time getting the major press to run the stories, for sure. This is always the way it is. You know, there’s always a disconnect between the bad stuff that goes on that everybody knows goes on and what I guess you could call the mainstream press want to write about. I don’t know why, but it’s true, there always is.
And in any case, one repressed memory that I didn’t learn about until I was deep into the story — written two or three pieces — concerned this young man who did a lot of shooting. His name was Meadlo, as I said. He simply fired clip after clip. He was one of those — like an automat, just shot and shot into the ditch. They put people, as I said, in three large ditches. And after the shooting was over, the soldiers went and were eating their lunch, really literally next to the ditch, next to the bodies. And that’s how disconnected you get. You know, you dehumanize —- you obviously have to dehumanize the enemy, as we’ve listened to this morning.
In any case, one mother tucked a child, a two— or three-year-old boy, under her stomach, and somehow he survived all the bullets. And they heard a keening noise, the soldiers told me. And this little boy climbed his way up through the ditch full of other people’s blood, got to the top and began to run across the — you know, just to run away. And Lieutenant Calley turned to Meadlo, his most dependable shooter — others had stopped at a certain point or shot high — and said, “Meadlo, plug him.” And Meadlo looked at one person and couldn’t do it. And Calley then, with a great — you know, very saucy-like — grabbed his carbine — officers had a smaller rifle called a carbine — ran behind him and shot him.

Everybody remembered that, because the next morning, Meadlo was walking on patrol with the soldiers — they moved on to a few clicks away, a mile or so away, and began to patrol again, as they always did — just another day’s work, I guess. I don’t know. And he stepped on a land mine — Meadlo did — and blew his right leg off at the knee. And when the medevac was coming — they called in a chopper to take him away — he began to issue an oath: “God has punished me, Lieutenant Calley, and God will punish you. God has punished me.” And the kids, in telling me about this a year and a half later, all remembered how angry they were. “Get him out of here! Get him out of here!” They didn’t want to hear this.

AMY GOODMAN: Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh, talking about the My Lai Massacre. Lieutenant Calley, speaking to the Kiwanis Club in Columbus, Georgia, has apologized.

[thaimeme]

And like so much of an abundance of hidden, omitted, covered up, and pushed-aside historiography....

The incidents at My Lai were not random nor isolated. Just escaped to the public's sphere of blinded attention....so became the proverbial vocal poster child.

During the late war, such nasty activities and atrocities as this had become accepted commonplace.

We all know "the good guys" engaged in their "good wars" do not commit acts of brutal atrocities.....

BS.

[Davis Knowlton]

^Absolute horseshit.

And Calley didn't really apologize. He said he felt remorse, and then fell back on what has always been his line..."I was following orders". That he was pardoned is one of the most reprehensible events in the sorry US history in Vietnam.

[Hans Mann]

If he felt any remorse at all, he wouldn't have asked money for telling "his story". Kinda says a lot about the man.

[Davis Knowlton]

^Indeed.

[PeeCoffee]

Thank you for that reminder of this date in history.
A very sobering event indeed.

Sadly I remember the MLK April & JFK June assassinations in 1968.
Tomorrow is St Pattys.

1968 not a very good year in world history.

I assume he means RFK.

Correct...RFK.

[Lukey1979]

I remember watching the ITN piece many years ago named: 4 Hours in Mai Lai.
Pretty fucking mental what happened there on that day, just couldn't get my head round it.
Talk about PTSD, some of the platoon members relaying their stories, were so full of meds and horror that their brains were shot to pieces.

[terry57]

The horrifying part of this story is that young Americans were forced to fight a war in a foreign country where the Supposed enemy looked exactly the same as the good guys.

How could they know the difference.

I never blame the American soldiers but piss in the General direction of the Politicians who sent these young guys away to fight their stupid war.

Politicians are scum pure and simple, they would kill their mother or a foreign nation to gain a vote.

Vietnam was disaster but don't blame to troops on the ground. The stress levels were of the planet for these guys.

They fucked up but so would most of us.

[thaimeme]

The good ethical Americans.


Repeated often enough it all becomes true and real.

[Davis Knowlton]

^^And, unlike the absolute total crap spouted by Thaimeme above, there were few atrocities. My Lai was the only mass murder. Not one other ever surfaced, by either the US or North Vietnamese. Nobody knows about these mass killings other than Thaimeme. Unless you're talking about mass murder of civilians by the North Vietnamese Army....in that case, there are many, all well-documented.

There were other atrocities - as in any war. One was in the 101st Airborne Division LRRP team known as Tiger Force - in 1966. I joined this same unit - then known as Phantom Force - in 1968. Those responsible for murders and atrocities were prosecuted by the US.

The Americal Division was a sub-standard Division, and Calley was at best a bottom of the barrel officer who barely made it through training. It was disgusting, but it was an aberration.

[Lukey1979]

The good ethical Americans.


Repeated often enough it all becomes true and real.

I met plenty of brave and good Americans caught up in the ''wrong'' wars in Afghanistan
and Iraq.

What about you, are you ''Good ethical'' ?

[Davis Knowlton]

The good ethical Americans.


Repeated often enough it all becomes true and real.

Other than My Lai - name one. And I don't mean Winter Soldier fantasy crap from Kerry - I mean a DOCUMENTED atrocity or war crime. Go ahead....name one.

[thaimeme]

Yes.....of course, gents.

All goodness and light emanating from the most enlightened ones.

[full of shit per usual]

[Davis Knowlton]

^As I said, name one.

[Eliminator]

Who the FUCK knows where they are and by now, WHO the fuck cares? Most of them are dead also. When the FUCK do you let SLEEPING DOGS lie.

NONE of us knows the true story of ANY history.

How old are YOU. were you there or you just trying to create a new thread?

Get on with it. FUCK the PAST. OR, are you just going to be a PC RETARD and placate to idiots that can't take RESPONSIBILITY of THEIR OWN LIVES?