Diarist's note: This diary attempts to factually (yet emotionally) describe a massacre. The pictures and words contained below may disgust you. If images of death and violence disturb you or anyone who might happen upon them (such as a child or co-worker), do not click on the asterisked links.
My Lai: 7:30 a.m. March 16, 1968.
Children slaughtered. Senselessly. Needlessly. Coldly.
Women raped and killed. Disgusting? Inhumane. Unfathomable. Unforgivable.
Some come forward to surrender. They surrender not their freedom but their lives. Take no prisoners.
Bodies lie in piles. Strewn in ditches. Huddled behind bunkers. Clustered in tiny huts.
One American stands responsible for shooting and killing 60 innocent Vietnamese citizens -- because another American refused.
Beyond those 60 are too many others. Three hundred eight-five in all? Five hundred four? Five hundred eighty-three? Nobody knows.
Vietnamese citizens lie dead on the ground, dead because one man ordered it and other men obeyed.
The American death toll in My Lai today is zero. The only wound incurred by an American is self-inflicted and accidental. The morning's human destruction discriminates only by nation of origin. Infants to octogenarians, unarmed children and adults, those too weak to wield a gun and those too poor to own one, Americans leave them dying in piles in ditches, crude huts, lumped en masse indiscriminately.
Welcome to My Lai.
On March 16, 1968, My Lai, a hamlet in Vietnam, saw hundreds of its members, all of them innocent, die. Many accounts tell of them surrendering, only to be slaughtered, not like human beings but bodies in a video game. American soldiers killed (a court will later say 22 of them were murdered) every one of those people, bloodshed that was as harmful to the war effort as was perhaps any single other event in the Pacific theater during the United States' involvement. It was a singularly horrific blight on the honor, the dignity, the once-proud name of the U.S. military. It was a day on which the moral compass of too many American soldiers, beyond spinning impossibly quickly, was simply nowhere to be found.
It is a day, an event, a tragedy too many people know little about and too many more know nothing about. Forgetting massacres should be something reserved for those whose memories of the death and the blood and the surrender-turned-slaughter is still too fresh. And not being told about the shameful moments in American history makes them all the more so.
The harm of My Lai went beyond the hundreds of people who met their untimely and undeserved ending. That harm festered, fermented, brewed and boiled for a year until one of those involved got to talking about what happened. The anniversary of the public outbreak of My Lai knowledge is November 12, 1969 -- one year and nine months after it happened. And when the news broke, there was no other way to respond.
You may ask yourself, "Why, if those involved in this senseless brutality were mostly keeping quiet, did this ever become public knowledge? Why was the government unable to hide the facts?" The government couldn't explain away pictures like *this* or *this*. Or read *this article* and look at the pictures in it. It's pretty hard to hide something when "[t]here are so many kids just lying there; these pictures are authentic," as then-Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird said.
While the government couldn't hide what its soldiers had done, whom they had senselessly killed, what justification they'd had, it could exonerate the lot of those involved. One man served three and a half years under house arrest before a judge ordered that he be freed.
To this day we do not have an accurate total because of the inadequate initial investigations into the massacres.
One man of the lot, Lt. William Calley, served a few days for each civilian shot in cold blood March 16, 1968. One man was punished for the actions of almost an entire company. But we should be happy that others were involved for the greater good:
- The man who stopped the carnage, Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson. Read more here about his heroism.
- Ron Ridenhour heard about what had happened and made finding out the truth his mission.
- Lawrence Colburn was a gunner on Thompson's helicopter. He and Glenn Androetta helped Thompson keep Lt. Stephen Brooks from wasting more innocent Vietnamese lives.
- Androetta, Colburn and Thompson wouldn't stand by while Americans turned innocent Vietnamese citizens into innocent Vietnamese bodies.
- Robert Maples wouldn't join in the slaughter. But he would later testify against Calley.
- Harry Stanley refused to commit atrocities in the name of the United States. But he did testify against the man who ordered him to.
So often in response to things like the My Lai massacre, we say "Never forget." And with events like this one serving as a reminder of the barbaric capacity of humans, perhaps it becomes more difficult for us to mentally separate instances of gruesome acts of depravity. So I leave you with perhaps the most chilling words I have ever read. They are from the Peers Inquiry, which gathered testimony on the events of March 16, 1968. What follows is a description of using a baby for target practice:
He fired at it with a .45. He missed. We all laughed. He got up three or four feet closer and missed again. We laughed. Then he got up right on top and plugged him.