When I was a boy, the Vietnam War ripped apart the fabric of American life.
There was a time, early in America's involvement in the conflict, when the majority of Americans supported the U.S. effort. But public opinion gradually turned against the war and the president who oversaw it, eventually forcing Lyndon Johnson to abandon his pursuit of another term.
About two weeks before Johnson withdrew from the race, something happened in a tiny hamlet in South Vietnam that changed the dynamics of the public's perception of what was being done in its name halfway around the world.
I don't know if it played a role in Johnson's decision. I don't know if Johnson was even aware that it had happened. But it certainly played a prominent role in the first years of the next presidency.
On March 16, 1968, between 350 and 500 South Vietnamese civilians, most of them women, children and the elderly, were killed by members of a unit of the U.S. Army at a place called My Lai. Many of the victims were sexually abused. Some were beaten and/or tortured. Some were mutilated after they died.
It was not long after North Vietnamese forces had humiliated the Americans with their much–heralded Tet offensive in January 1968, which may explain, in part, the vicious nature of the Americans' attack, but it could never justify it.
I mean, how could anyone consider wiping out a tiny hamlet in South Vietnam any kind of payback for what the North Vietnamese had done? Only those, I suppose, who had been conditioned to regard all Asians as "gooks."
Initially, details were sketchy, as I recall, but I was just a child and not aware of much of what was happening in the world.
But the story that the American public was given was simply that — a story.In fact, a coverup began virtually the moment the gunfire stopped on the day of the massacre. Official accounts spoke of a great victory, and Stars & Stripes said it had been a "bloody day–long battle" in which communist casualties outnumbered American, 128 to 1, but there were those in the Army who knew differently.
A soldier named Ronald Ridenhour who had heard of the massacre from friends gathered information on his own and sent letters about it to members of Congress and other officials about a year later.
In the annals of the My Lai massacre, It seems to me, that letter played much the same role as the letter from James McCord to the judge who presided over the original trial of the Watergate burglars a few years later.
Without that letter, the world probably never would have known the truth. It blew the lid off the coverup.
Journalist Seymour Hersh apparently got his hands on a copy of the letter and launched the investigation that would expose the dark side of the military's "body count" and "kill ratio" strategies. He published his findings with Dispatch News Service in November 1969.
About a week later, on Nov. 20, 1969, the media began to fill in the gaps. Time, Newsweek and Life gave considerable space to what Hersh had revealed.
The Cleveland Plain Dealer published explicit photos that had been taken at the scene — some of which can be seen in this post.
The coverup that had been successful for nearly two years came undone. And what had been originally praised by military leaders as an heroic chapter was transformed in the public's eyes into a despicable one.
It wasn't despicable because the media wrote about it. It was despicable because the media wrote the truth about what had happened.
It was a courageous thing to do, and I'm sure those who wrote for those publications faced their share of abuse for violating the code of silence that had kept well–connected violators from facing the consequences of their actions in the past.
Three members of a helicopter crew that had tried to intervene could sympathize.
They were denounced at the time by members of Congress. One died in Vietnam, but the other two received hate mail and death threats after they returned to the United States and were not recognized for what they had tried to do until three decades after the fact.
(I have often thought that it was such a cocoon of denial that must have permitted a serial killer nicknamed "Citizen X" to get away with his crimes in the Soviet Union as long as he did. Soviet officials refused to acknowledge that such a thing as serial murder was possible in their country, dismissing it as a "decadent, Western phenomenon."
(To their great chagrin, they learned that not only was such a thing possible in the Soviet Union but the killer actually had been in custody early in the investigation and was subsequently released. Based on the number of killings that had already been committed when he was arrested and the number with which he eventually was credited, it is possible that more than three dozen lives might have been spared if he had not been freed.
(We will never know if there were any other My Lais during America's lengthy involvement in Vietnam — although it seems to me there almost certainly must have been — or whether any might have been prevented if there had been a more forceful response from the U.S. government.)
More than two dozen soldiers ultimately were charged, but only one, Lt. William Calley, a platoon leader, was convicted of murder. Calley was given a life sentence, but, in what was a controversial move at the time, President Nixon decided to have Calley released, pending his appeal.Eventually, Calley's sentence was adjusted, and he served 4½ months in a military prison. He was sentenced to — and could have ending up serving — a life sentence.
Nevertheless, his conviction only served to widen the gulf that existed between those who supported the war and those who opposed it.
Last year, more than 40 years after the massacre, Calley publicly apologized for the first time.
The revelation that babies had been among the victims at My Lai led many antiwar activists to label all Vietnam veterans "baby killers." That wasn't fair, but I guess it was the unavoidable legacy of the event combined with the deception the American public had come to associate with the war in Vietnam.
Tales of murdered infants from that case were so abundant at the time one might have thought that "My Lai" meant "nursery."
I must admit that I have often wondered if the G.I. culture in Vietnam — as one soldier put it, "most people in our company didn't consider the Vietnamese human" — contributed not only to My Lai but other atrocities during the Vietnam era — like the napalm attack that led to the Pulitzer Prize–winning photograph of children fleeing from their burning village in 1972.
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