30 May Will Haditha Become Another My Lai?
Certain events seem to lose impact with time, or are simply not known to younger generations. The massacre at My Lai during the Vietnam war may be one of them. For those of us too young to remember the incident and the subesquent military trial of Lt. William Calley — the officer held repsonsible for the massacre — it is difficult to imagine the impact that the uncovering of that brutal war crime had on the American public’s perception of the war and of the military more generally. This piece by Rupert Cornwell in The Independent helps put the recently uncovered actrocities by US marines in Haditha in historical perspective:
At Haditha, it is US Marines who are under accusation, soldiers from K or Kilo Company of the 3rd Battalion of the 1st Marine Division. In Vietnam, the troops who carried out the massacre at My Lai were from C, or Charlie Company, of the 11th Brigade of the Americal Division. But though separated by 37 years, the similarities abound.
No one disputes that what happened at Haditha on 19 November 2005, when as many as 24 civilians, including families complete with women and children, may have been shot by rampaging US soldiers, was provoked by the death of the 20-year-old Marine Lance Corporal Miguel Terrazas, killed in a roadside bomb. In Vietnam, dozens of members of Charlie company had been killed and wounded by insurgents in the weeks before the atrocity in the hamlet of My Lai 4 (then known in military jargon as Pinkville).
A couple of days earlier, on 14 March, a Vietnamese version of the IED (Improvised Explosive Device) of the variety that took L/Cpl Terrazas’s life had killed one C Company sergeant and wounded others. Military intelligence concluded that a crack unit of the Viet Cong was holed up in My Lai, and C Company was ordered to destroy them. Three platoons were assigned to the operation, one led by a lieutenant named William Calley, an unemployed college drop-out who had been rushed through officer training before being sent to lead soldiers in a full-scale guerrilla war.
Lt Calley’s platoon entered the hamlet with guns blazing at around 8am on the morning of 16 March. There was no hostile fire and the men found only 700 residents: old men, women, and children (“we never saw a male of military age,” one participant later confessed).
Over the next three hours, the men ran amok. Villagers were bayoneted, women and children were shot in the back of their heads as they prayed, at least one girl was raped and murdered. Lt Calley himself is said to have personally slaughtered dozens of villagers whom he rounded up and ordered into ditch, mowing them down with a machine-gun. By 11am it was all over. The exact number of victims is unknown to this day, anywhere from 300 to over 500. A monument at the site lists the names of 504 people, their ages ranging from 1 to 82.
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But, apparently just like Haditha now, My Lai was proof of the ghastly things that can happen in wars fought by young troops who have lost close friends to an enemy they cannot see, in another skirmish in a conflict seemingly with no end, where every victory is fleeting, which unfolds amid a civilian population whose language the young soldiers cannot speak, whose true sympathies they cannot fathom.
Part of the blame undoubtedly attaches to commanders who failed to impress upon trained soldiers the difference between right and wrong, even under such pressure. But should we be surprised that this group of US Marines seems to have snapped? Can we all put our hands on our hearts and say that under such appalling stress, when a fighting man’s greatest loyalty is not to his country or his commander-in-chief, but to his buddies alongside him in the heat and the dust and the carnage, we could not have done something similar?
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The first official version of My Lai spoke of a signal victory, in which the Americans had killed 128 insurgents and suffered only one casualty. But, in March 1969, an ex-soldier who had heard eyewitness accounts of what had really happened sent letters detailing what he had heard to President Nixon, the top commanders at the Pentagon, and members of Congress.
Slowly the military was prodded into action, but only on 5 September 1969, almost 18 months after the massacre, was Lt Calley charged with premeditated murder. The wider public knew none of the details until the story was broken by Seymour Hersh, the same investigative journalist who, in April 2004, first disclosed the prison abuse at Abu Ghraib – which was, at least until Haditha, the greatest single blot on America’s reputation left by the Iraq War.
As Cornwell points out, Hersh’s expose on My Lai finally turned the American public against the war in Vietnam. Today, six out of ten Americans already oppose the war in Iraq. And the trials of those responsible for the atrocities at Haditha have not even begun.
Peggy, My Lai itself should be put in an historical context for those not well acquainted with the history of the Vietnam War. I would suggest looking at the documents to the 1967 International War Crimes Tribunal (founded by Bertrand Russell) that are found at several sites, here’s one: http://www.vietnamese-american.org/contents.html Secondly, readers should look into the Winter Soldier Investigation conducted by the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW). As Gerald Nicosia writes in Home to War: A History of the Vietnam Veterans’ Movement (2001), ‘Of all the many accomplishments of VVAW over more than three decades, none demanded so much individual courage, none brought down so much condemnation, and none is likely to have such a lasting impact, as the Winter Soldier Investigation, which was held at Howard Johnson’s Motor Lodge in Detroit, January 31 through February 2, 1971.’ Although prompted by Seymour Hersh’s revelations about the My Lai massacre, the event covered far more than testimony about atrocities committed by soldiers (in her recent book tour, Jane Fonda has spoken rather movingly about this). Nicosia’s discussion is essential reading: alas, one is therefore not at all surprised about what appears to have occurred at Haditha…. In addition, and in… Read more »
Lovely how, without any firm findings, any official reports, any concise evidence widespread “accounts” are already associating this incident with My Lai, with the goal of highlighting its effect on the Vietnam war’s support. If the point was to associate warfare by young males with massacres history is replete with examples.
I’ve pretty much given up any hope of honest debate with those in opposition to U.S. efforts in Iraq.
‘Cassandra’: There were plenty of ‘debates’ just prior to the war, and those were initiated largely by those opposed. After the war began, I watched, attended, and personally engaged in discussions and debates about the U.S. decision to invade Iraq. Some of the best debates involved Christopher Hitchens, who surprised and disappointed many on the Left by supporting the invasion. Some of us were opposed to the war but believed the time has come for the international community to articulate clear and consistent priniciples of humanitarian intervention. What is more, we’re opposed to reflexive ‘anti-Americanism’ insofar as it fails to appreciate the very real virtues of Liberalism (as understood, say, by a Gerald Gaus, William Galston, or Stephen Holmes) and democratic principles and practices. It’s a bit late to be expressing concern for engaging in honest debate about the war in Iraq. Now’s the time to come clean with a few prominent neo-conservatives and admit support for the war was a mistake (endeavoring to figure out why one was led down this dangerous path in the first instance: much like my parents did when they decided, contrary to the Democrats they had voted for, that the Vietnam War was a… Read more »