THE MY LAI MASSACRE

IT passed without notice when it occurred in mid-March 1968, at a time when the war news was still dominated by the siege of Khe Sanh. Yet the brief action at My Lai, a hamlet in Viet Cong-infested territory 335 miles northeast of Saigon, may yet have an impact on the war. According to accounts that suddenly appeared on TV and in the world press last week, a company of 60 or 70 U.S. infantrymen had entered My Lai early one morning and destroyed its houses, its livestock and all the inhabitants that they could find in a brutal operation that took less than 20 minutes. When it was over, the Vietnamese dead totaled at least 100 men, women and children, and perhaps many more. Only 25 or so escaped, because they lay hidden under the fallen bodies of their relatives and neighbors.

So far, the tale of My Lai has only been told by a few Vietnamese survivors--all of them pro-V.C.--and half a dozen American veterans of the incident. Yet military men privately concede that stories of what happened at My Lai are essentially correct. If so, the incident ranks as the most serious atrocity yet attributed to American troops in a war that is already well known for its particular savagery.

Rather Dark and Bloody. The My Lai incident might never have come to light. The only people who reported it at the time were the Viet Cong, who passed out leaflets publicizing the slaughter. To counter the V.C. accusation, regarded as standard propaganda, the U.S. Army launched a cursory field investigation, which "did not support" the charges. What put My Lai on the front pages after 20 months was the conscience of Richard Ridenhour, 23, a former SP4 who is now a student at Claremont Men's College in Claremont, Calif. A Viet Nam veteran, Ridenhour had known many of the men in the outfit involved at My Lai. It was C Company of the Americal Division's 11 th Infantry Brigade. Ridenhour did not witness the incident himself, but he kept hearing about it from friends who were there. He was at first disbelieving, then deeply disturbed. Last March--a year after the slaughter--he sent the information he had pieced together in 30 letters, addressed them to the President, several Congressmen and other Washington officials.

Ridenhour's letter led to a new probe--and to formal charges. Last month, just two days before he was to be released from the Army, charges of murdering "approximately 100" civilians at My Lai were preferred against one of C Company's platoon leaders, 1st Lieut. William Laws Calley Jr., a 26-year-old Miamian now stationed at Fort Benning, Ga. Last week Staff Sergeant David Mitchell, a 29-year-old career man from St. Francisville, La., became the second My Lai veteran to be charged (with assault with intent to commit murder). The Army has another 24 men (15 of whom are now civilians) under investigation. If the accounts of others who have spoken out publicly stand up, C Company, as Ridenhour wrote, is indeed involved in "something rather dark and bloody" at My Lai.

Before the massacre, My Lai was a poor hamlet in Quang Ngai province, whose low, marshy coastal plains had been--and still are--a base for the Viet Cong 48th Battalion. My Lai was a "fortified" hamlet whose bricked-up houses served as bunkers for marauding V.C. cadres, and was known to the G.I.s in the area as "Pinkville." P:Company arrived in Viet Nam in February 1968, and was assigned to Task Force Barker, a three-company search-and-destroy unit located a few miles from the hamlet at a firebase on Viet Nam Highway No. 1. Almost from the moment it arrived, C Company suffered daily casualties. Most of the mayhem was caused by mines and booby traps, and they were particularly plentiful in and around My Lai. By mid-March, the company, had lost a third of its original strength of more than 100 men. One day, a 155 mm. shell rigged as a booby trap killed one and injured four or five others. As Sergeant Michael B. Terry, 22, recalled it last week, "that really bothered the guys." Evidently so. Some of the men in the unit later beat up an innocent woman whom they spotted in a field. The beating ended, said Terry, when "one kid just walked up to her and shot her."

The next morning, on orders whose origin is still unclear, C Company took on a special assignment. It was described last week by Sergeant Michael A. Bernhardt, another C Company veteran. At Fort Dix, N.J., he went before TV cameras accompanied by a base press officer. As Bernhardt told it, the company commander (Captain Ernest Medina, now stationed at Fort Benning) assembled hk men and announced that the Task Force was to destroy My Lai and its inhabitants.

The Kid Just Couldn't. According to the survivors, who spoke to newsmen last week at their shabby refugee camp at nearby Son My, the operation was grimly efficient. The inhabitants, who had a long record of sheltering Viet Cong, scrambled for cover around 6 a.m. when an hour-long mortar and artillery barrage began. When it stopped, helicopters swooped in, disgorging C Company's three platoons. One platoon tore into the hamlet, while the other two threw a cordon around the place. "My family was eating breakfast, when the Americans came," said Do Chuc, a 48-year-old peasant who claims to have lost a son and a daughter in the shooting that followed. "Nothing was said to us," he said. "No explanation was given."

The first G.I.s to enter the hamlet were led by Lieut. Calley, a slight, 5-ft. 3-in. dropout (with four Fs) from Palm Beach Junior College who enlisted in the Army in 1966 and was commissioned in 1967. Some of Calley's men raced from house to house, setting the wooden ones ablaze and dynamiting the brick structures. Others routed the inhabitants out of their bunkers and herded them into groups. Some of them tried to run, said Bernhardt, but "the rest couldn't quite understand what was going on." Sergeant Terry saw a young C Company soldier train an M-60 on the first group of huddled villagers, "but the kid just couldn't do it. He threw the machine gun down." Another man picked it up.

As Ridenhour described it, one of his C Company friends was stunned by the fate of a small wounded boy who had been standing by the hamlet trail. "The boy was clutching his wounded arm with his other hand, while blood trickled between his fingers," Ridenhour wrote. "He just stood there with big eyes staring around like he didn't understand. Then the captain's RTO [radio operator] put a burst of 16 [M16 rifle] fire into him."

Lunch Break. Few were spared. Stragglers were shot down as they fled from their burning huts. One soldier fired his M-79 grenade launcher into a clump of bodies in which some Vietnamese were still alive. One chilling incident was observed by Ronald L. Haeberle, 28, the Army combat photographer who had been assigned to C Company.* He saw "two small children, maybe four or five years old. A guy with an M-16 fired at the first boy, and the older boy fell over to protect the smaller one. Then they fired six more shots. It was done very businesslike."

Most of the shooting had died down by the time the men of the other two platoons filed into the hamlet. Sergeant Terry told newsmen that he and his squad were settling down for some chow when they noticed that some Vietnamese in a pile of bodies in a nearby ditch "were still breathing." Continued Terry: "They were pretty badly shot up. They weren't going to get any medical help, and so we shot them, shot maybe five of them." Then they broke for lunch.

Not all of C Company took part in the madness. At My Lai, Ridenhour reported, one soldier shot himself in the foot so that he would be Medevacked out of the area. A few others, himself included, says Bernhardt, refused to fire. That evening, he said, his company commander told him "not to do anything like write my Congressman."

Many questions about My Lai remain unanswered. Who had ordered the attack on the hamlet, which was apparently designated as a "free-fire" zone? What exactly were the orders? The answers may come out in a court-martial; Fort Benning Commander Major General Orwin Talbott is expected to announce a decision this week on whether Lieut. Galley is to be tried. Even so, time has already erased much of the evidence.

Outrage Again. There have been other American atrocities in Viet Nam. Ten Marines were prosecuted in 1967 after a nighttime rampage in Xuan Ngoc in which two women were raped and a family of five killed. Daniel Lang's Casualties of War describes the kidnap-rape-murder of a young girl by four G.I.s in 1966. Yet such incidents are only a small part of the mosaic of brutality for which both sides are responsible. Terror is a principal Viet Cong tactic. So far this year, by actual count, the Communists have killed 5,754 civilians, wounded 14,520 others and kidnaped 5,887. The allies have taken to such tactics too, though on a more limited scale. Under the so-called Phoenix program, the U.S. and South Viet Nam last year began a struggle to break the Viet Cong infrastructure of tax collectors and other officials. In its first year, according to the Pentagon, Phoenix "neutralized" more than 14,000 Communist civilians--meaning captured them, converted them to the allied side--or killed them as they tried to escape capture.

Some antiwar partisans in the U.S. seized on the event to support their theme. Senator George McGovern suggested that the massacre was the result of "the futility and uselessness of this war." But Americans and others have committed brutal acts in other wars as well, wars with a deeper outline and purpose. Some critics abroad glibly started making comparisons with Nazi atrocities. Such comparisons are obviously spurious, if only because Lidice and Babi Yar were caused by a deliberate national policy of terror, not by the aberrations of soldiers under stress. Still, it will not be easy for Americans to come to terms with Pinkville. It sears the generous and humane image, more often deserved than not, of the U.S. as a people. Whatever else may come to light about Pinkville in the weeks ahead, the tragedy shows that the American soldier carries no immunity against the cruelty and inhumanity of prolonged combat.

* Some of his pictures of the massacre appeared in Cleveland's Plain Dealer last week, others not so far published appear here (see page 17) and will also be seen in a forth coming issue of LIFE.

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