What was it like when the My Lai story broke?

[DrWeird]

It was before my time, so please indulge me.

What were the similarites and differences between that and Abu Ghraib? Were all the hawks making excuses?

[DODI]

1. Similarities -- Seymour Hersh broke both stories.

[bobbieinok]

2. shock, disbelief - antiwar people had heard a lot of similar stories

I think I was most upset at how Calley was seen as a hero by a lot on the right; he spoke at conservative church groups.

It was also extremely disturbing that he was the highest ranking officer tried.

(above is what I remember; what a person remembers is not always the way it actually was)

[Raven]

8. I remember the same thing, many people were horrified but

there were some who thought that the Vietnamese got what they deserved. Lt. Calley went to jail didn't he? I can't remember for how long. Also, I don't remember there being as big a cover-up then as there seems to be now with the Iraqi abuse.

[Sandpiper]

9. Lt. Calley only spent

4 years in prison before being pardoned by Tricky Dick.

[Paranoid_Portlander]

13. Confined to his quarters?

I might be wrong, but didn't he spend most of his time in his room, confined to quarters, a form of house arrest? Every effort was made to make him comfortable, pampered, and coddled. He did spend a little time in jail at first, and Nixon, who shared Calley's comtempt for human life, set him free. Does anyone know what Calley is doing now?? What kind of career did he have after military service?

[rsdsharp]

10. Calley wasn't the highest ranking officer tried

Ernest Medina, a Captain, was tried and acquitted. He was defended by F. Lee Bailey.

[NMDemDist2]

3. I remember only that it was one more crime in an illegal war

I was pretty radical in those days and didn't really watch TV so I'm not sure how the "mainstream" took it.

But within the Peace Movement we took it as a "duh! we've been saying it for years" and felt justification that our protests were right all along.

So all in all I'd say it's pretty similar

[Snellius]

4. Everyone had known it had been going on for years

The only difference, as with Iraq, is that the public and the press had become sufficiently disillusioned and disgusted with the endless conflict that reporters like Sy Hersch, who broke the story, were more willing to tell the truth and the general public was more willing to listen. My Lai may have been more organized, but indiscriminate napalming of Vietnamese villages and the random killing of women and children, many of whom were VC combatants, was widely known. Civilian causalities in Afghanistan and Iraq have been completely ignored by the American press.

[capriccio]

5. Denial...denial..denial

It just became one more line of demarcation between those for and those againt the war. If you were for it, you bought into all the excuses and doubts about the truth of it. If you were against the war, you were in a greater state of outrage than you were the day before you heard about it.

I remember coming home from college and seeing my dad's car with a "Free Calley" bumper sticker on. I said to him, "You sure you want to be excusing what that guy did?"

He said he was down at the American Legion Hall where they were passing them out and he said, "You can put one on my car that says Free Calley; Jail Nixon."

Good comeback, Dad. But in the end I had to go peel the damn thing off his car.

[GainesT1958]

6. A storm from both sides...

Those against the war were saying "I told you so" as loud as they could, and many were calling Calley and his troops murderers. Those suppporting the war were painting Calley as a victim, and the real right-wingers were portraying him much as they did Ollie North in '87, as a "hero". That's right; they called a guy who gave the order to massacre an entire village a hero!:crazy:

It was yet another example of a quagmire that was spinning out of control, and doing so even worse when Nixon gave the order to invade Cambodia in the spring of 1970. We had about as much "Peace with honor" then as we're having an effective "regime change" now.

When my wife's Repub. uncle says that all he can see is us plunging headlong into another Viet Nam, that's pretty bad.:scared:

B-)

[Hubert Flottz]

7. I do not think it had the impact this will have!

But some of the people who helped cover up the truth are still around the White House! Colon Bowell for one! It's where Bowell got his foot in the GOPer door!

EDIT}}} The photos were not blasted everywhere like this deal as well as I recall!

[Snellius]

11. Maybe not here but in the Islamic world the impact is immense

[thecrow]

16. It's good to see

... those women protesting! Mothers! Grandmothers!
But I shudder to think of the backlash this will have on our soldiers.

I had just quit college in digust after Kent State, and remember that kids on campus said that My Lai was the thing that would bring the war to an end. I remember being very shocked at a poster of My Lai which said, "...and women and children too? And women and children too."

The Iraq score .. er.. war has from the very get go accepted that women and children too will get killed. And the casualness with with that is accepted (even in the practice .... er...run-up to war a/k/a known as the Afghanistan "war" ) is something that is just COMPLETELY unacceptable.

[LizW]

12. I remember being at a shopping mall

in Huntsville, Alabama, and seeing people giving out helium balloons that said "Free Calley". The jingoistic hawks made the same excuses then as now.

[Tuttle]

27. I remember the National Lampoon August 1970 cover

with Calley portrayed as Alfred E. Neuman and the tag-line "What, My Lai?"

Then there was a Ralph Steadman illustrated comic strip of a matchup, pairing Calley against Charlie Manson. I don't remember which ruthless killer won the bout...

This is how it was portrayed to the 'hip' youth -- while we ate mushrooms, smoked weed and hoped we wouldn't have to go to Southeast Asia.

Tut-tut

[Unknown Known]

14. It was a year before the actual story broke to the public

Hersch's story didn't get published until autumn of 1969 and the event had occurred a year earlier. The public's reaction was the same as today with this prison story - those who were for the war were in denial, those of us against the war saw it as confirmation we were right all along.

I remember in early 1970 going to see "Little Big Man" in the theatre and during the massacre scene, one of my friends yelled out "MY LAI".

I feel today like I woke up and it's 1970 again - I've fallen through a time warp - the prison story, people attacking the low-rank soldier, the brass denying everything and even Seymour Hersch is still here:wtf:

[Paranoid_Portlander]

15. Is Lt. Calley still here?

Does anyone know what he is doing nowadays?

[capriccio]

23. Selling blood diamonds

Well, jewelry anyway in some bauble boutique on a US military base down South...where else?

[bobbieinok]

18. I feel like once in a lifetime is enuff - I'm too old to relive this mess

[Hamlette]

21. time warp indeed!

I was 18 in 1968 and remember thinking: its so hard to get out of one of these unwinable wars. I thought the adults should not have let us get into this war in the first place.

Sy Hersh is FURIOUS over this prisoner abuse story. It's like he's saying: "we did this before and I told you then how horrid war is and you went and did it again!!!!!"

I have never felt less secure as I do today and it's all because of this damn war.

The problem with making decisions based on God is that Bush probably still thinks he did the right thing. After all, God wanted him elected Prez and wanted him to start this war. It must all be part of his plan. At least Johnson knew what he was doing was wrong.

Will he think that still when WWIII starts? Yeah. Prolly.

[charlie]

17. Pretty contentious

I remember my Dad bellowing to anyone who would listen that Calley was railroaded, a fine American soldier just doing his job, and me thinking he (my Dad) was a deranged idiot. There were a lot of people like him. Life magazine, the "reality TV" of our day, had run full-color spreads of the carnage, the images were more than most in the country could bear. Some jackasses had a minor radio hit with "The Battle Hymn of Lt Calley", a song about his martyrdom at the hands of unwashed liberals. It really opened a chasm in the nation, with ugly and loud feelings on both sides.

[robbedvoter]

19. One difference: civilians were victimized (rather than prisoners)

Also, there was some independent media then.
But it's true, "respectable, popular" Powell got his start there (probably why he declined to run).
I think it will have an effect - today W was speaking about the success in "closing the torture chambers". It pretty much blows his liberation BS reason of the day for the war.

[DrWeird]

22. That's a rather trivial difference.

Since many in Abu Ghraib are civilians.

[Feanorcurufinwe]

20. I remember being shocked; there was a lot of coverage.

But I was too young to do a media analysis.

When the soldiers in Charlie Company pushed into the hamlet, they expected to be locked into fierce combat with a Viet Cong battalion believed to be at My Lai. For three months the American unit had been in no major battles but had suffered a lot of casualties from snipers, mines, and booby traps. The soldiers were ready to prove themselves, ready to exact revenge on the enemy.

Charlie Company met no resistance; there were no Viet Cong soldiers at My Lai. Calley then ordered the slaughter of the civilians. People were rounded up into ditches and machine-gunned. They lay five feet deep in the ditches; any survivors trying to escape were immediately shot. When Calley spotted a baby crawling away from a ditch, he grabbed her, threw her back into the ditch, and opened fire. Some of the dead were mutilated by having "C Company" carved into their chests; some were disemboweled. One GI would later say, "You didn’t have to look for people to kill, they were just there. I cut their throats, cut off their hands, cut out their tongues, scalped them. I did it. A lot of people were doing it and I just followed. I just lost all sense of direction."
http://www.dreamscape.com/morgana/mylai.htm

[davsand]

24. My first REAL political argument with my dad.

I was maybe nine or ten at the time. I've always remembered that simply because it was the first time I'd ever stood up to my dad about political issues.

He maintained Calley was a scapegoat for the entire war, that he was being hung out to dry by the liberal media. I remember sitting there and telling him that the higher ups in the military HAD to know this stuff was going on and asking WHY weren't THEY on trial too? He got a pained look on his face and told me to quit arguing with him then walked out of the room.

I remember that photo of the girl fleeing the napalmed village being out around that same time, and I was horrified to think that my country was making war on kids and civilians. Not much has really changed, in 30 years, however, if you stop to think about it. Iraq is not a shining moment in our history.

Since then, I've talked to so many vets who were there in Viet Nam, and I realize just how untenable their position was--there were so many combatants who were not in any kind of uniform, the soldiers were scared all the time. I can't imagine what that must do to the mind after a while--you know?

I really think Iraq will create another entire generation of vets who will carry those same emotional scars and that same anguish. I'm not surprised that the abuses and outright murders has come with it. I'm sickened and horrified that our government didn't learn anything from Viet Nam and Me Lai.


Laura

[Mountainman]

25. Hopefully the Iraq war will not last 10 years and there won't be so many

people coming home with problems. When I hear that we can't leave Iraq now because of some bad outcome for Iraq I wonder if those saying that care about the bad outcomes that the troops will have.

I doubt they do.

[davsand]

28. The hawks don't care about our troops.

They never have, really. I've never understood how any of them can claim to be "pro military" when they treat our soldiers' lives as some abstract. They send them off to bleed and die with abandon, they prolong these messes and then turn their backs on them when they come home shattered.

I worry that our soldiers now will come home to the same treatment that our guys saw before, and it scares me. Stories like this most recent one just fuel it. Nam was a horror--and very few people realize it--all they saw was the photos of burning villages and dead people.

WE have GOT to get out of there now, and find some way to help rebuild what we destroyed. Staying any longer only compounds the damage, IMO.

Pax to you.


Laura

[seemslikeadream]

26. "Was Your Family all Together for Thanksgiving?"

Scapegoat

This picture of Lieutenant William Laws Calley has a caption that reads, "Scapegoat: a person, group, or thing that bears the blame for the mistakes or crimes of others." In 1971 Calley was found guilty of the premeditated murder of at least twenty-two Vietnamese civilians in connection with the My Lai massacre in Vietnam. His conviction was later overturned.



"Was Your Family all Together for Thanksgiving?"

This drawing by Tom Francis Darcy originally appeared in the November 28, 1969 edition of Newsday. This depiction of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam accompanied an editorial criticizing American military action.

http://www.picturehistory.com/find/p/13047/mcms.html

[eridani]

29. A classmate of mine worked for AFSC about 20 miles from My Lai

He knew about it, but they didn't bother complaining because it was just one of many similar events they knew about. They invested their energy in protesting the widespread bombing of free fire zones, which was far more devastating.

[VolcanoJen]

30. Kick... fascinating thread, especially for those of us who don't remember.

[Piperay]

31. At the time my family was not anti-war

at the time (we became so later) but I remember my father actually cried and said how could someone shoot down those people, the women and the children. My father was a WWII vet who had been stationed with MacArthur in Japan as part of the occupation after the war and he really loved the people there. My father said that the people of Viet Nam reminded him of when he had been in Japan and he couldn't imagine how anyone could do that to those people. :-(

[moof]

32. here's a bit about it and a link

On March 16, 1968, a bloodied unit of the Americal
division stormed into a hamlet known as My Lai 4. With
military helicopters circling overhead, revenge-seeking
American soldiers rousted Vietnamese civilians -- mostly
old men, women and children -- from their thatched huts
and herded them into the village's irrigation ditches.

As the round-up continued, some Americans raped the
girls. Then, under orders from junior officers on the
ground, soldiers began emptying their M-16s into the
terrified peasants. Some parents used their bodies
futilely to shield their children from the bullets. Soldiers
stepped among the corpses to finish off the wounded.

The slaughter raged for four hours. A total of 347
Vietnamese, including babies, died in the carnage. But
there also were American heroes that day in My Lai.
Some soldiers refused to obey the direct orders to kill
and some risked their lives to save civilians from the
murderous fire.

A pilot named Hugh Clowers Thompson Jr. from Stone
Mountain, Ga., was furious at the killings he saw
happening on the ground. He landed his helicopter
between one group of fleeing civilians and American
soldiers in pursuit.

Thompson ordered his helicopter door gunner to shoot
the Americans if they tried to harm the Vietnamese. After
a tense confrontation, the soldiers backed off. Later,
two of Thompson's men climbed into one ditch filled with
corpses and pulled out a three-year-old boy whom they
flew to safety.

Several months later, the Americal's brutality would
become a moral test for Major Powell, too.

more about the war criminal powell

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2000/121700b.html