how should we look at my lai now, nearly fifty years after the events? For most Americans, it was a rude awakening to learn that “one of our own” could commit the kind of atrocities mostly associated with the nation’s enemies in war. Even to those who defended the American soldier, his image changed from citizen-soldier to baby killer—from poster boy hero and virtuous protector of the defenseless to cowardly murderer and rapist. It seemed impossible to reconcile My Lai with the concept of the United States as a chosen nation—an exceptional nation—built on republican principles and predestined by God to spread freedom throughout the world. In his memoirs after he had left the presidency, Nixon expressed the opinion of many Americans when he called it an aberration, unrepresentative of our country.1
From one perspective, the story of My Lai came full circle on March 10, 2008, when Pham Thanh Cong, director of the Son My War Remnant Site and a survivor of the massacre, met at My Lai with former corporal Kenneth Schiel, a participant in the killings and the first member of Charlie Company to return to the scene. Cong had lost his mother and four siblings that day in My Lai 4 and was surprised at Schiel’s appearance. Less than a week before the proceedings commemorating the fortieth anniversary of the massacre, they spent three hours discussing the events of March 16, 1968. Cong described the meeting as tense, though he appreciated Schiel’s effort to atone for what had happened. At first he did not admit to killing Vietnamese civilians. In the end, however, Schiel apologized even though continuing to maintain that he had been following orders.
In August 2009, Cong would learn that in the United States William Calley had spoken publicly for the first time about his role in the killings. Unlike Schiel, Calley refused to return to My Lai. Like Schiel, he claimed to have been following orders and felt no personal responsibility. To his friend Al Fleming, Calley still maintained, “I did what I had to do.”2 The news media nonetheless regarded Calley’s public remarks as an apology; Cong and another survivor of that day, Tran Van Duc, were dubious. Cong wanted more than a so-called apology from Calley. “I want him to come back … and see things here.” If Calley “sincerely” apologized, said Cong, “we of course would forgive him.” Duc and his two sisters had escaped the massacre but did not know their mother’s fate until 1975 when, in a photo displayed at the Son My War Remnant Site, he saw her lying on the ground, dead from a gunshot in the head. “A terse ‘apology,’ ” Duc asserted, “is simply a disappointment!”3
Schiel and Calley substantiated an observation made by William Eckhardt, the chief prosecutor in the My Lai cases: those soldiers who killed noncombatants were the same ones to claim they were innocent because they had been following orders.
How exceptional was My Lai? In The Guns at Last Light, Rick Atkinson shows that in the closing months of World War II American troops committed a number of horrific crimes against the French populace after landing in Normandy in 1944. Mary Louise Roberts supports that analysis, using newly opened French documents to argue in What Soldiers Do that many American soldiers raped French women after landing on the continent.4 Atrocities also took place in America’s other wars, including the Mexican War, the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, World War I, the Korean War, and, most recently, in Iraq and Afghanistan.5
To many Americans, however, Vietnam seemed to offer more examples, perhaps in part due to the war’s longevity. In Tiger Force, Michael Sellah and Mitch Weiss uncovered a series of atrocities and mass killings of Vietnamese civilians just below Da Nang, committed by an elite army contingent over the course of seven months beginning in May 1967. Nick Turse, in Kill Anything That Moves, argues that U.S. soldiers killed civilians throughout the Vietnam War as a result of government policies that made atrocities acceptable. My Lai was thus one of many.6
The mass killings of civilians, Turse argues, were “the inevitable outcome of deliberate policies, dictated at the highest levels of the military,” and resulting in a “veritable system of suffering.” These policies established the conditions conducive to atrocities—a war of attrition based on body counts, search-and-destroy missions, free-fire zones, and soldiers trained to see the enemy as subhuman.7
Turse draws heavily on thousands of pages of documents collected by the Vietnam War Crimes Working Group, a secret task force working out of the army chief of staff’s office created by the Pentagon in 1970. The documents gathered by this wartime investigation, declassified in 1994, recorded hundreds of atrocities committed by U.S. forces in Vietnam. Eight boxes of these materials, all extracts from the now-open CID and Peers Inquiry files, focused on My Lai, however, making it stand out from the others. General Westmoreland emphasized this point in his report. “The Army investigated every case, no matter who made the allegation,” but “none of the crimes even remotely approached the magnitude and horror of My Lai.” Whereas many of these atrocities in other parts of Vietnam came by air and at night, every victim at My Lai was killed during the day, many of them less than five feet away while facing their killers.8
My Lai simply stands out, in part because of the numbers. As noted in this book’s prologue, 504 victims are listed on the marble plaque located near the entrance to the museum at the Son My War Remnant Site in My Lai. The victims broke down into 231 males and 273 females—seventeen of them pregnant. More than half of those killed—259—were under twenty years of age: forty-nine teenagers, 160 aged four to twelve years, and fifty who were three years old or younger. Of the remainder, eighty-four were in their twenties and thirties, and the rest ranged from their forties to the oldest at eighty.9
The numbers do not tell the whole story, but they say a great deal. Calley and his platoon had executed at least two hundred Vietnamese elderly men, women, and children, seventy-seven at the trail and 123 in the ditch. Seventy-nine children were among the victims, who ranged in age from infancy to their teens and included forty-two boys and thirty-nine girls. Also slain were 120 adults, eighty-one females, and thirty-nine males.
Investigators from the Peers Inquiry and CID agreed that Lieutenant Calley and the 1st Platoon were responsible for the greatest number of deaths in My Lai 4. The Peers commission accused Lieutenant Stephen Brooks of the 2nd Platoon of numerous crimes, including ordering and participating in killing noncombatants, but by that point he had already died. The commission did not bring charges against Lieutenant Jeffrey LaCross of the 3rd Platoon. He testified that he was shocked at the number of deaths and fired his rifle only one time that day—into the air—at which point it jammed.10
More than forty soldiers apparently took part in killing civilians. Of all the facts that emerged from the many investigations and reports, perhaps the most chilling is that not a single soldier on the ground tried to stop the killing.
Nor did anyone try to stop the rapes. CID accused thirteen soldiers of rape, and yet no one was convicted. Witnesses could not swear to seeing penetration; others refused to come forward, some fearing retaliation. Both the victims and alleged perpetrators had scattered afterward, making it virtually impossible to find the victims and have them identify the accused. Moreover, many officers and enlisted men dismissed rape as an unavoidable aspect of war and did little or nothing to prevent it.11
Equally troubling is that none of the soldiers reported any of these crimes. But in fairness, to whom would they have reported them? In nearly every case, their superiors either ordered, participated in, or ignored what was going on around them. If they waited until they returned to the base, who would believe them?
Why the mass killings? The sexual assaults? The violence? Writer Tim O’Brien served with the army in Vietnam and blamed war itself, declaring that in the confusion of combat, nothing seemed real. “For the common soldier, at least, war has the feel—the spiritual texture—of a great ghostly fog, thick and permanent. There is no clarity. Everything swirls. The old rules are no longer binding, the old truths no longer true.” The troops “did not know even the simple things … how to feel when seeing a dead Vietnamese, to be happy or sad or relieved… . They did not know good from evil.”12
Another Vietnam veteran, Philip Caputo, argues in Rumor of War that the only safeguard of decency was “the net of a man’s inner moral values, the attribute that is called character.” Not everyone had character. “There were a few—and I suspect Lieutenant Calley was one—who had no net and plunged all the way down, discovering in their bottommost depths a capacity for malice they probably never suspected was there.” As Harry Stanley, a soldier in Charlie Company, put it two decades after My Lai, “It’s just what’s in the person, I think: the person himself.”13
Of the figures who seemed to have “character,” Hugh Thompson and Lawrence Colburn come first to mind. March 16, 1968, was “one of the saddest days of my life,” remarked Thompson at a conference on My Lai at Tulane University in 1994. “I just could not believe that people could totally lose control like the way it happened.” Other units had suffered losses, “but they didn’t go out the next day and wipe out a village.”14
Thompson said he learned morality in a close-knit family while growing up in Georgia. By present-day standards, he once jokingly explained, his mother and father were “abusive” and did not know what “double jeopardy” was. “If I did something wrong, my mother would get me. When my father got home from work, she would tell him, and I’d get it again. But they always taught me to help the underdog. Don’t be a bully and live by the Golden Rule.” His parents, he said, “taught me right from wrong.”15
Thompson’s father had served in both the army and the navy in World War II, followed by the navy reserve for more than three decades. The younger Thompson took a similar path. After graduating from high school, he joined the navy in 1961 and, after a brief time out of the service, enlisted in the army in 1966. A year later he completed flight school and departed for Vietnam, where as a helicopter pilot he crashed five times, the last time resulting in a broken back in August 1968 that took him out of the war. Lawrence Colburn later remarked that he suspected that after Thompson had exposed the massacre, someone in command placed him in a “very precarious position” by sending him to the most dangerous areas without adequate gunship protection. Whether this is true or not, Thompson stayed in the service until retiring in 1983 and was inducted into the Army Aviation Hall of Fame in 2004.16
Colburn likewise learned right from wrong at home. Raised in the state of Washington, he had been an altar boy for four years and, like Thompson, was humble about his actions at My Lai 4. He only did what was right, he later asserted, though he admitted that what he saw that day made it difficult to adjust to life afterward. His father had likewise provided a model, having joined the army and landed at Normandy Beach. When he died in 1964, his widow faced the challenge of raising four children, three girls and a boy. To ease the family’s financial burden, Colburn dropped out of high school to join the army at seventeen but had to wait until he was eighteen before deploying to Vietnam in December 1967 as a helicopter gunner.17
Thompson and Colburn had not seen each other for more than two decades after My Lai when British journalist Michael Bilton brought them together in 1989. Bilton wanted to make a documentary film on My Lai, and Colburn, who lived outside Atlanta, expressed interest. After locating Thompson in Lafayette, Louisiana, Bilton convinced him to join Colburn in granting the interviews that became the basis of “Remember My Lai,” the award-winning video directed by British film-maker Kevin Sim broadcasted on BBC-TV and then in the United States on Frontline on PBS-TV. Bilton and Sim then collaborated in writing the internationally acclaimed book that appeared in 1992, Four Hours in My Lai. In the meantime, Thompson and Colburn became close friends.18
Thompson never thought of himself as a hero, despite the accolades from Peers and many others. Peers asserted that Thompson “maintained his basic integrity in spite of everything that surrounded him. If there was a hero of My Lai, he was it.” Eckhardt similarly praised Thompson’s heroism. “When you have evil, sometimes, in the midst of it, you will have incredible, selfless good. And that’s Hugh Thompson.” Eckhardt acknowledged that some soldiers refused to obey Calley’s orders, but, he added, they did nothing to stop the killings. Colburn, however, came to their defense, maintaining that those soldiers did all they could under the circumstances. “We could just fly away at the end of the day,” but they had to face each other for months.19
Thompson came under bitter criticism for his actions that abated only after the courts martial came to an end. When he walked into the officers’ club, it was often to calls of “traitor,” “communist,” and “sympathizer.” He received hate mail at his home in Louisiana, along with death threats over the phone at three in the morning and mutilated animals dumped on his doorstep. He said he was galled by the TV coverage of “rallies for Calley” that took place all over the country after the sentencing. How could I be “the bad guy,” he once asked a reporter. “Has everyone gone mad?”20
Thompson thought My Lai was an aberration. “It can’t happen all the time,” he told Mike Wallace on 60 Minutes. “I don’t think that I could live with myself if I thought that was an everyday thing and I was part of it.”21
David Egan, a veteran army officer and later professor of architecture at Clemson University, had been so moved by Bilton and Sim’s documentary film that he began a letter-writing campaign that, with the aid of journalists, aimed at winning national recognition of the bravery of Thompson, Colburn, and the late Glenn Andreotta. The Pentagon had at first been reluctant to give awards to Thompson’s two crew members, particularly in a public ceremony, but he insisted on both conditions and with public pressure got what he wanted.22
On March 6, 1998, the Pentagon awarded each of the three men (posthumously in Andreotta’s case) the Soldier’s Medal, the highest honor for valor bestowed on a soldier in a noncombat situation. The army had finally acknowledged that the awards it gave the three men in 1968 for heroism under enemy fire were erroneous, because no Viet Cong forces had been in My Lai on March 16, 1968. As the Washington Post put it, “The enemy was us.”23
“We stand in honor of their heroism, and we have taken too long to recognize them,” said the army chaplain, Major General Donald Shea, standing near the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington. My Lai was “one of the most shameful chapters in the Army’s history,” declared the keynote speaker, Major General Michael Ackerman. “It was the ability to do the right thing even at the risk of their personal safety that guided these soldiers to do what they did.” They “set the standard for all soldiers to follow.”24
After accepting his medal, Thompson spoke. He thanked the army for the honor before saying, his voice trembling, “I would like to recognize all Vietnam veterans who are alive today—all across America and especially those who are on the wall right out to the left. I would like to thank all of them, who served their country with honor. In a very real sense this medal is for you.” To his fellow veterans, he said, “Welcome home.”
Colburn, for his part, declared it his “solemn wish that we all never forget the tragedy and brutality of war.” He then quoted General Douglas MacArthur: “The soldier, be he friend or foe, is charged with the protection of the weak and the unarmed. It is the very essence and reason for his being.”25Following the ceremony, Thompson and Colburn walked to the black granite wall and, surrounded by the press, found Andreotta’s name and used a pencil to trace the engraving onto a piece of paper to give to his mother.26
Over the years Thompson and Colburn participated in a number of My Lai events (including at the service academies) and gave talks, seminars, and presentations—all focusing on the importance of moral and ethical leadership in combat. Perhaps most rewarding, however, were their returns to My Lai. They received invitations to attend the commemoration of the thirtieth anniversary of the massacre in March 1998, where Vietnam veteran Michael Boehm played the mournful elegy “Ashokan Farewell” on his violin (as he had done every year since 1994) as “an offering to the spirits of dead at My Lai and for those still living at My Lai.” Three years later they came back to dedicate a school and were reunited with Do Hoa, the young boy they rescued from the ditch in 1968. Colburn noted that Do Hoa “had to steal to feed himself” and spent four years in prison for petty crimes. But Boehm had helped the young man secure enough financial support to begin a new life and to become, by 2001, husband and father of a five-year-old son.27
For their efforts, Thompson was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2000, and a year later both he and Colburn were nominated for that award.28
Thompson did not accompany Colburn to the fortieth-anniversary proceedings at My Lai in 2008; he had died two years earlier—“morally wounded and despondent,” according to Colburn, who was at his bedside. Soon after Thompson’s death, Colburn received an increasing number of death threats, and more patrons than usual refused to do business with him in Atlanta.29
My Lai made it imperative that the army institute major changes in training aimed at developing what Eckhardt called “professional battlefield behavior.” Soldiers are trained to kill in defense of their country and must know when to use force and how much. “Ill discipline loses wars.”30
To understand the importance of restraint in combat, soldiers and officers must learn to disobey illegal orders. The only way to bring this about, Eckhardt insisted, was “to plainly state that the intentional killing without justification of noncombatants—old men, women, children, and babies—is murder and is illegal.” No one prior to My Lai had considered it necessary to teach U.S. soldiers something so “obvious”; My Lai had made the obvious necessary. Judge Reid Kennedy made clear in Lieutenant Calley’s trial that no soldier could escape responsibility for following an order that a person of “ordinary sense and understanding” should know was illegal. In the U.S. Court of Military Appeals, Associate Judge Robert E. Quinn affirmed that argument, adding that it did not matter whether Calley knew the order was illegal; he had no defense for his actions.31
After My Lai the army felt compelled to implement reforms aimed at building a more professional military service. It produced television ads exalting work training and educational programs that better prepared soldiers for their post-army life. It improved the screening of incoming soldiers in an effort to develop an “Army of character” rather than one of castoffs or misfits. It raised the training level of both officers and enlisted personnel by emphasizing moral and ethical behavior in all situations. And it demanded strict enforcement of rules and regulations embodying what William Hays Parks called the “principle of restraint” embodied in the law of war.32
To its credit, the army immediately addressed the problems My Lai had exposed. It revised and expanded policy directives regarding several key issues: the reporting of war crimes; the proper treatment of civilians, noncombatants, and prisoners of war; the protection of property; the adherence to the rules of engagement; and the enforcement of the Geneva and Hague Conventions as integral parts of the law of war. It also improved the management and maintenance of file records, ensured that all photos taken by the army’s photographers became its property (which, if in effect in 1968, would have kept Haeberle’s photos from becoming public in 1969), called for clarification of colors in using smoke canisters to mark locations, and placed first sergeants in the field to be closer to the men and raise morale.33
The army also stopped using “search and destroy” in describing military operations and employed the more innocuous term “search and clear.” Lieutenant General Peers thought the move wise, noting that both commanders and soldiers had sometimes misunderstood search and destroy to mean more than “seeking out and destroying enemy forces, installations, resources, and base areas”; the loosely defined term led to the killing of civilians and the destruction of their settlements and basic foodstuffs. Search and clear imposed restrictions on U.S. forces by specifically authorizing them “to clear an area permanently of organized VC/NVA main forces, including the provincial battalions, in order to eliminate the immediate enemy threat.”34
By the mid-1970s the army had come closer to becoming a professional organization. The draft had ended in 1973, although those eligible to serve still had to register with the Selective Service System in the event of a need to revive conscription. The following year, the Department of Defense instituted the Law of War Program, which held the commander responsible for enforcing its principles, and it established training standards and educational requirements commensurate with the soldier’s responsibility and position. In 1976, the army revised its field manual Law of Land Warfare to better protect civilians in an embattled area by specifically prohibiting the bombardment of undefended towns, villages, dwellings, or buildings; attacks on civilians, whether individual or in groups; and unnecessary killing and damage to property.35
The army appeared to have put My Lai in the past by the time of its first real post-Vietnam test in January 1991. Before launching Operation Desert Storm in the Gulf War, the First Armored Division commander, Major General Ronald Griffith, warned his brigade commanders: “No My Lais in this division—Do you hear me?”36
Two years later, in 1993, the army incorporated almost verbatim the “Nine Marine Corps Principles” into The Soldier’s Rules by the Army. These principles held, among other things, that soldiers are not to engage noncombatants or harm those who surrender and become prisoners. They must care for all wounded, and they cannot interfere with medical workers or damage their equipment, nor can they steal or needlessly destroy property. They must treat civilians in a humanitarian way, and they must report violations.37
These principles were already set out in the Geneva Convention, Parks asserted, but the army wanted to make them more specific and then teach, follow, and enforce them. To prevent more My Lais, commanders must repeatedly emphasize to their military forces why they are in combat and the importance of distinguishing between “unarmed civilians, noncombatants, and those people who were, in fact, shooting at us.” If the army intended to take the “moral high ground,” it must develop officers and enlisted personnel with character, discipline, and an understanding of combat ethics.38
Lieutenant Calley, Parks declared, personified the two major problems in the army at that time: he was a poor soldier and a poor leader. He “didn’t deserve to be in the United States military, much less to be an officer.”39
To emphasize the importance of doing what was right, the army has inserted a copy of Hugh Thompson’s Soldier’s Award into its field manual, highlighted in a boxed quote under the heading “W01 Thompson at My Lai.”40
Despite the army’s efforts, atrocities have not become a thing of the past. Of those committed after My Lai, perhaps the best-known took place at Abu Ghraib, the American prison located twenty miles west of Baghdad, during the Iraq War. Abu Ghraib was the scene of torture, beatings, rape, degradation and humiliation, and murder—all of which happened over the course of three years, confirmed by photographs. It has been estimated but not confirmed that more than five hundred detainees (most of them civilians) died in American hands. Seymour Hersh, still tireless in his efforts to expose wrongdoing, wrote that few of the perpetrators—military police and intelligence agents—had been in combat; one could not attribute their behavior to battlefield stress.41
In the years since Abu Ghraib, which was perhaps the worst public relations scandal the American military had endured since My Lai, it has tried to institute further reforms.
In June 2015, after nearly two decades of work, the Department of Defense completed the updating and expansion of the U.S. Army’s Field Manual 27-10 and released it as the Department of Defense Law of War Manual. More than 1,200 pages in length, the volume covers a multitude of issues, including attempts to correct the flaws that helped lead to the events of March 16, 1968.42
The echoes of My Lai (and Abu Ghraib) are unmistakable. All members of the armed services must “refuse to comply with clearly illegal orders” that violate the law of war—particularly those “orders to kill defenseless persons” who are “under effective physical control.” Commands, orders, and speeches should never be “understood” as implicit authorization to violate the law of war. The commander’s responsibility is to prevent his subordinates from violating the law of war. The new field manual reiterated the “grave breaches” enumerated in the Geneva Convention of 1949, the war crimes defined in MACV Directive 20-4, and the penalties set out in the Uniform Code of Military Justice. It emphasized the importance of reporting “possible, suspected, or alleged violations of the law of war,” followed by a thorough investigation. And it repeated the central thrust of the War Powers Act of 1996 by declaring war crimes committed outside the United States triable and punishable under federal statutes.43
After Abu Ghraib, the army continued its efforts to protect noncombatants in wartime. In 2016 Congress passed the Law of Armed Conflict, which specifically confined combat engagements to military targets. Yet the continuation of atrocities in the post–My Lai era strongly suggests that the central problem in improving the army’s treatment of civilians lies less in writing new laws and regulations than in having officers who enforce those already in effect.44
Can we, fifty years later, prevent future atrocities by reaching a better understanding of what caused the massacre at My Lai? Were there any warning signs?
Just five years before My Lai, Hannah Arendt famously reflected upon the seemingly law-abiding and morally sound German citizens who followed Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann’s bidding to execute millions of Jewish people. As a top officer in the SS (Schutzstaffel, the paramilitary security service), Eichmann was a major architect of the Holocaust, in charge of deporting Jews to ghettos and extermination camps in Eastern Europe. He had fled Germany after the war, settling in Argentina and living there under an assumed name until he was found in 1960 by Mossad, the Israeli intelligence organization, and taken to Jerusalem for trial in the civil courts. “The trouble with Eichmann,” Arendt wrote after covering his 1961 trial for the New Yorker, “was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal.” And deeply chilling was her implication that it could happen again. “The sad truth of the matter is that most evil is done by people who never made up their minds to be or do either evil or good.”45
This “normality,” Arendt noted, “was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together.”46
German philosopher Bettina Stangneth has recently questioned Arendt’s argument about Eichmann’s “banality” by insisting it was a ruse aimed at preventing his execution. According to Stangneth, he pretended to be an innocent bureaucrat who had followed orders and yet felt “indispensable” because of his “exclusive” knowledge of the murderous program. In his private notes and taped interviews after 1945, he proved himself to be a fanatically driven National Socialist, proud of his role in the Holocaust.47 Yet Stangneth’s revelations, even if accurate, do not refute Arendt’s point that banal behavior is not a guarantee against the commission of atrocities.
Historian Christopher Browning agrees with Arendt and argues that German perpetrators of the Holocaust went beyond those in the Eichmann circle: They were primarily “ordinary men,” which makes it difficult to detect reliable early warning signs of genocidal behavior. His examination of a reserve police battalion in Poland involved in the Holocaust shows it was composed of normal human beings thrown into a situation conducive to committing atrocities. In an assessment that reminds one of My Lai, he found varying types of participants: those who willingly killed; those who followed orders out of a sense of duty or to protect their careers; and those who refused to kill. Yet from his study of these “ordinary men” came the realization that a person could not escape responsibility by claiming that others would have acted the same under similar conditions. They had choices. In a statement similar to that made by Harry Stanley of Charlie Company, Browning argues, “Human responsibility is ultimately an individual matter.” Under intense peer pressure, who can say what any person will or will not do?48
Like Arendt and Browning, human rights specialist James Dawes asserts that so-called monsters are mainly “ordinary people” who do not suddenly become killers. Remorseless killing by “evil men” requires transforming them into automatons who do not realize what they are doing. Drill sergeants must teach impressionable young soldiers the skills for eliminating all threats in a binary world of good and evil. To do this, they blind the new soldiers to the world’s ambiguities, erase their identity by keeping them within their own special group to promote similarity of purpose, demand unquestioned obedience to authority, stereotype the enemy as subhuman, and rely on violence as an energizing force in an escalatory process in which killing becomes less difficult with repetition.49
A number of people have drawn comparisons between Americans killing Vietnamese civilians and Nazis executing Jewish civilians. The Nazi firing squads avoided eye contact and blood spattering on them by shooting their victims in the back of their heads so they would fall forward into the freshly dug graves; Thompson asserted that GIs wielding M-16s and M-60 machine guns could not look into their captives’ eyes and told them to turn around toward the ditch before shooting them. One young Nazi soldier noted that he and the others shot women and children to prevent them from seeking revenge later; Calley ordered the killing of women and children for the same reason. A young SS officer explained that any words suggesting execution were “completely banal and devoid of meaning once one has gotten used to them”; Varnado Simpson, a teenager in 1968, recalled that after he had shot his first victim at My Lai, the killings became easier.50
My Lai demonstrated with graphic clarity that U.S. soldiers are as capable of war crimes as anyone under the right circumstances. The improvements made by the army in the years since are an important step in the right direction, but they have not eliminated the problem. Ultimately, there has been no accountability and no real means to achieve it.
Historian Roger Spiller once declared that “the most frightening lesson” he learned from military history is that it is not only psychopaths who commit heinous crimes; even “ordinary” people can do the same in the right situation. “We are all,” he said, “one step away from My Lai.”51
My Lai was a turning point for so many reasons, not least for the ways in which it tarnished the image many Americans had of their soldiers, and that the soldiers had of themselves. Veterans came home expecting to receive a warm welcome but instead encountered widespread and vicious criticism of their actions in Vietnam.
More than a few veterans felt that Calley had cast a dark shadow over the military. Perhaps the most outspoken critic was Harry G. Summers, a retired colonel in the U.S. Army, veteran of the Korean and Vietnam Wars, and bestselling author of books on military strategy. At a 1994 conference on My Lai at Tulane University, he told the audience, “Calley and Medina ought to have been hung and then drawn and quartered and the remains put at the gates at Fort Benning to remind all who enter of the consequences. The bastard fell through the cracks.” In a television interview, David Hackworth agreed with this position. Calley “should have been lined up against the wall and shot… . The guy’s a murderer.”52
“Only crime and the criminal,” remarked Arendt, “confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.”53 Both Schiel and Simpson came to realize what they had done, felt intense guilt, expressed remorse, and, in their way, atoned. Calley has provided no indication of any of these changes in attitude and will likely take his reasons and his feelings to his grave.
In the mid-1990s Tim O’Brien publicly declared at that same Tulane conference attended by Summers that military authorities today should prosecute both the perpetrators of the war crimes at My Lai and those who covered them up. Calley should have remained in jail all his life. He was no scapegoat; he committed the crimes—as did the others in Charlie Company who followed his orders and, like him, publicly admitted to the killings. O’Brien’s comment echoed what Lieutenant General Peers had said fifteen years earlier: “There is no statute of limitations for war crimes.”54
Nothing today could ease the pain of what happened at My Lai, but it is crucial that we do not allow this tragedy to slip from memory. Two instances out of many remind us of the importance of remembering how the events of that day had a lasting, deeply personal impact on both Americans and Vietnamese.
Varnado Simpson was one of numerous veterans who remained haunted by what he did at My Lai. “I just lost all sense of direction, of purpose. I just started killing in any kind of way I could kill. It just came, I didn’t know I had it in me, but like I say after I killed the child my whole mind just went, it just went.”55
Two decades after My Lai, in his hometown of Jackson, Mississippi, Simpson sat before a table covered with pill bottles as he told the story of his ten-year-old son, his photo in a frame nearby. The boy was playing in his grandmother’s front yard when two boys about fourteen years old got into an argument across the street. One ran home to get a gun; the other one ran for safety—near the spot where Simpson’s son was playing. The first teenager returned with the gun and fired at the other teenager but accidentally shot the child in the head. “I was in the house and I came out and picked him up,” Simpson remembered, “but he died in my arms. And when I looked at him, his face looked like the same face of a child that I had killed and I said, ‘This is the punishment for me killing the people that I killed.’ ”56
When asked if this self-torture would ever end, Simpson replied, “Yeah, when I kill myself, yeah, it’ll come to an end. Like I said, I tried suicide three times.”57
Simpson succeeded on his fourth attempt—this one in May 1997, at the age of forty-eight.
Truong Thi Le’s life likewise changed that day in My Lai. She was having breakfast with her young son, daughter, and eight other family members, when they were ordered outside by American soldiers and taken to a group of other villagers squatting or sitting on the main trail into the village. Suddenly two soldiers raised their rifles and fired into the throng of men, women, and children. Le dropped to the ground to cover her six-year-old son. “Don’t cry,” she whispered as two bodies fell on them, shielding them from the gunfire. “The Americans have shot everyone. Don’t cry—and see if we can survive.” Le cupped her hand over the boy’s mouth and lifted her head to see soldiers pointing here and there while shooting those still alive. In the silence that followed the last shot, she could hear the clicks of a camera as someone took pictures of the scene.
After the soldiers left, Le broke down in tears as she scratched and clawed among the bodies, finally finding one of her infant nephews unhurt and, with her son, took them off the trail and fled through the rice paddies to a secure area west of the village. The next day she returned to My Lai 4, where she found her home burned to the ground and all her other relatives dead—nine family members, including her father, mother, and daughter. She never saw her husband again after he left for work in the rice fields the previous morning.
More than two decades later, Le was living alone, unable to erase that day from her mind. “I think of it all the time, and that is why I am old before my time. I remember it all the time. I think about it and I can’t sleep… . I hate [the Americans] very much. I won’t forgive them as long as I live.”58
We are left with the question: Why the massacre at My Lai?
In truth, there is no definitive answer because no one can reliably predict human behavior in any situation, and particularly in the stress of war.
Tim O’Brien’s unit operated in the same area as Charlie Company and experienced the same trials and fears but acted differently. Each village in Pinkville was a source of terror to young American soldiers. They all individually felt rage and frustration and abject fear because of land mines and booby traps against which they could not fight, yet knowing that their next step, their next breath, could be their last. Despite all this, why didn’t his unit take revenge against defenseless civilians? O’Brien’s reply: He did not know.59
Despite all the reforms by the army, there are no assurances against the commission of atrocities in either combat or non-combat situations—the latter demonstrated by Abu Ghraib. What is perhaps most disturbing about My Lai is not that it stands out in the annals of wartime atrocities in the American experience, but that the factors and elements that converged there in March 1968 have converged in all wars: debilitating panic, dehumanizing rage, dissociative confusion, the heady sense of power over life and death. Other soldiers in wars before and since have experienced the cauldron of primal yet complex emotions produced by combat. They have also sometimes been badly trained and poorly led, and therefore unprepared to channel those emotions. The GIs in Charlie Company were not much different from the young men who have fought in every war. Indeed, the line between My Lai and the thousands of other operations in Vietnam in which what happened at My Lai did not happen seems nearly arbitrary.
But My Lai forces us to see that the line cannot be arbitrary. We have to accept that there remains a crucial difference between William Calley and Hugh Thompson. Perhaps this difference involves “character”—however we define it. I would suggest it embodies a notion of decency that was most noticeably missing at My Lai. Thompson, Lawrence Colburn, and Glenn Andreotta leave us room for hope because, unlike Calley (and others), they did not lose sight of ordinary human decency. And that, in the end, is a form of heroism.