50 years ago, the My Lai massacre shamed the US military

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Source: Associated Presss

50 years ago, the My Lai massacre shamed the US military

By TRAN VAN MINH and GRANT PECK
Today

MY LAI, Vietnam (AP) — The shudder of artillery fire woke the boy at 5:30 a.m. Three American soldiers appeared at his family’s home a couple of hours later and forced the mother and five children into their bomb shelter, a structure almost every rural Vietnamese home had during the war, to keep residents safe.

One soldier set fire to the family’s thatched house while the others tossed grenades into the shelter. Protected under the torn bodies of his mother and his four siblings, 10-year-old Pham Thanh Cong was the only survivor.

It was March 16, 1968. The American soldiers of Charlie Company, sent on what they were told was a mission to confront a crack outfit of their Vietcong enemies, met no resistance, but over three to four hours killed 504 unarmed civilians, mostly women, children and elderly men, in My Lai and a neighboring community. Vietnamese refer to the greater village where the killings occurred as Son My.

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The U.S. military’s own records, filed discreetly away for three decades, described 300 other cases of what could fairly be described as war crimes. My Lai was distinguished by the shocking one-day death toll, the stomach-churning photographs and the gruesome details exposed by a high-level U.S. Army inquiry.

An official policy of free-fire zones — from which civilians were supposed to leave upon being warned — and an unofficial code of “kill anything that moves” meant Vietnamese were constantly at risk.

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Read more: https://apnews.com/4268e3e8a0554d59b71638479503111a/50-years-ago,-the-My-Lai-massacre-shamed-the-US-military

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1. Today We Have "Trump Lies" And He's Shaming The.....

whole United States.

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2. LA Times: A forgotten hero stopped the My Lai massacre 50 years ago today

Last edited Fri Mar 16, 2018, 03:50 PM - Edit history (2)

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LA Times: A forgotten hero stopped the My Lai massacre 50 years ago today

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A forgotten hero stopped the My Lai massacre 50 years ago today

By JON WIENER

MAR 16, 2018 | 4:05 AM



Helicopter pilot Hugh Thompson speaks with reporters at the Pentagon on Dec. 4, 1969, after testifying about the My Lai massacre in South Vietnam. (Associated Press)

Everybody's heard of the My Lai massacre — March 16, 1968, 50 years ago today — but not many know about the man who stopped it: Hugh Thompson, an Army helicopter pilot. When he arrived, American soldiers had already killed 504 Vietnamese civilians (that's the Vietnamese count; the U.S. Army said 347). They were going to kill more, but they didn't — because of what Thompson did.

I met Thompson in 2000 and interviewed him for my radio program on KPFK in Los Angeles. He told the story of what happened that day, when he and his two-man crew flew over My Lai, in support of troops who were looking for Viet Cong fighters. ... "We started noticing these large numbers of bodies everywhere," he told me, "people on the road dead, wounded. And just sitting there saying, 'God, how'd this happen? What's going on?' And we started thinking what might have happened, but you didn't want to accept that thought — because if you accepted it, that means your own fellow Americans, people you were there to protect, were doing something very evil."

Who were the people lying in the roads and in the ditch, wounded and killed? ... "They were not combatants. They were old women, old men, children, kids, babies." ... Then Thompson and his crew chief, Glenn Andreotta, and his gunner, Lawrence Colburn, "saw some civilians hiding in a bunker, cowering, looking out the door. Saw some advancing Americans coming that way. I just figured it was time to do something, to not let these people get killed. Landed the aircraft in between the Americans and the Vietnamese, told my crew chief and gunner to cover me, got out of the aircraft, went over to the American side." ... What happened next was one of the most remarkable events of the entire war, and perhaps unique: Thompson told the American troops that, if they opened fire on the Vietnamese civilians in the bunker, he and his crew would open fire on them.
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We know that Americans committed a massacre 50 years ago today; and we also know that an American stopped it. Hugh Thompson died in 2006, when he was only 62. I wish we could have done more to thank him.

Jon Wiener is professor emeritus of history at UC Irvine, and working, with Mike Davis, on a book on Los Angeles in the 1960s.

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