On March 16, 1968 an army unit entered My Lai. The troops were ordered to lay waste to anything "walking, crawling or growing" on a search and destroy mission that lasted four hours and left the village razed to the ground. Not even crops or livestock were spared. The atrocities of My Lai would remain largely hidden for 20 months, until vivid images and accounts of the massacre appeared in newspapers, shocking Americans and sparking massive anti-war protests.
THE MY LAI MASSACRE
US Infantry battalion Charlie Company entered the area under the erroneous understanding that Viet Cong guerrilla fighters were present. Instead, they found unarmed civilians, many of whom were children, women and the elderly.
Unleashing a hail of firepower from M-16s and an M79 grenade launcher, the soldiers rounded up villagers and killed them, not before sexually assaulting as many as 20 women and teenagers. The horror only began to die down when army helicopter pilot Hugh Thompson Jr landed between the soldiers and the villagers, threatening to fire at the troops.
"The whole thing was so deliberate. It was point-blank murder and I was standing there watching it," Sgt. Michael Bernhardt recalled. "We met no resistance and I only saw three captured weapons. We had no casualties. It was just like any other Vietnamese village - old Papa-san, women and kids. As a matter of fact, I don't remember seeing one military-age male in the entire place, dead or alive. The only prisoner I saw was about 50."
Thompson had witnessed a soldier kill an injured Vietnamese woman from his vantage point, and then noticed the ditch filled with bodies. "It looks to me like there's an awful lot of unnecessary killing going on down there. Something ain't right about this. There's bodies everywhere," he said over the radio. He landed and got into a confrontation with platoon leader Lieutenant William L. Calley.
After taking off again, the pilot witnessed soldiers chasing civilians and landed the helicopter between them. He evacuated the villagers and returned to the scene to search for survivors. Thompson also told his superiors about the massacre, and the order was sent back to "knock off the killing."
"After the shooting was over, the soldiers went and were eating their lunch, really literally next to the ditch, next to the bodies. And that's how disconnected you get," Seymour Hersh, the investigative reporter who uncovered the story, said on Democracy Now.
COVER UP
Despite Thompson filing a report, a military investigation found there had been no massacre. Captain Ernest Medina, who had ordered the soldiers to be aggressive in their operations, told superiors the unit had killed lots of VC fighters.
In 1968, Ron Ridenhour, an infantryman who had heard about the event, started investigating what happened. In March 1969 he wrote a letter to President Richard Nixon, the Pentagon, members of Congress, the State Department, the Joint Chiefs of Staff detailing the massacre. This sparked official investigations and Ridenhour, Medina, Thompson, and Calley were interviewed.
Sgt. Ron Haeberle, a US Army photographer with Charlie company, had captured events on official and personal cameras. He handed over the official army rolls of film, but held onto his personal, more graphic ones, later explaining he thought they would have been destroyed.
Hersh, then a freelance journalist in Washington, heard what happened at My Lai from an antiwar lawyer, and started to speak to those in the unit. He saw a news report about Calley being charged with murder in September 1969, and managed to get hold of the classified charge sheet. Hersch's resulting report, "Lieutenant Accused of Murdering 109 Civilians,"appeared in the Dispatch News Service on November 13, and was picked up by a number of publications before gaining further traction.
In November, a selection of Haeberle's images were published in the Cleveland Plain Dealer. The photographs backed up Thompson's claims and helped with the investigation. Years later, Haeberle admitted he destroyed the most graphic images of soldiers killing the villagers. "I had actual photos of actual guys who were doing the shooting and stuff like that," he said.
On November 15, half a million anti-war protesters marched in Washington, with a march also taking place in London at the same time. In 1973, direct US troop involvement in Vietnam ended.
A 1970 inquiry by Lieut. Gen. William Peers into the My Lai cover up found "at every command level from company to division, actions were taken or omitted which together effectively concealed from higher headquarters the events which transpired."
Calley's court martial ended 1971. He was found guilty of killing 22 people and sentenced to life at hard labor. However, President Richard Nixon intervened, and he was placed under house arrest instead before being freed in 1974. "There is not a day that goes by that I do not feel remorse for what happened that day in My Lai," Calley admitted in 2009.
Reader Comments
Simply because when it came to light that the perpetrators were US military and let us not forget US citizens, it caused an outcry with the voting public.
Look what is happening in the Middle East. Proxy Armies doing the dirty work that was perpetrated in Vietnam, on a much more viscous scale. As a result, no conflict with the voting public.
But of course the US personal that are involved, are of course on the side of righteousness, delivering freedom and democracy.
I worked with a colleague from Vietnam, she related a story on a recent visit with her family, she had visited one of the tunnels during the time of conflict. She told me that after she had visited she developed itching and a rash on her lower extremities.
Go figure, it has been hinted that chemical substances were used in Vietnam.
"it has been hinted that chemical substances were used in Vietnam."
More than hinted. Agent Orange was openly used rampantly.
Shalom
This is why it is soooooo important to continuously develop one's sense of Self. Otherwise, whether Left or Right... you become an open conduit for evil.
Then there is the emergence of 2 4 D another so called pesticide.
This article from the Atlantic in 2012 (My, how times have changed).
Agent Orange, the New Pesticide in your Backyard.
[Link]
2,4-D was invented in the chemical boom during World War II, making it one of the oldest pesticides that's still legally on the market today. It was one of the two active ingredients in Agent Orange, the notorious Vietnam War defoliant. Despite decades of scientific studies showing links to non-Hodgkin's lymphoma in humans (and Canine Malignant Lymphoma in household dogs), this chemical survives and thrives as one of the top three pesticides sold in the United States today. Newer science shows that it's not just a cancer problem, but that this pesticide interferes with several essential hormones, thereby increasing the risks of birth defects and neurologic damage in children. Studies in Midwest wheat-growing areas (where 2,4-D is heavily used) have shown increased rates of certain birth defects, especially in male children, and lower sperm counts in adults.
Brittanica.com: "Agent Orange was one of several herbicides used in Vietnam, the others including Agents White, Purple, Blue, Pink, and Green. The names derived from colour-coded bands painted around storage drums holding the herbicides."
Courtesy of Rainbow Herbicides. How gay (jolly)... Reminds me a bit of Reservoir Dogs
At 38:57 a survivor talks about watching her sister being raped and then shot by the man who had just raped her. She tells the story as witnessed by a little girl she was back then.
I just can't comprehend that. How thin is the line between a human being and a monster?
And what a contrast between their actions and those of Hugh Thompson Jr. [Link]
The same circumstances, different choices of behaviour.
My favourite quote from Collingwood comes to mind: "History is for human self-knowledge…the only clue to what man can do is what man has done. The value of history, then, is that it teaches us what man has done and thus what man is."
There is thus no feature of experience, no attitude of mind towards its object, which is alien to history. Art rests on ignoring reality: religion, on the ignoring of thought, science: on the ignoring of fact; but with the recognition of fact everything is recognized that is in any sense real. The fact, as historically determined, is the absolute object.Is it possible that history is all around us, and understanding the whole, in its various parts, gives one the ability to read the various parts, and the whole, if one has acquired the ability to read same?
The mark of the absolute object is individuality, for individuality is concreteness. The object as individual is the whole of what exists, and this is concretely articulated into parts each of which is again individual, and so to infinity. Within this cycle of infinite articulation of the absolute object, the historical spirit moves freely in all directions, never finding anything that is not individual and unique, never finding anything that is not , on the one hand, composed of individual and unique parts, and, on the other, itself a part of an individual and unique whole. The object is a system of fact so organized, is objective throughout, for every part is a true microcosm, and is truly infinite.
It is this object of which the preceding forms of consciousness have been in search. Each has grasped it, but in such a way to destroy it. The aesthetic consciousness expresses itself in a single work of art. Here it finds a cosmos which like the world of history is individual and unique, whose organization is a systematic structure of parts each displaying the same individuality , the same uniqueness, in its indispensable contribution to the whole. But it is only by an abstraction that the single work of art is a cosmos. Outside it are other works of art, each a cosmos in itself, and these do not combine into a totality which is itself a single all-embracing work of art. Thus the aesthetic consciousness , instead of systematic, is monadic, and the monads, being windowless , are not so much reflections of the whole universe. This rivalry is fatal to all the claims alike. Art is thus even within its own limits a false form of individuality.
Religion goes a step farther and finds exactly the same individuality in God. God is the monads of monads, a cosmos whose structure is that of the absolute object. But God always stands over against a world whose very nature is to be outside him, and thus God forfeits his own absoluteness. As long as the world stands over against him, his own individuality is unattained. And because religion is conscious of this, its search for objectivity is confessed to be in vain.
In science the attempt is made to bridge the gulf between God, and the world. Instead of God we find the concept or law, which because it is the law of the world no longer stands outside the world. Here what was transcendent has become immanent. But in this very success, failure is revealed; for it becomes plain that the immanence is a false immanence. The world is not a world of individuals.but a world of particulars, and because the concept is indifferent to the various particulars in which it is embodied, their diversity remains meaningless and the world is to that extent a chaos. What is individual and organized as a system of individuals is not the world but only the concept, so that the failure of religion is repeated and the quest for immanence ends in transcendence, but an abstract transcendence more intolerable than the concrete transcendence of religion.
Thus the work of art, God, and the abstract concept are all attempts on the part of thought to reach the organized individuality of history. Art comes nearest to success, religion fails more openly, and science most openly of all. But this order of relative failure is due to an inverse order of seriousness in facing the problem. Art ignores the real world altogether, and constructs an arbitrary cosmos of its own; religion contents itself with a cosmos outside the world; and science alone tries to bring the concrete world into the unity, but destroys its concreteness in the attempt. But because all are agreed that the real object must be an absolute individual, their failure is wholly redeemed by the success of history, which actually achieves the idea of an object beyond which there is nothing and within which every part truly represents the whole.
This absolute whole is the concrete universal, for concrete universality is individuality, the individual being simply the unity of the universal and the particular. The absolute individual is universal in that it is what it is throughout, and every part of it is as individual as itself. On the other hand it is no mere abstraction, the abstract quality of individualness, but an individual which includes all others. It is the system of systems, the world of worlds. Everything in it is determined by its place in the whole, but this is not determinism because every part determines the whole and therefore by implication every other part, so that each part taken separately may be regarded as the crucial determinant of everything else, just as every separate link bears the whole responsibility for keeping the chain together. Everything in it is as unique as the whole, and the uniqueness of every part is based upon the uniqueness of every other. The principal of its structure is not classification, the abstract concept, but the concrete concept, which is relevance, or implication. The only reason why, this notion of a concrete universal is thought puzzling on paradoxical is that our attempts at philosophical theory suffer from the obsession of regarding science as the only possible kind of knowledge. For the concrete universal is the daily bread of every historian, and the logic of history is the logic of the concrete universal.
I may be taking it too far but maybe all of human history with all its glories and atrocities exists in us in potential until a moment comes when we tilt towards the dark side or the bright side of it.
And maybe the side we will pick depends on millions of little choices we've made previously, like giving a seat to an elderly person on the train. Or telling the cashier that they gave us too much change.
Dunno. I'm not much of a philosopher really
many of us over here are trying very hard to Restore the Republic . that is what needs to be done.
and you could help us or you can bash us.
if you cannot define the difference between a Republic and a Democracy, then you are a part of the problem. and not the solution.
peace.
Shalom.
Normal, average people are victims too. They will back their psychopathic governments to the extent that they are uninformed or misinformed about the true nature of their governments' agenda. Take the narrative of evil Assad killing his own people in Syria for example. Or the Russian hacking idiocy.
This is where sites sike Sott come in. They uncover what the pathological forces behind and inside the government want people to be ignorant about. The signal is sent out to counter the lies of the MSM pro-government propaganda to empower those who are capable of receiving it to form informed opinions.
How can the uncovering of the hidden atrocious agenda be done without "picking on your country" if your country isn't exactly doing much to deserve global praise?
What other method do you suggest? Surely not focusing on the bright side? Positive mantras and positive thinking haven't done much to change the trajectory this world is on.
Also, you posted a video of US troops above. I guess you would prefer them presented as heros rather than villains? Here's a photo you may have seen before depicting a soldier's attitude towards the war he was sent to fight for his government: [Link]
today, I saw a post on SOTT about a "managed Democracy" LOL!
the Romans invented the "managed Democracy" theorem. res publica. the public thing.
yes it is true that my country deserves the scorn that comes my way.
it is also true that my country was originally designed to protect the individual. against the masses.
what my country was supposed to do... was to take over the world. . and leave everybody alone to do as they wish.
I still think that this is a good idea for the US.
[Link]
But with great power comes the Bitch of responsibility...
"But the one who does not know and does things deserving punishment will be beaten with few blows. From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked." - Luke 12:48
...Heavy is the head... eh, HVACTech? [Link]
There have been many similar atrocities since then, in various "conflicts".
A dark stain, and a slap in the face by reality. So sad; and my how time flies...
I was 11 at the time...my cousins were still there in Viet Nam..and it just does NOT feel like 50 years.
Perhaps because of its "impact" on me and the society?
Sadly, I think it will pale to what might be coming if these world leaders can't get their poop sorted, and shut down the deep state types who are pushing for war.
Pravdaseeker
'Worse than doing evil, is being in the company of and belonging to, those who are evil.'
Your obsession with your own happiness, leads to your enslavement and obedience to the technocrats, the Dark Ones. Our current and past world leaders--the makers of government.
You observe their ordinances and are rewarded. You climb the ranks. You make more money. You get more stuff, more cool technology. More and more and more stuff. How cool is that?
It is waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay cool.
Yes, sir!
And so you grow to believe that wrong is right and that evil is just, as a result of your company.
Have you noticed yet, that all organizations (companies and corporations) are military operations? That they are covert and rigidly hierchical and controlling and destructive? And that technology is uber-aggressive? Hyper-aggressive? ??
Have you noticed this?
Have you noticed this!?!?
The people of My Lai, as with so many others, were simple villagers. They did not need nor did they seek, a lot of money. They did not desire to be anyone's slave, nor did they desire to make slaves. They were simple and meek. They had each other and they had their connection to the earth and the rest of earth's life.
Thus, they were destroyed, slaughtered, obliterated.
You, in your turn, have been saved. You have been saved by technocracy.
Don't you just feel soooooooooooo lucky?
You have been saved by your allegiance and association with the Dark Ones, the technocrats.
You laugh and say 'Ho, ho, nedlud, you idiot and berserk fool...Kali Yuga....what is that? And who even cares? Kali Yuga....ha, ha, ha....ha!'
Kali Yuga. The Dark Age. It is to be your final resting place....Eternal Hell.....where you will live forever with your Dark Lords, the technocrats from whom you gained your 'happiness' and in whom you have placed your 'trust'.
Yes, sir!
ned, idiot and berserk fool
OUT OUT OUT
So the four year old step-son I am took the long wood paddle he proudly beat me with and broke his back with it. And, I don’t like assholes who cant tell the truth.. sigh.. all good.