A date which ought to live in infamy. The first few paragraphs from the Washington Post article follow below.
‘It was insanity’: At My Lai, U.S. soldiers slaughtered hundreds of Vietnamese women and kids
By Ian Shapira March 16 at 7:00 AM Email the author
American soldiers burned numerous homes during the My Lai Massacre on March 16, 1968, in My Lai, South Vietnam. (Ronald S. Haeberle/Time Life/Getty Images)
Early morning on March 16, 1968, helicopters carrying U.S. soldiers flew into a tiny village on the eastern side of South Vietnam, bordering the South China Sea. They’d arrived by a series of hamlets, known as My Lai, expecting to find a booby-trapped stronghold of their enemy, the Viet Cong. Instead, all they saw were noncombatants: women, children, elderly men. Many of them were preparing for breakfast.
The Americans, about 100 soldiers from the Army’s Americal division, proceeded to massacre them. Over the next several hours, the civilians in My Lai (pronounced “Me Lie”) and an adjacent settlement were shot and thrown in ditches. The body count: 504 people from more than 240 families. Some women were raped. Huts and homes were burned. Even the livestock was destroyed.
It was one of the worst American military crimes in history and still pierces the collective conscience of Vietnam War veterans. On Friday, an organization called the Vietnam Peace Commemoration Committee is scheduled to hold a vigil in Lafayette Square across from the White House to acknowledge the American war crimes at My Lai.
Right after the attack, the soldiers — who had been told by their superiors the night before that everyone they’d see would be a Viet Cong guerrilla or sympathizer — kept quiet about what they’d done. For more than a year and a half, the public wouldn’t know about the atrocity. Top military officials initially tried to keep a lid on the killings and commanders even touted the mission to the press as a tactical feat. A United Press International wire service account published in newspapers March 16 reported that U.S. infantrymen “tangled with Communist forces threatening the northern city of Quang Ngai Saturday and U.S. spokesmen reported 128 guerrillas slain in the bitter fighting.” But a few paragraphs later, the article, unwittingly, contained an ominous foreshadowing: “Details of the fighting near Quang Ngai were sketchy.”
Soon, a government whistleblower and a promising journalist would expose the atrocity. In early 1969, Ronald Ridenhour, a veteran from Arizona, wrote a letter to the White House, Pentagon, State Department and numerous members of Congress, revealing his conversations with soldiers who participated or saw the attack. Ridenhour’s letter included details that made the allegations credible and worthy of investigation, including map coordinates of My Lai, witness names and the identities of the perpetrators, according to a congressional probe.