Vietnam: A butchered memory of war

[unhappycamper]

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/World/WOR-01-190214.html

Vietnam: A butchered memory of war
By Nick Turse
Feb 19, '14

~snip~






On March 15, 1968, members of the 23rd Infantry Division's Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry, were briefed by their commanding officer, Captain Ernest Medina, ahead of an operation in an area they knew as "Pinkville." As unit member Harry Stanley recalled, Medina "ordered us to 'kill everything in the village.'" Infantryman Salvatore LaMartina remembered Medina's words only slightly differently: they were to "kill everything that breathed." What stuck in artillery forward observer James Flynn's mind was a question one of the other soldiers asked: "Are we supposed to kill women and children?" And Medina's reply: "Kill everything that moves."

The next morning, roughly 100 soldiers were flown by helicopter to the outskirts of a small Vietnamese hamlet called My Lai in South Vietnam's Quang Ngai Province and followed Medina's orders to a T.

Over a period of four hours, the Americans methodically slaughtered more than 500 Vietnamese civilians. Along the way, they also raped women and young girls, mutilated the dead, systematically burned homes, and fouled the area's drinking water. It took a year and a half for a cover-up that extended from soldiers in the field to generals at the top of the division to unravel - thanks in large measure to veterans Ron Ridenhour and Ron Haberle and crack investigative reporter Seymour Hersh.

The military took great pains to contain the fallout from the My Lai revelations, offering basement-level estimates of the death toll and focusing its attention on Lieutenant William Calley, the lowest ranking officer who could conceivably shoulder the blame, while also burying other atrocity allegations, deep-sixing inquiries, classifying documents, and obstructing investigations in order to cast My Lai as a one-off aberration.