The Vietnam War My Lai and HUE: Maps, media and memories of massacre
MY LAI
March 16, 1968
Interview: Laser Film Corporation, 1970
During the period (7:20 - 8:53), notice how this interviewee felt it was his duty to fulfil a 'search and destroy' mission and all that this entailed...
Echoes of Milgram can be heard as this interviewee frames his military role within a chain of authority...
Another prominent aspect in this clip, is the development of the veteran's facial expressions throughout the questioning. Notice how their expressions visibly change at particular points during the interview: it would appear that My Lai continued to fester in the consciousness of these veterans, even at the time of these interviews, almost three years later.
The mission in My Lai on the morning of March 16 1968 was branded a 'Search and Destroy' mission: "The objective of which involved not only the destruction of Viet Cong forces but also anything the Viet Cong used for food, shelter, or transport". (Allison, p.10)
The typical attitude of an American soldier...
"You walk through the fucking bush for three days and nights without sleep. Watch your men, your buddies, your goddamn kids get booby-trapped. Blown apart. Thrown six feet in the air by a trap laid by an old lady and come down with no legs".
The solution this soldier straightforwardly concluded, "was to kill them all". (Allison, p.12)
My Lai's most prominent perpetrators...
Captain Medina.
During the My Lai operation, “Medina radioed Calley, demanding to know why his movement through My Lai (4) had not progressed more quickly. Calley replied that processing so many detained Vietnamese slowed down his platoon. Later Calley claimed Medina told him to get moving, to ”get rid of ‘em”, to “to waste all those goddamn people”. (Allison, p. 41)
“By midmorning, members of Charlie Company had killed hundreds of civilians and raped or assaulted countless women and young girls. They encountered no enemy fire and found no weapons in My Lai (4) itself. Despite all this, Captain Medina radioed the TOC at 0935 hours that his men had killed another 69 Vietcong, in addition to 15 already reported”. (Allison, p. 43)
Medina's report in the quote above demonstrates the ease at which civilians could become transformed into the VC in death, through the 'body count' incentives laid out by the American command in Vietnam...
Lieutenant William Calley.
Calley was the only American soldier to ever be convicted for his actions in My Lai (in the 1970 Peers inquiry).
“Lieutenant Calley claimed Medina had said that any people remaining in My Lai (4) would be Vietcong: All civilians had left the area, there were no civilians in the area. And anyone there would be considered enemies".(Allison, p.31)
When questioned about William Calley, one My Lai veteran commented: “It could have happened to any of us. He’s killed and seen a lot of killing… killing becomes nothing in Vietnam”. (Hersh, p. 333)
Mapping the My Lai massacre
Maps accessed via The Peers Report, 1970.
Key
PLT: Platoon
LZ: Landing Zone
C/1-20: Charlie Company
- The 'intermingling' of 1st and 3rd Platoons and the return of some members of the 1st Platoon from the western perimeter into the space of My Lai, appears quite unordered behaviour for a military company. Therefore I would deduce from the maps above that the movement of men within the space of My Lai is much more reflective of aberration rather than intention. As within the context of a military operation, such an unordered structure to a mission would have been both unprofessional and difficult to maintain control.
- Furthermore, if the operation in My Lai, totally intended to kill all the population in the hamlet, then it would have been likely that this would have occurred during the first sweep of the hamlet, by both 1st and 3rd Platoons. In reality we see members of both platoons breaking off from their positions to return to the hamlet to continue the killing.
memories of my lai
Interviewees
Joe Grimes († January 15, 2013). (Squad leader, Charlie Company ,1st Battalion, 20th Infantry Regiment, 11th Brigade, US Army).
Tran Nam, My Lai Villager.
Frederick Widmer (Radio operator, Charlie Company ,1st Battalion, 20th Infantry Regiment, 11th Brigade, US Army).
The Hue Massacre
February 1968
The Communist Plan for Hue
1. Destroy and disorganise the enemy’s restrictive administrative machinery from the province and district levels to city wards, streets, and wharves. To pursue until the end spies, reactionaries, and reactionaries who exploit Catholics in and outside the country. To prevent them from escaping and to punish scoundrels, hoodlums, and robbers who kill the people and disturb peace and honor.
2. Motivate the people to take up arms, to pursue the enemy and seize power and establish a revolutionary government.
3. Make every effort to establish strength in the military, political and economic fields in order to conserve the government. Our immediate mission is to pay particular attention to armed and security forces.
4. Make positive efforts to develop (our forces) in the city wards, streets and wharves in order to expand the guerrilla war.
5. Encircle the reactionaries who exploit Catholics and isolate them. Pay special attention to the Phu Cam area, Thien Huu and Binh Linh schools and at the same time try to gain the support of the Buddhist sects of Tu Dam and Bao Quoc pagodas.
6. Promptly motivate the people to participate in combat, transportation and supply activities and to serve the wounded soldiers, etc.
7. Maintain order and security in the city and stabilize the people’s living conditions.
(Oberdorfer, p. 207)
Attitudes of the Viet Cong
“An entry in a captured communist document dated Feb 22nd stated, Troop proselyting by the VC/NVA forces was not successful because the troops had to devote themselves to combat missions. Moreover, they were afraid of being discovered by the enemy. It was very difficult for them to handle POW’s so they executed the policy of catch and kill.”. (Pike, 1968)
The Politicisation of massacre
“Killing in some instances was done by family unit. In one well- documented case during this period a squad with a death order entered the home of a prominent community leader and shot him, his wife, his married son and daughter-in-law, his young unmarried daughter, a male and female servant and their baby. The family cat was strangled; the family dog was clubbed to death; the goldfish scooped out of the fishbowl and tossed on the floor. When the communists left, no life remained in the house. A "social unit" had been eliminated”. (Pike, p. 57)
Evidence of massacre
"At first the story was mere rumour and assertion; and then, little by little, the rumour began to be substantiated. Residents gradually began to speak more freely of what they had seen and heard. Over weeks, months and even years, the earth yielded up the evidence from schoolyards and parks, coastal salt flats and jungle creek beds – the bodies of 2800 victims of the occupation, shot to death, bludgeoned or buried alive in the most extensive political slaughter of the war”. (Oberdorfer, p. 201)
Douglas Pike
Pike provides the foundation for the majority of knowledge available surrounding the Hue massacre today...
His work is widely accepted as creating an accurate picture of how the massacre progressed.
Where Pike's work becomes less reliable, is when we consider the death toll for Hue.
The figure, often quoted around 2,800, is widely debated between parties associated with the victims and perpetrators of the massacre.
It is unknown how many of the deaths discovered in mass graves were the result of other circumstances, such as artillery fire during the battle of Hue.
This point alone reaffirms the continuing significance of the battle of Hue as a contextual factor of the massacre.
MAPPING THE HUE MASSACRE
- From the beginning of the battle of Hue, American and South Vietnamese forces had to fight their way from the MACV compound on the south side of the river, and a small pocket in the north-east of the Citadel.
- Notice how the river, and also the ancient walls surrounding the Citadel, provided the geographical boundaries that formed a 'state of exception' in Hue.
- The American and South Vietnamese troops were not totally chased out of Hue during the Tet offensive, despite being caught off guard at the beginning of the offensive.
- Douglas Pike claimed, that had the Americans and South Vietnamese not recaptured some of the districts of Hue early in the battle, and particularly those districts near the university, with all the connotations and connections to western culture, then the massacre in Hue could have been incredibly more destructive. (Pike, Viet Cong strategy of Terror, p. 62)
MEDIA AND MASSACRE
The Media and My Lai
My Lai: “No other American atrocity committed during the war- and there were so many- was ever afforded anything approaching the same attention”. (Turse, p. 5)
“There are some clearly explicable reasons why alleged US war crimes receive more attention than do those committed by insurgents. First, the fact that a great power is the supposed perpetrator certainly accounts for part of the interest in such atrocities. Second, apparent US hypocrisy also increases the attention paid to war crimes allegations. The fact that Washington loudly proclaims that it stands for the global promotion of human rights very likely does it more harm than good". (Walton, p. 14)
The Media and Hue
"When the news of these executions emerged, it caused remarkably little stir in the American media, which was preoccupied with the impact of Tet on the United States, not the South Vietnamese. But the massacre’s impact on South Vietnamese public opinion was critical. It gave credence to the ‘bloodbath’ prediction – the expectation that, if the Communists should eventually take over, they would, despite all the assurances of the NLF, eliminate their political, and perhaps even their class enemies”. (Christie, p. 196)
The Cold War, Vietnam and massacre...
- The My Lai and Hue massacres, the Tet Offensive and subsequently the Vietnam War cannot be fully understood unless it's international role in Twentieth Century History is fully taken into account.
- "The all-pervasiveness of the Cold War, underpins both massacres. Both perpetrators were caught in a war, where polarisation of political allegiances created a vacuum of neutrality where the civilian was incompatible. Thus under exceptional circumstances where the perpetrators became paranoid about the security of their power base, the civilian became increasingly likely to be targeted as an enemy". (Max Nicholson, 2016)
- "Ultimately, the civilians of Vietnam were a doomed entity caught in the middle of an escalating Cold War infused conflict". (Max Nicholson, 2016)
Media, Memory and My Lai and Hue...
My Lai is a much more well known space of violence in comparison to the Hue massacre, primarily because... “The camera (and freedom of western media to cover the war uncensored) put South Vietnam (and America) – and open societies generally – at a disadvantage, because closed societies were never subjected in the same way to close visual scrutiny. The world saw, in gruesome close-up, the execution of one Vietcong soldier; it did not see the details of the executions by the communists of over 2000 civilians in waste ground outside Hue at the same time”. (Christie, p. 203)
And finally...
Source Bank.
- Allison, William T. My Lai: An American Atrocity in the Vietnam War, (John Hopkins University Press, 2012).
- Christie, Clive J. The Vietnam War: The Cold War and the crisis of Western Liberalism, (YouCaxton, 2015).
- Hersh, Seymour, The Mammoth Book of the Vietnam War, (Robinson, 2015), Part III, My Lai, pp. 323-353.
- Hue Massacre, 1968-1998, in English and Vietnamese, (includes personal note and newspaper articles in Vietnamese), No Date, Folder 03, Box 01, Lu Lan Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University. Accessed 30 Apr. 2016: http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=19350103001.
- Oberdorfer, Don, Tet: the turning point in the Vietnam War, (John Hopkins, 2001).
- Pike, Douglas, The Viet Cong Strategy of Terror, (Saigon, 1970).
- Turse, Nick, Kill anything that moves, (Metropolitan books, 2013).
- U.S Department of the Army, The Report of the Department of the Army Review of the preliminary investigations into the My Lai, (The Peers Report), By Lieutenant W. R. Peers Volume I, March 14, 1970.
- Walton C. Dale, Wars: Victory through Villainization: Atrocity, Global Opinion, and insurgent Strategic Advantage, Civil Wars, 2012, Vol. 14. No. 1. pp. 123-140.
- YouTube clip 1: Strick, Joseph, Laser Film Corporation, Interviews with My Lai Veterans, 1971: https://www.youtu.be/Klx4TB33BRU?t=7m20s.
- YouTube clip 2:Television documentary, My Lai: American Experience, WGBH, (PBS, 2010), America, accessed on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSIHEO6V6vg.
- YouTube clip 3: American Veterans Centre,Two veterans of the Tet Offensive, Brig. Gen. Michael Downs and Col. Charles Krohn, talk about the Hue City massacre at the American Veterans Center's 2008 conference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gVCutQ4O8Wg.
- YouTube clip 4: Walter Cronkite, CBS, 1968 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nn4w-ud-TyE&index=24&list=PLmX6CEWVV194dXy2rcXPERwmhb3FfRL3r.
Images
Title slide:
- http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/active_learning/explorations/vietnam/vietnam_mylai.cfm
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Calley
- https://jf-vietnam.wikispaces.com/My+Lai+Massacre
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Lai_Massacre
- http://rarehistoricalphotos.com/soldier-war-is-hell-vietnam-1965/
- http://ngothelinh.tripod.com/Hue.html
My Lai Images:
- http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-23427726
- http://alexiarutkowskiibhistory.weebly.com/containment-in-vietnam.html
- http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/153799
- http://cdn.c.photoshelter.com/img-get2/I0000XaYHBNw7Vxs/fit=1000x750/Capt-Ernest-Medina-Trial-71072601-45-Court-Marshall-in-Atlanta.jpg
- https://sites.google.com/site/bblockushistorymylaimassacre/trial
Viet Cong Images:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D445_Battalion
- http://dailycaller.com/2013/01/15/thedc-interview-10-questions-with-max-boot-on-his-history-of-guerrilla-warfare/
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viet_Cong_and_PAVN_strategy,_organization_and_structure
- https://www.flickr.com/photos/13476480@N07/16896438716
Media and Massacre images:
- https://usastruck.com/2014/11/24/television-coverage-of-the-vietnam-war/
- https://www.flickr.com/photos/13476480@N07/16734935850
The Cold War, Vietnam and massacre
- http://bhshistorynetwork.weebly.com/the-cold-war.html
- http://www.ask.com/history/year-did-cold-war-begin-b7011c5ee9d9c360