A few weeks ago, I wrote about the anniversary of the American attack on My Lai during the Vietnam war. Today April 8, is the birthday of the journalist who broke that story, Seymour Hersh. In his honor, I want to remind you of My Lai and what one of the great journalists of our lifetime has accomplished. Here is his biography at The New Yorker:
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/bios/seymour_m_hersh/search?contributorName=Seymour%20M.%20Hersh
On March 16, 1968, in a small Vietnamese village, “something dark and bloody” took place.
On November 12, 1969, journalist Seymour Hersh broke the story of the massacre in My Lai during the Vietnam War. Hersh won a Pulitzer Prize for the story. It was a story that changed history.
Dropped into the village by helicopter that March day in 1968, the men of Charlie Company found only the old men, women, and children of My Lai. There were no Vietcong, and nothing to suggest that My Lai was a staging base for guerrilla attacks. But under Lieutenant William Calley’s orders, the villagers were forced into the center of the hamlet, where Calley issued the order to shoot them. The defenseless villagers were mowed down by automatic weapons fire. Then the villagers’ huts were grenaded, some of them still occupied. Finally, small groups of survivors—some of them women and girls who had been raped by the Americans—were rounded up and herded into a drainage ditch, where they too were mercilessly machine-gunned. A few of the soldiers of Charlie Company refused to follow the order; one of them later called it “point-blank murder.”
During the massacre, Hugh C. Thompson, a 25-year-old helicopter pilot saw the bodies in the ditch and went down to investigate. Placing his helicopter between the GIs and a band of children, the pilot ordered his crew to shoot any American who tried to stop him. He managed to rescue a handful of children. But that was one of the day’s few heroic deeds. Another witness to the massacre was an army photographer who was ordered to turn over his official camera, but kept a second secret camera. With it, he had recorded the mayhem in which more than 560 Vietnamese, mostly women and children, were slaughtered. Those pictures, when they later surfaced, revealed the extent of the carnage at My Lai. The mission was reported as a success back at headquarters.
Then reporter Seymour Hersh also got wind of the story and broke it to an incredulous America in November 1969.
In the immediate aftermath of the investigation, several officers still on active duty were court-martialed for dereliction of duty for covering up the massacre, a word the Pentagon never used. At worst, they were reduced in rank or censured. Four officers –Calley, Medina, Captain Eugene Kotouc and Lieutenant Thomas Willingham– were court-martialed. Medina was acquitted, but later confessed that he had lied under oath to army investigators. The other two officers were also acquitted. Only Lieutenant Calley was found guilty of premeditated murder of 22 villagers at My Lai on March 29, 1971. Two days later, he was sentenced to life imprisonment. But President Nixon then reduced his sentence to house arrest in response to an outpouring of public support for Calley, who was seen as a scapegoat. Calley was later paroled.
Hersh’s revelation of the My Lai Massacre transformed the way the war was viewed and reported in America. It went far in changing America’s views about the conflict. He was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting and later wrote about the event in a book, My Lai 4: A Report on the Massacre and Its Aftermath. Hersh has continued his groundbreaking journalism with such stories as the atrocities at Abu Ghraib, subject of the book Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib.
In August 2009 The Columbus GA Ledger-Inquirer reported that Calley had apologized publicly for the first time while speaking on Columbus, Ga.
“There is not a day that goes by that I do not feel remorse for what happened that day in My Lai,” Calley told members of the Kiwanis Club of Greater Columbus on Wednesday. His voice started to break when he added, “I feel remorse for the Vietnamese who were killed, for their families, for the American soldiers involved and their families. I am very sorry.”
http://www.ledger-enquirer.com/news/story/813820.html
Read more about this event and the Vietnam War in Don’t Know Much About History
