We Forgive But We Do Not Forget: There Were Many My Lais (trigger warning)

[niyad]

(there are some truly appalling pictures with this article, which can be seen at the link.)

(and this is the link to the pbs documentary on the massacre at youtube:

)


We Forgive But We Do Not Forget: There Were Many My Lais



Marking the 47th anniversary of the Vietnam War's infamous massacre at My Lai, the inimitable Seymour Hersh - whose chilling dispatches from the war helped stir public outrage against it - has written about visiting "the scene of the crime" for the first time. After so many years and stories, he thought he knew "most of what there was to learn about the massacre." He's wrong. He hears more stories "told in bland, appalling detail"; he meets Vietnamese who have forgiven but not forgotten; he revisits an atrocity he is reminded was "not an aberration," unique only in scale. Most vitally, he enjoins us to remember its lessons: Duplicitous and ignorant U.S. political leaders ensnared the country in a war about which they long obfuscated, withheld information and just plain lied, and the war ended when it did, in part, because at least some brave members of the press insisted on telling the truth about it - "that the war was morally groundless, strategically lost, and nothing like what the military and political officials were describing to the public" - and some brave Americans insisted on protesting against that truth.

On the morning of March 16, 1968, about a hundred U.S. soldiers known as Charlie Company arrived at My Lai, having received faulty intelligence that it held Vietcong troops. When they found "only a peaceful village at breakfast," they slaughtered all its inhabitants anyway. A museum now at the site - there are also "memory day trips" there - lists the grisly statistics: 504 victims, including 182 women, seventeen of them pregnant, and 173 children. The numbers include 97 people killed the same day in another nearby village by members of Bravo Company. The rule of the day was famously articulated by Lieut. William Calley, Charlie's commander and the only person ever convicted of any crime; his order, used by Nick Turse as the title for his harrowing book on Vietnam, was "Kill Anything That Moves."

The message of both Turse's book and Hersh's trip is the same: "What happened at My Lai 4 (the name U.S.military used) was not singular, not an aberration." Writing in The New Yorker, Hersh describes meeting veterans who acknowledge "it was just revenge" and who, once amidst the war's horrors, "began to question who we were as a nation.” When he talks with an elderly Vietnamese leader and former soldier who now works with victims of Agent Orange, she emphasizes, "There was not only one My Lai - there were many." Most went unnoticed and unreported; My Lai didn't largely thanks to Hersh, who unearthed and wrote five articles about the massacre. After being turned away by both Life and Look, the large mainstream magazines of the time, he wrote them for the Dispatch News Service, a small D.C. anti-war news agency. Hersh's stories, in conjunction with countless dispatches from the field from other truth-telling reporters, helped fuel public opposition to the war, including the Washington anti-war march that drew half a million people.

The empire's response to the growing revelations was as honorable as their conduct in the war. When Calley was convicted in 1971 of pre-meditated mass murder of 109 "Oriental human beings" and sentenced to life at hard labor, Nixon intervened and placed him under house arrest; he was freed three months after Nixon left office in disgrace. Before he left, Nixon had also approved the use of "dirty tricks" to discredit a key witness to the massacre and thus cover up yet one more obscene truth of his dirty little war. Still angry and sorrowful, Hersh painfully digs out new nuggets from a tawdry history he clearly feels remains relevant -and which we remain in danger of repeating. He also summons a Robert McNamara on his deathbed who was said to feel that "God had abandoned him.” Notes Hersh, "The tragedy was not only his."

http://www.commondreams.org/further/2015/03/23/we-forgive-we-do-not-forget-there-were-many-my-lais


http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/03/30/the-scene-of-the-crime

the link above is the hersh article in the new yorker magazine.


Pham Thanh Cong, the director of the My Lai Museum, was eleven at the time of the massacre. His mother and four siblings died. “We forgive, but we do not forget,” he said.



The ditch where Lieutenant Calley ordered the killing of dozens of civilians.The ditch where Lieutenant Calley ordered the killing of dozens of civilians.

[SoLeftIAmRight]

1. I still the copy of...

Ramparts magazine that shows the horrid photo on the cover.

When I show the magazine to people they can not believe that that type of information was common back then.

[niyad]

7. back then, we still had a somewhat functioning media.

walter cronkite on the tet offensive:

. . . .

Mr. WALTER CRONKITE (Anchorman): I wrote a three-minute closing for the program, which seemingly, without reluctance, our stern and uncompromisingly fair news president Dick Salant approved.



Mr. CRONKITE: (Reading) Tonight, back in more familiar surroundings in New York, we'd like to sum up our findings in Vietnam, an analysis that must be speculative, personal, subjective. Who won and who lost in the great Tet Offensive against the cities? I'm not sure. The Vietcong did not win by a knockout but neither did we.
Then, with as much restraint as I could, I turned to our own leaders whose idea of negotiation seemed frozen in memories of General McArthur's encounter with the Japanese aboard the Battleship Missouri.

We've been too often disappointed by the optimism of the American leaders...
Both in Vietnam and Washington to have faith any longer in the silver linings they find in the darkest clouds. For it seems now more certain than ever, that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate. To say that we are closer to victory today is to believe in the face of the evidence, the optimists who have been wrong in the past.

To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic, if unsatisfactory conclusion. On the off chance that military and political analysts are right, in the next few months we must test the enemy's intentions, in case this is indeed his last big gasp before negotiations.

But it is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could.

This is Walter Cronkite. Good night.

. . . .

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=106775685

[SoLeftIAmRight]

10. here is the issue

http://www.unz.org/Pub/Ramparts-1972nov

The photo is not very good

But in real life it hurts to look at

[niyad]

11. it was hard enough just at that size. that was the reason I did not post the pics

in the article.

[madokie]

2. Replying so I can find this later

thanks niyad for the post

[niyad]

6. you are most welcome

[kentuck]

3. I was in Vietnam when this happened.

The rumors spread quickly throughout the villages and hamlets.

I recall being informed about it by a Vietnamese family months before it was public in this country. I assured them that America did not do such things.

It happened just days after the Tet Offensive of '68. There was a lot of anger and resentment within the American troops. It was not uncommon to hear, "Kill the little gooks - they will just grow up to be big gooks"..

That was a prevalent attitude in some units.

[niyad]

8. I know, I heard it far too often even years later.

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

4. Nor should we forget My Lai and the other atrocities commited by anyone on anyone.

What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy? Gandhi

[yuiyoshida]

5. this,

[niyad]

9. . . .

[Vattel]

12. Thank you for the links niyad.

The Vietnam War was a moral disaster with incidents like My Lai massacre being especially obscene. The fact that so many of us remain so eager to resort to war to address political problems is a testament to the prevalence of ignorance and bad character and the power of propaganda and the almighty dollar.

I believe that we should preserve our military strength while recognizing that the best and almost always the only appropriate use of that strength is to simply deter military aggression against us. "Peace through strength" is a slogan I can live with. Of course, if deterrence fails, a war of self-defense might be necessary; but how often would we be at war if we only fought to defend ourselves against immediate aggression?

[niyad]

13. you are most welcome. I wish those who get us into wars would have to be there having

to deal with the blood, the horror, the death and destruction. not that they care.