massacre of My Lai

My Lai, massacre of (1968), a military atrocity carried out in Vietnam. On 16 March 1968, ‘C’ Company of the 20th US Infantry Brigade was ordered to attack a Vietcong battalion in the village of My Lai. The American unit had been mauled over the previous weeks by booby traps, snipers, and mines, and the company commander told his men they were about to ‘get even’ with the enemy. Although there was no opposing fire, the infantrymen advanced into the village shooting everyone they saw. Despite the fact that no Vietcong were found, the villagers—male, female, of all ages—were shot, bayoneted, or beaten to death. Some women were raped and later a platoon commander, Lt Calley, ordered 150 civilians to be herded into a drainage ditch, where they were killed by automatic fire. Accompanying news photographers recorded the grisly events, which resulted in perhaps 400 civilian deaths. The Tet offensive intervened, but afterwards photographs of the massacre were eventually published and led to a public outcry. Several senior officers were reprimanded and Calley sentenced to life imprisonment, although he was soon quietly released when a remarkably unanimous public opinion judged him a scapegoat for the merely reprimanded senior officers and for the US army in general. This war crime was symbolic of several others known to have been committed, for which perpetrators were never brought to justice, and of the poor quality of low-level leadership that the theatre commander Westmoreland himself admitted was prevalent by this time.

— Peter Caddick-Adams