The soldiers of which nation committed the Mei Li massacre?

Answer 1

Lt. William Callie I think that's the spelling was court marshalled by the US Army as he was the OIC of a group of US Army solgiers who killed a bunch of "civilians" at mei li. As most people now know the war was a confusing one for or US troops as the civilians were our friends in the daylight and at night they sliiped on their black pagamas and became our enemy.

Improvement.

My Lai was the hamlet where Lt. William Calley and 'Charlie Company' killed more than 200 old men, women and children on March 18, 1968. It took them four hours to kill everyone, and that included a break for lunch which they ate within a few yards of a pile of fresh corpses, mostly women and infants. (There was one American casualty, a sergeant who shot himself in the foot). At the time the Americans had declared most of Quang Ngai province a 'free fire zone' and 70 per cent of the villages had been razed. When it was My Lai's turn civilians were being killed at a rate of 50,000 a year. This was known as 'collateral damage'.

Look closely at the famous photograph of the piles of dead in a ditch at My Lai and there is a shadow in the grass to the left. This was Mrs Truong Thai Le, who survived beneath the bodies of her mother, daughter and grandson. She bravely held the photograph and listed for me the others in the ditch who were her family: her brother, aged 30, her nephew, aged one, four nieces, all of them under 10, a total of nine. "It was six o'clock in the morning," she said. "Suddenly this helicopter was manoeuvring above the house, then we saw soldiers come across the fields. They ordered all the families out and told us to march towards the ditch. If we walked too slowly, they prodded us with their guns. We came to an assembly point and huddled together; then they shot us one by one. I saw a little boat and used it to cover my son, and dead bodies fell down on me. I kept telling my son, who was six years old, "Oh, please don't cry. They will hear us if you do". When the Americans had finished and walked away, I waited, then stood up with my boy; I felt I was walking in the sky or somewhere else; I didn't have any kind of feelings. I was covered in blood and pieces of human brain, which smelt terrible. On the way back we had to walk in the field because the pathway was covered with bodies; I saw a mother die here, children there. They even killed the animals like ox and buffaloes. When we got to our home, it was burned down. It was only then I realised a bullet had passed right through me, but I was still alive."

In 1970 John Pilger the award winning journalist went to the US and interviewed seven American soldiers who had taken part in mass murder in Vietnam. None had been charged. Each was adamant that he had been under orders to "kill everyone and everything". "A village was a designated playground," one of them said.