The Shame of My Lai Survives

This 30th anniversary of the My Lai massacre, when U.S. soldiers killed more than 500 villagers on March 16, 1968, is maybe the first to give Americans a warm glow. The warmth comes of course from the Soldier’s Medals awarded to Hugh C. Thompson Jr., Lawrence Colburn and Glenn Andreotta (the latter posthumously) for landing their combat helicopter that morning and intervening to save Vietnamese lives. The ceremony by the Vietnam Veterans Memorial on Friday exhibited everything--honor, courage--that is the reverse of the soldiers’ conduct that shameful day three decades ago. Even the Army, which had fought long and hard against the awards, looked good.

Watching the moving ceremony on television, I thought of the man who had first brought My Lai into public view, Ron Ridenhour, who was himself flying a helicopter a few miles south of My Lai that March morning.

It was Ridenhour who heard accounts of My Lai from men in Charlie Company who had been there. He secretly compiled accounts, looked at official reports and in December 1968, now out of the Army, wrote a report of the massacre that he mailed to 200 people, including Rep. Morris Udall of Arizona, thus setting in motion the exposure of what had happened.

These days Ridenhour works in New Orleans. I called him to ask how he felt about the awards and this anniversary. “It’s an eerie feeling,” Ridenhour said. “During the two years that the story of the massacre first unfolded, polls showed that Americans were following it much more closely than most news stories. Yet at the end of it, when you asked people what happened at My Lai, they’d say, ‘Oh yeah, that’s where that lieutenant went crazy and killed a lot of Vietnamese civilians.’

“And the news stories today, surrounding Thompson and the other two deservedly getting their medals, say the same thing. [Lt. William L.] Calley [Jr.] was the lone madman, and it took one good man, Hugh Thompson, to intercede and stop it. But my answer is no, that’s not what happened. Calley was one of several officers on the ground; there were a hundred men in the village and a couple of hundred outside, and the massacre took four hours, 7:30 to 11:30 a.m. This was an operation, not an aberration.

“If it was an aberration, then Calley was tried, and justice was done. If it was an operation, then it raised--still raises--enormous questions of culpability for the rest of the chain of command, questions about the Nuremberg principles concerning war crimes.”

And indeed, as Ridenhour compellingly outlines, My Lai was a military operation. At 9:30 a.m., about the time Thompson landed his helicopters and the killing in My Lai still had two hours to go, one of the other companies in Task Force Barker marched three miles to the east, toward the sea, and commenced another massacre at My Khe 5, killing at least 90 people. “Task Force Barker,” Ridenhour says, “was created specifically by the division commander to annihilate the 88th Viet Cong battalion. They thought My Lai was the home base of this battalion. Above My Lai were helicopters filled with the entire command staff of that brigade, division and task force. [They] were literally flying overhead all morning, while it was going on. My Lai didn’t happen because Calley went berserk.”

But Calley was the man the Army made carry the can. Capt. Ernest Medina and Col. Oren Henderson were both acquitted even though there were eyewitnesses, including Thompson, who saw Medina shoot civilians that morning. And with only one guilty party, you don’t have the chain of command, of orders given from on top, that constitutes the profile of a premeditated war crime, which some historians of the war have concluded was part of the CIA’s Phoenix Program, aimed at exterminating the infrastructure of the Vietnamese National Liberation Front .

One lone madman, one good man . . . . Thompson conducted himself bravely that day and saved some lives. But not “untold lives,” as the citations for the medals suggest. Two hours after he radioed his first report, at 9:30, the massacre at My Lai finally ended. There was no one left to kill.

I asked Ridenhour how he’d feel if someone offered him the Soldier’s Medal. “I didn’t save any lives,” he answered. It’s true and, as I pointed out to him, his expose taught the Pentagon how to do it better the next time. Barely more than a decade later, the U.S. Army was training the Atlacatl Battalion in El Salvador, which killed twice the number of civilians at El Mozote, and not even a lowly American lieutenant was put on trial for complicity. The Army had learned how to do it right.