How did the americans behave in the My Lai massacre?
Army intelligence (an oxymoron if ever there was one) suggested that elements of the 48th NLF battalion, having retreated, had gone to ground in the Mai Lai complex of hamlets. During the briefing, the soldiers were ordered by their Colonel to burn the hamlets down and kill the animals, and find the VC and their supporters and put an end to them, once and for all. Given these orders, the troops, under Lt. Calley, went in firing, and began shooting essentially anything that moved. The firing peaked, and at that point, the soldiers were completely out of control, beating, raping and killing defenseless civilians, without even a shred of evidence that they were enemy or sympathizers. It should be noted that the company which committed these atrocities had suffered several months of frustrating patrols, and had taken 28 casualties due to booby traps in the area. This does not in any way excuse thetir behavior, but it helps explain how the fear and frustration and anger those troops reasona
See chance68 (above) for an excellent summary! A company under the command of Lt. James Calley (apparently he passed the lowest in his class at west point, and could barely read a map in good conditions.) were on patrol and lost. As they blundered through the jungle, several men were lost to booby traps and sporadic enemy fire. And morale was almost non existent. Upon coming into Mai Lai, the initial fire started after american soldiers shot a woman who resisted a rape attempt. Other troops believing they were under fire started firing indiscriminately. The troops started firing at civilians who’d made a run into the paddy fields fearing getting caught up in a Viet cong attack on the americans (there were no VC in the area). A pilot in an observation helicopter seeing wounded civilians in the fields, dropped marker flares for medics to attend to the civilians, however saw US troops shooting the unarmed and wounder civilians. As far as I can recall Calley and about four others were cour
The world and more important the U S turned against the war there were demonstration all over America It had it’s effect on the military But what has always been of interest to me is what happened after our pull out The V/C were disarmed and disbanded many were put in re=ed camps along with tens of thousands Vietnam had a short war with China invaded Cambodia millions were killed Thailand told us to remove our bases and within a few month asked the U S for help But all the ”concerned” people in America and over the pond did not care They were to busy having fun telling the Americans ”you did not win that one”
