
At My Lai: The Photographer Who Captured the Massacre - user982
https://foto.gettyimages.com/archive/war/my-lai-massacre-anniversary-pictures-ron-haeberle/
======
eludwig
I'd also like to recommend the Ken Burns "The Vietnam War," which can be found
on PBS. It is amazingly well done and the depth of it is beyond most
documentaries. For example, there is one episode (1.5+ hours) that covers a
six month period from 1967 to '68.

I was a small child during the war (10 in '68) and (to be truthful) only
somewhat remember watching the coverage on TV. My mother said I used to ask
her if I was going to have to go fight there and that I didn't want to.
Thankfully, I didn't. The war ended in '75\. I had just turned 17.

Strangely, the My Lai massacre is not covered until a later episode. They
slotted it in the time line where it was first reported --not when it actually
happened. But be patient, they do get to it eventually.

The sobering part about the series is that it absolutely captures the
stupidity, futility, and mismanagement of the war over such a long period of
time. The huge waste on both sides. The scale of it was staggering.

Myself, I am always drawn to the jungle patrols and the combat portions, which
are fierce, terrifying and totally engulfing. I can see why certain people are
drawn to war. It's the ultimate video game. Everything is on the line. You
have no idea what the enemy will do and (really, in the end) no idea what you
will do when faced with that visceral terror and excitement. What a rush it
must be! And how horrible too. I am in inveterate coward. I don't believe I
would have gone if called, but my 17 year old self is someone I don't really
know anymore.

Anyway, the series is great and I highly recommend it.

~~~
TaylorAlexander
Seconded. I just made it through the whole 20 hour series and it was sobering.
I never learned very much about this significant war in American history (I am
American).

To think that we started this war to help an ally (France) maintain their
colonial power over people who wanted to be free, and then stayed in it
because it would look bad, is horrific. Nixon even interfered with peace talks
before he was elected to make sure he’d have a better chance of being elected,
and that fact was seen as so damaging that those in power decided to keep it
the American people in the dark. A presidential candidate interfered with the
peace process to get elected and the American people weren’t even told about
it.

And then the massacres. So much humanity was lost. Not just in the massacres
but in the battles for a war that didn’t need to be fought.

The Vietnam war is such a dark part of human history, and yet we barely talk
about it. Or when we do, many people to this day believe the government lines
they were being fed at the time of the war. That this was necessary, etc.

And now we have a president that threatens war and people support him in it.
Hell Obama pushed war too and advanced many war efforts.

I wish we could stop all this killing. I mean - we could. I wish we would.

~~~
scriptproof
From Wikipedia:

"The North Vietnamese government and the Viet Cong were fighting to reunify
Vietnam. They viewed the conflict as a colonial war and a continuation of the
First Indochina War against forces from France and later on the United States.
The U.S. government viewed its involvement in the war as a way to prevent a
communist takeover of South Vietnam."

------
Red_Tarsius
I was surprised by how much war footage and gut-wrenching videos I could find
online. More people should be exposed to those documents as a form of shock
therapy. It gives weight and meaning to words so effortlessly spoken by our
leaders. It might also help young people have a little more empathy for actual
individuals, as opposed to abstract demographics.

The article reminds me of _War against War!_. It's a 1924 anti-war photobook
(180 images) designed by German pacifist Ernst Friedrich. It's a sobering
read.
[http://craigritchie.co.uk/archives/2581](http://craigritchie.co.uk/archives/2581)
[WARNING: 18+ NSFL]

EDIT: I added a few quotes describing the _War against War!_ photobook.

> _Outraged by the unprecedented barbarism and massive destruction of the
> First World War, Ernst Friedrich complied and published a collection of
> pictures and other visual material which attempted to illustrate not only
> the tragic human consequences of war, but also the lies and hypocrisy of the
> social, political, and economic forces that produced and promoted it. Aimed
> at an international audience with multi-lingual supporting text and
> captions, it was one of the first concerted photographic expressions of
> protest against the barbarism of modern warfare in all its tragic folly._

> _Friedrich’s strategy was to present shocking images of the atrocities of
> war and then juxtapose the official German patriotic and military propaganda
> and rhetoric of the time with graphic illustrations of what this discourse
> actually produced._

> _The horrific imagery builds gradually, commencing with illustrations of
> children’s toys and propaganda posters, followed by photographs of the
> soldier’s march to war, the privilege of the elites orchestrating the
> violence, the devastated and then forgotten battlefields [...] and the
> graveyards of the dead._

> _The most unbearable pages are in a section called ‘The Face of War’,
> twenty-four close-ups of military and non-military survivors with huge
> facial wounds._

> _Never before had the people there been subjected to such horrendous images
> of the savagery and the senseless destruction of the First World War. During
> WW1, most European governments forbade the publication of war photographs
> and few images of the war had appeared before the publication of Friedrich’s
> book._

~~~
fractallyte
Most of the big wars were/are ultimately started (or allowed to start) by
politicians.

The word 'politician' can be thought of as a portmanteau: _political
technician_. So the responsibility is on _us_ to enforce this distinction: who
among our political technicians is actually qualified to _lead_?

Heinlein's _Starship Troopers_ had the right idea. I wish just one nation in
the world would implement it. Maybe it would lead to a cascade of rationality,
and future wars would become impossible as a result.

~~~
7952
Ah yes. The kind of rational society that fights giant insects with lightly
armoured infantry soldiers despite being highly technologically advanced.

A lot of problems are complex and require competing demands to be balanced.
There is no single objectively correct solution to those problems. Rational
intelligent people come to different conclusions. That is why we have
politics, to deal with the messy complexity of the real world.

Treating rationality as a moral virtue just disturbs me. It is just a kind of
moralistic discrimination based on things that may or may not indicate actual
quality.

~~~
gaius
_The kind of rational society that fights giant insects with lightly armoured
infantry soldiers_

In the movie. In the book the MI wear power armour.

~~~
7952
Sure, but they could have just thrown rocks from space, or nukes from orbit. A
culture that can fly across the galaxy does not need to use infantry any more
than a US marine needs to throw a spear. It is a very common thread in this
kind of sci-fi. It is just more glorious to shoot the insect from close up.
There is more opportunity for pointless sacrifice.

~~~
angersock
Heinlein actually addresses that point:

 _> If you wanted to teach a baby a lesson, would you cut its head off? Of
course not. You'd paddle it. There can be circumstances when it's just as
foolish to hit an enemy city with an H-bomb as it would be to spank a baby
with an axe. War is not violence and killing, pure and simple; war is
controlled violence, for a purpose. The purpose of war is to support your
government's decisions by force. The purpose is never to kill the enemy just
to be killing him...but to make him do what you want to do. Not killing...but
controlled and purposeful violence. But it's not your business or mine to
decide the purpose of the control. It's never a soldier's business to decide
when or where or how—or why—he fights; that belongs to the statesmen and the
generals. The statesmen decide why and how much; the generals take it from
there and tell us where and when and how. We supply the violence; other
people—'older and wiser heads,' as they say—supply the control. Which is as it
should be._

------
megous
Sadly, similar massacres are happening almost daily in this world. One day you
see someone start a twitter campaing like #iamstillalive, the other you see a
reports of him being killed in an airstrike with countless other people.
People are daily begging on twitter for their lives, to be spared, to someone
help them. You can easily find similar images from what you see in this
article, from yesterday, day prior, almost any day of the week. Dead people,
burned people, living people who have their arms baked to the bone, hacked off
extremities... plenty of orhpaned children. Just yesterday ~61 people were
burned to death in incendiary air strike in the middle of the city with many
others injured.

What is worrying though how much propaganda there is these days, which says
that this is all made up, staged, people are doing it to themselves, and how
many people seemingly take this shit seriously. How much effort there is to
justify such attrocities. That's seriously deranged, and I still don't know
what to think of it.

~~~
vietnamese59
My parents are Vietnamese. My dad actually fought in the war with the South
Vietnamese army alongside US troops. He's a lifelong Republican, as were all
of his brothers who also fought, as well as the vast majority of his friends
and their families who arrived as refugees.

They supported the war. They saw the US as liberators against the communists
who wanted to murder them and take over their country. They love America and
despise communist Vietnam. They wish the US had finished the job.

Promoting things like the link above and conveniently omitting the pure
savagery of the Viet Cong, Ho Chi Minh, and the communists from the North is
pure propaganda. It's always puzzling to me what types of topics journalists
choose to run.

Instead of listening to journalists reporting on Vietnam from half a world
away, you should visit Little Saigon in Southern California and Northern
California and ask them how they feel about America and the Vietnam War.

EDIT: Since I have a post limit and I can't reply below, I'll reply here.

quan: I didn't say My Lai was propaganda. I said emphasizing My Lai over the
several atrocities committed by the communists, including the systematic
murders of those who opposed communism, is propaganda.

~~~
namelost
I'm sorry but the actions of the Viet Cong do not excuse the crimes committed
the US, and neither does the nationality of your parents.

To this day, many are maimed and killed by US land mines in the region, and
the US does not give a shit.

~~~
vietnamese59
You're setting up a straw man to an argument I never made. All I'm telling you
is how my dad, his brothers, and the vast majority of his first generation
Vietnamese friends (who arrived as refugees) feel about America and the
Vietnam War. Despite what you may think, they wholeheartedly support America.

If you don't believe me, you should try visiting Little Saigon on Bolsa Avenue
in Orange Country and ask them what they think of the USA. Look at the flags
they use (South Vietnam and the USA). If you want to get assaulted (I highly
don't recommend this), try bringing Vietnam's current flag and parade it
around.

EDIT:

to andrepd: Again, you keep setting up straw man arguments. It's very easy to
attack someone if you misrepresent their views. I never said anything about
excusing massacres.

~~~
NotSammyHagar
I think you didn't mean it, from your later comments, but you came across as
saying we shouldn't only talk about My Lai because the other side did bad
things too. Yes, they did bad things, but it doesn't excuse us. We claim we
are better. Just like in the Iraq War 2 and our prisons where we treated
people horribly, it doesn't excuse it just because someone else also did bad
things. I think that's a core principal.

It doesn't lessen the horror of atrocities if the other side did it.

~~~
candiodari
> We claim we are better.

That's exactly the point made. The US IS better. Better than the Nazis, better
than North Vietnam/Vietnam, better than China (and frankly better than all
European states during and immediately after WWI/II at least). Better than
North Korea. Better than South Africa.

With better I mean "how people are treated", in the human rights, in general,
and only as part of government policy.

And yes, I agree. The US has it's downsides. The US has made mistakes. The
difference between a mistake and a government policy is the number of times
and the scale at which it happens, and the intent. The US has made mistakes,
some of which lead to the death of hundreds, even thousands of people. Some of
those mistakes involved the military. It was NOT the intent of any significant
fraction of the US to make these events happen.

China, Vietnam, and Germany had a widely supported-by-the-people government
policy of massacre. Every organisation in those countries is focused and
involved in oppressing and massacring people for some reason. Vietnam's
CURRENT government made children watch their own parents getting raped,
slowly, and killed, then used them as insane soldier-killers sending them into
defenseless villages where they brutally murdered everyone they could. This is
NOT a one-off. They did this to children for decades.

The difference is indescribable and it is absurd to even compare the two. They
are not on the same moral level, they just aren't. We are better than that,
it's just that simple.

That's objectively so, and for some reason a lot of people feel the need to
destroy historical views like this.

It may not lessen atrocities on the other side, but we should acknowledge the
difference between mistakes and popular government-supported genocide.

Equating them does nothing, other than provide cover for these massacres.
Hell, the amount of people talking up Chinese policy seems to be mounting
every day. And, of course, the situation of people in China gets worse
everytime some high up in the Chinese government thinks censorship is good
enough that they can get away with something more.

It pains me to point out the obvious: "anti-racism" has become the leading
excuse for racism, inequality and state-based massacres.

~~~
simonh
Ive looked carefully through he comments here and nobody is making any false
equivalency In the terms you describe, or denying what you say about the US
overall.

I don’t see why an article or subsequent discussion about a horrible crime
committed by US soldiers, subject to an attempted coverup by the US army and
limply prosecuted afterwards needs to also say how nice the US is otherwise.
It doesn’t matter how nice it is otherwise. It’s got nothing to do with the
issue at hand, any more than if it had happened in any other country.

~~~
candiodari
Really ? I get that message very strongly just looking at the very post above
me (and the other comments by the same user in the same thread).

------
chrischen
Wow had no idea the Vietnam was this bad (bad as in how bad the Americans
were). Almost makes the invasion of Iraq look noble. I went through the US
educational system and while we know about the Vietnam war, the protesters,
this is definitely not the picture of the war that we were given. It's
basically propaganda and history rewriting what they are doing here, even
though the US didn't even technically win the war. We were taught that the
Vietnam war protesters were just pacifist hippies.

No wonder why China is fiercely anti-American (in terms of influence, policy,
etc).

~~~
verylittlemeat
>I went through the US educational system and while we know about the Vietnam
war, the protesters, this is definitely not the picture of the war that we
were given.

I just want to be one anecdotal voice to disagree with this statement. I went
to a city university and my American history class 1945-present included a
curriculum with media such as:

A People's History of the United States

The Fog of War (documentary)

Hearts and Minds (documentary)

Last Night I Dreamed of Peace: The Diary of Dang Thuy Tram

Gary R. Hess, Vietnam: Explaining America's Lost War.

Nick Turse. Kill Anything that Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam.

I know some of my friends took courses where the Vietnam War was referred to
pejoratively as the American War. We learned about My Lai in high school even.
Where did you go to school that the Vietnam War was glossed over in such a
pro-American way? Maybe it's a regional thing? I was educated on the east
coast.

~~~
chrischen
I think a college class would have to delve into the topic a bit more.

But given a high school history curriculum being limited they'd have to pick
and choose what to cover, and the majority of American kids would end up with
the highly distilled, pro-American leaning retelling. I went to high school in
the mid-west (Michigan) in a probably center-left leaning (though in the last
election probably Trump-leaning) area.

------
lopmotr
How do people manage to condemn this type of thing but not the 100,000s
murdered in Iraq because of the US invasion? I can't work out how Americans
think being proud of their soldiers - both left and right wing people are. Is
there something I don't know?

~~~
verylittlemeat
During the Vietnam war that _is_ what happened. Soldiers were treated like
baby killers upon returning to the US.

There was a sort of rebranding of the American solider after that catastrophe.
The American citizen is now supposed to see the American solider as a
utilitarian third party cog in a system where soldiers don't make decisions
they just execute them. So if you're unhappy with the war you take out your
disapproval on the government not the lowly soldier who is "just doing their
job/just following orders" etc.

Obviously this is very ethically questionable but I'd say it's the standard
attitude towards the American soldier in my experience (in group social
settings with ex-military people). The military is simply the hammer, the will
of the people and politics. The hammer only acts when the hand picks it up
hence we're supposed to hold the hand (government) accountable not the hammer
(military).

~~~
LifeLiverTransp
Wait, so a attack on a soldier is wrong- and attacking the government (aka the
people in a democracy) is right? So the whole of the people view themselves as
a sort of warlord?

~~~
angersock
When the solider is out on the sharp end, they're goin g to make whatever
policy is most likely to keep them alive modulo broad mission objectives. This
had been true somewhere have been humans fighting.

The time to consider the impact of this is before you deploy the solider.
Ergo, to affect change, we must look at the government and not the solider.

~~~
LifeLiverTransp
But didnt he/she volunteer. Shouldnt then there be some conditional clauses to
service- aka, i m only a soldier to this democracy, as long as it is acting in
my missions in true self-defense against a unprovoked attack.

Else- in theory, couldnt your goverment just rent you out to the highest
bidder as mercenary and you would still have to do whatever this entity
demands of you. This cart blanche of action, combined with the chance to loose
your life- that is strange.

~~~
lostlogin
> But didnt he/she volunteer.

The draft saw 2,215,000 conscripted.
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscription_in_the_United_S...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscription_in_the_United_States#Vietnam_War)

------
jashkenas
For firsthand testimony by American soldiers involved in similar operations —
I cannot recommend Winter Soldier, the 1972 documentary film, highly enough.

It's something that every American adult deserves to see.

Part 1:
[http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x67rpbi](http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x67rpbi)

Part 2:
[http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x681bui](http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x681bui)

In short: The film records a 1971 Vietnam Veterans Against the War event in
Detroit, where dozens of veterans spoke in public, to the media and on the
record, for the first time, about war crimes that they had seen and taken part
in, just months or years before.

------
rdtsc
> Duc was eight years old in March 1968, and as Haeberle spoke with him,
> through an interpreter, he realized with a jolt that the woman he had
> photographed dead behind a rock 43 years earlier was Duc’s mother, Nguyen
> Thi Tau.

It was hard not to cry reading that.

It is terrifying to think about all the other massacres where a photographer
wasn't there to document it or someone like the helicopter pilot Hugh Thompson
to intervene.

------
dfee
Fucking horrific. What war does to men, and what men do in war.

This can hardly be confined to Americans in Vietnam, and that doesn’t justify
it, but rather provides an opportunity for pause and reflection.

I’m left wondering if we’re just a bunch of dumb animals. Being capable of
having that thought gives me some hope. But, what can we be when we’re
surrounded by our own savagery?

------
slantedview
While My Lai was horrible, evidence collected since then such as in Nick
Turse's book "Kill Anything That Moves" [1] and at the Winter Soldier hearings
[2] show that Mai Lai was hardly an aberration. Horrible atrocities committed
by US soldiers were widespread in Vietnam, much more so than most people
digesting the Ken Burns narrative realize.

What's important to learn about My Lai isn't just that it happened - that
Americans are indeed as capable of horrible atrocities as anyone - but that
almost no consequences resulted. In fact, as Turse discovers, Army officials
who were aware of what was happening in Vietnam later moved to take control of
the Criminal Investigation Division in order to suppress investigation and
prosecution of the innumerable war crimes that took place. The most
significant prosecution that took place was of Lt. William Calley, who
ultimately received 3 1/2 years of house arrest after being convicted of
hundreds of murders. The message that this sends to the rest of the world is
that we are imperialist killers of the highest order, and we are above the
law.

Without looking at these atrocities in the eye, we are doomed to repeat them.
And so we have.

[1] [https://www.amazon.com/Kill-Anything-That-Moves-
American/dp/...](https://www.amazon.com/Kill-Anything-That-Moves-
American/dp/1250045061)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter_Soldier_Investigation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter_Soldier_Investigation)

------
technotarek
There's a good short video here with Seymour Hersh telling how he broke the
story and brought it all to public attention:

[https://investigatingpower.org/vietnam-
war/](https://investigatingpower.org/vietnam-war/)

(Disclosure: We designed and developed the site.)

------
pimmen
The My Lai massacre is an important event because what happened to the
soldiers who committed the atrocities (nothing) echoes through history. Nobody
is still being punished for what happened in Haditha, Abu Ghraib or Gitmo.

During the 1940s the US prosecuted Japanese and German war criminals by
adhering to the Yamashita principle and disqualifying the Nuremberg defense;
basically, commanders are always responsible for crimes that their soldiers
commit if they aren't actively combating it themselves (this is what convicted
Yamashita, who occupied the Philippines) and you can't blame your CO when you
commit war crimes (which convicted a lot of people in Nuremberg).

But, after the My Lai massacre, the soldiers could successfully use the
Nuremberg defense themselves. Their CO was also not under the Yamashita
principle because he only served three years of a commuted sentence. The My
Lai massacre should not be forgotten because it's a reminder that it's been
more than 50 years now, when is America going to start measuring up to the
moral standards it claims it has?

------
joshuaheard
For many, this incident is a metaphor for the U.S. involvement in Viet Nam:
thuggish U.S. soldiers came to a country they didn't understand and killed
everyone. This view lacks the context of the war. The U.S. and its allies were
fighting the Cold War, a war against Communist Bloc hegemony. We were fighting
against the expansion of Communism in South Viet Nam, trying to prevent The
Domino Effect.

The primary reason we lost the war was micro-managing by Washington
bureaucrats, and overly-limited rules of engagement. Keep in mind, our mission
was to assist the South Koreans in defending a guerrilla war. For this reason,
we never invaded North Vietnam, and initially refrained from going in to
neighboring countries to attack the Viet Cong revolutionaries staging there.
Nixon started bombing these countries, but by then, it was too little, too
late, and he ended the war.

~~~
stelonix
I believe this view also does not consider economic and government system
hegemony as a good reason to end lives. Many of the people who lived those
massacres, from Vietnam to Iraq seem to agree with this view. Since I come
from a country that has also been victim to American interventionism I tend to
agree, our lives are more important than capitalism, communism, war on terror
or whatever it is the excuse of the times for invading sovereign nations and
slaughtering its people.

I believe we who see that "metaphor" rather see it as the truth: US soldiers
go to countries they know nothing about and kill everyone. I do not fancy
being murdered. Killing people is wrong, plain and simple.

------
fractallyte
So, just finished reading the article... I guess everyone should, just for the
sense of thoughtfulness it _should_ provoke.

The thing is, the perpetrators started out as ordinary young American men.
What tipped the balance, to turn them into stone-cold killers? It's not unique
to this situation: this is what soldiers eventually _tend_ to do. The ultimate
modern example of pure, large scale monstrosity is the Red Army, at the close
of WWII. But - make no mistake - many (most?) males are capable of such acts.

Some serious psychological tools need to be thrown at this problem.

~~~
b1daly
Stone cold killers is not the right description here. These soldiers,
conscripts, were put into the most bizarre, dangerous, depraved situation you
could imagine. The stress must have been unreal, in the jungles. They suffered
a situational insanity.

~~~
neverartful
Well said. From my reading of many non-fiction accounts of the Vietnam War,
this view is reinforced with each account. I think it's also unfair for
Monday-morning quarterbacking of "well, if i were there, i would have just
...".

------
arca_vorago
Vietnam was never meant to be won, it just continued the Korea and WW2 bleed
out strategy. (With a side of MICC profits and deep state drug running black
profits) Read up on Robert G Thompson for more on the bleed out comment if you
are genuinely curious. All these wars we get into, people need to focus on the
"advisors" influencing policy. What ends up happening is people debate about
the trees and miss the forest.

------
z3t4
I think the savage is in the human nature. Maybe in the future wars can be
fought virtually. With the advance of VR we fight it out in "Quake" rather in
real life.

------
coupdejarnac
There is a Frontline or other PBS special about My Lai from about 5 years ago.
I think I saw it on netflix, but it should be on the PBS website, too.

------
vnjp
iam vietnamese

