The Vietnam War My Lai and HUE: Maps, media and memories of massacre
MY LAI
March 16, 1968
Interview: Laser Film Corporation, 1970
During the period (7:20 - 8:53), notice how this interviewee felt it was his duty to fulfil a 'search and destroy' mission and all that this entailed...
Echoes of Milgram can be heard as this interviewee frames his military role within a chain of authority...
Another prominent aspect in this clip, is the development of the veteran's facial expressions throughout the questioning. Notice how their expressions visibly change at particular points during the interview: it would appear that My Lai continued to fester in the consciousness of these veterans, even at the time of these interviews, almost three years later.
The mission in My Lai on the morning of March 16 1968 was branded a 'Search and Destroy' mission: "The objective of which involved not only the destruction of Viet Cong forces but also anything the Viet Cong used for food, shelter, or transport". (Allison, p.10)
Mapping the My Lai massacre
Maps accessed via The Peers Report, 1970.
Key
PLT: Platoon
LZ: Landing Zone
C/1-20: Charlie Company
- The 'intermingling' of 1st and 3rd Platoons and the return of some members of the 1st Platoon from the western perimeter into the space of My Lai, appears quite unordered behaviour for a military company. Therefore I would deduce from the maps above that the movement of men within the space of My Lai is much more reflective of aberration rather than intention. As within the context of a military operation, such an unordered structure to a mission would have been both unprofessional and difficult to maintain control.
- Furthermore, if the operation in My Lai, totally intended to kill all the population in the hamlet, then it would have been likely that this would have occurred during the first sweep of the hamlet, by both 1st and 3rd Platoons. In reality we see members of both platoons breaking off from their positions to return to the hamlet to continue the killing.
memories of my lai
Interviewees
Joe Grimes († January 15, 2013). (Squad leader, Charlie Company ,1st Battalion, 20th Infantry Regiment, 11th Brigade, US Army).
Tran Nam, My Lai Villager.
Frederick Widmer (Radio operator, Charlie Company ,1st Battalion, 20th Infantry Regiment, 11th Brigade, US Army).
The Hue Massacre
February 1968
MAPPING THE HUE MASSACRE
- From the beginning of the battle of Hue, American and South Vietnamese forces had to fight their way from the MACV compound on the south side of the river, and a small pocket in the north-east of the Citadel.
- Notice how the river, and also the ancient walls surrounding the Citadel, provided the geographical boundaries that formed a 'state of exception' in Hue.
- The American and South Vietnamese troops were not totally chased out of Hue during the Tet offensive, despite being caught off guard at the beginning of the offensive.
- Douglas Pike claimed, that had the Americans and South Vietnamese not recaptured some of the districts of Hue early in the battle, and particularly those districts near the university, with all the connotations and connections to western culture, then the massacre in Hue could have been incredibly more destructive. (Pike, Viet Cong strategy of Terror, p. 62)
MEDIA AND MASSACRE
The Media and My Lai
My Lai: “No other American atrocity committed during the war- and there were so many- was ever afforded anything approaching the same attention”. (Turse, p. 5)
“There are some clearly explicable reasons why alleged US war crimes receive more attention than do those committed by insurgents. First, the fact that a great power is the supposed perpetrator certainly accounts for part of the interest in such atrocities. Second, apparent US hypocrisy also increases the attention paid to war crimes allegations. The fact that Washington loudly proclaims that it stands for the global promotion of human rights very likely does it more harm than good". (Walton, p. 14)
The Cold War, Vietnam and massacre...
- The My Lai and Hue massacres, the Tet Offensive and subsequently the Vietnam War cannot be fully understood unless it's international role in Twentieth Century History is fully taken into account.
- "The all-pervasiveness of the Cold War, underpins both massacres. Both perpetrators were caught in a war, where polarisation of political allegiances created a vacuum of neutrality where the civilian was incompatible. Thus under exceptional circumstances where the perpetrators became paranoid about the security of their power base, the civilian became increasingly likely to be targeted as an enemy". (Max Nicholson, 2016)
- "Ultimately, the civilians of Vietnam were a doomed entity caught in the middle of an escalating Cold War infused conflict". (Max Nicholson, 2016)
Media, Memory and My Lai and Hue...
My Lai is a much more well known space of violence in comparison to the Hue massacre, primarily because... “The camera (and freedom of western media to cover the war uncensored) put South Vietnam (and America) – and open societies generally – at a disadvantage, because closed societies were never subjected in the same way to close visual scrutiny. The world saw, in gruesome close-up, the execution of one Vietcong soldier; it did not see the details of the executions by the communists of over 2000 civilians in waste ground outside Hue at the same time”. (Christie, p. 203)
And finally...
Source Bank.
- Allison, William T. My Lai: An American Atrocity in the Vietnam War, (John Hopkins University Press, 2012).
- Christie, Clive J. The Vietnam War: The Cold War and the crisis of Western Liberalism, (YouCaxton, 2015).
- Hersh, Seymour, The Mammoth Book of the Vietnam War, (Robinson, 2015), Part III, My Lai, pp. 323-353.
- Hue Massacre, 1968-1998, in English and Vietnamese, (includes personal note and newspaper articles in Vietnamese), No Date, Folder 03, Box 01, Lu Lan Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University. Accessed 30 Apr. 2016: http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=19350103001.
- Oberdorfer, Don, Tet: the turning point in the Vietnam War, (John Hopkins, 2001).
- Pike, Douglas, The Viet Cong Strategy of Terror, (Saigon, 1970).
- Turse, Nick, Kill anything that moves, (Metropolitan books, 2013).
- U.S Department of the Army, The Report of the Department of the Army Review of the preliminary investigations into the My Lai, (The Peers Report), By Lieutenant W. R. Peers Volume I, March 14, 1970.
- Walton C. Dale, Wars: Victory through Villainization: Atrocity, Global Opinion, and insurgent Strategic Advantage, Civil Wars, 2012, Vol. 14. No. 1. pp. 123-140.
- YouTube clip 1: Strick, Joseph, Laser Film Corporation, Interviews with My Lai Veterans, 1971: https://www.youtu.be/Klx4TB33BRU?t=7m20s.
- YouTube clip 2:Television documentary, My Lai: American Experience, WGBH, (PBS, 2010), America, accessed on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSIHEO6V6vg.
- YouTube clip 3: American Veterans Centre,Two veterans of the Tet Offensive, Brig. Gen. Michael Downs and Col. Charles Krohn, talk about the Hue City massacre at the American Veterans Center's 2008 conference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gVCutQ4O8Wg.
- YouTube clip 4: Walter Cronkite, CBS, 1968 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nn4w-ud-TyE&index=24&list=PLmX6CEWVV194dXy2rcXPERwmhb3FfRL3r.
Images
Title slide:
- http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/active_learning/explorations/vietnam/vietnam_mylai.cfm
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Calley
- https://jf-vietnam.wikispaces.com/My+Lai+Massacre
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Lai_Massacre
- http://rarehistoricalphotos.com/soldier-war-is-hell-vietnam-1965/
- http://ngothelinh.tripod.com/Hue.html
My Lai Images:
- http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-23427726
- http://alexiarutkowskiibhistory.weebly.com/containment-in-vietnam.html
- http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/153799
- http://cdn.c.photoshelter.com/img-get2/I0000XaYHBNw7Vxs/fit=1000x750/Capt-Ernest-Medina-Trial-71072601-45-Court-Marshall-in-Atlanta.jpg
- https://sites.google.com/site/bblockushistorymylaimassacre/trial
Viet Cong Images:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D445_Battalion
- http://dailycaller.com/2013/01/15/thedc-interview-10-questions-with-max-boot-on-his-history-of-guerrilla-warfare/
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viet_Cong_and_PAVN_strategy,_organization_and_structure
- https://www.flickr.com/photos/13476480@N07/16896438716
Media and Massacre images:
- https://usastruck.com/2014/11/24/television-coverage-of-the-vietnam-war/
- https://www.flickr.com/photos/13476480@N07/16734935850
The Cold War, Vietnam and massacre
- http://bhshistorynetwork.weebly.com/the-cold-war.html
- http://www.ask.com/history/year-did-cold-war-begin-b7011c5ee9d9c360