"By the time the My Lai massacre ended, 504 people were dead. Among the victims were 182 women—17 of them pregnant—and 173 children, including 56 infants."
"When the troops from 1 Platoon moved through the village they started to fire at the villagers. These were women, children and the elderly as the young men had gone to the paddy fields to work.Sergeant Michael Bernhardt, who was at My Lai, was quoted in 1973 as stating that he saw no one who could have been considered to be of military age. He also stated that the US troops in My Lai met no resistance.
An army photographer, Ronald Haeberie, witnessed a US soldier shoot two young boys who he believed were no more than five years of age. Other photos taken at the scene of the massacre show bodies of what can only be very young children.
Those who returned to the village claimed that it took three days to bury the bodies. They were later to report that some of the children had their throats cut and that some of the bodies had not just been shot but had also been mutilated. "
https://www.historyl...y-lai-massacre/
p.s. bez fotografija masakra,
"Though a number of US soldiers were charged, all with the exception of Lieutenant William Calley, were acquitted. Calley was sentenced to life in prison with hard labour.
His defence, which was initially rejected, was that he was there in My Lai to hunt out communists and to destroy communism and that he was only carrying out his orders that were to hunt out the NLF. ‘The Battle Hymn of William Calley’, a record in support of Calley, sold over 200,000 copies."
“When my troops were getting massacred and mauled by an enemy I couldn’t see, an enemy I couldn’t feel, I couldn’t touch…………nobody in the military system ever described them anything other than Communist.”
He served three years before he was released. He apologized in 2009
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
- A forgotten hero stopped the My Lai massacre 50 years ago today
When he arrived, American soldiers had already killed 504 Vietnamese civilians (that's the Vietnamese count; the U.S. Army said 347.
They were going to kill more, but they didn't — because of what Thompson did.
What happened next was one of the most remarkable events of the entire war, and perhaps unique: Thompson told the American troops that, if they opened fire on the Vietnamese civilians in the bunker, he and his crew would open fire on them.
Back at their base he filed a complaint about the killing of civilians that he had witnessed. The Army covered it up. But eventually the journalist Seymour Hersh found out about the massacre, and his report made it worldwide news and a turning point in the war. Afterwards Thompson testified at the trial of Lt. William Calley, the commanding officer during the massacre.
Then came the backlash. Calley had many supporters, who condemned and harassed Thompson. He didn’t have much support — for decades. It took the Army 30 years, but in 1998, they finally acknowledged that Thompson had done something good. They awarded him the Soldier's Medal for “heroism not involving actual conflict with an enemy.
Edited by Attolini, 16 March 2018 - 22:23.