By Mike Phipps

The death was announced this week of William Calley, the only person to be convicted in connection with the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam War.

Calley, who died on 28^th April at the age of 80, led the US Army platoon that carried out the mass murder of hundreds of unarmed civilians, including women and children, in the Vietnamese village of Son My in 1968.

He was sentenced to life in prison in 1971 for killing 22 civilians, but had served only  three days behind bars when then-President Nixon ordered his release under house arrest – which lasted just three and a half years.

Over 500 civilians were killed in the massacre, a figure still disputed by the US. On the morning of 16th March 1968, Calley’s unit was airlifted to a hamlet in Son My – known to US soldiers at the time as My Lai 4 – on a mission to search for and kill Viet Cong members and sympathisers.

When they arrived, the officers were met with no resistance from the residents of the village, who were cooking breakfast over outdoor fires. The unit raped and murdered the inhabitants over the next several hours.

One six-year old who survived was eating breakfast with his family when a US soldier stepped into his mud and straw house and opened fire. “Nam saw the bullet-ridden bodies of his family falling—his grandfather, his parents, his older brother, his younger brother, his aunt and cousins” says one report.  “He ran into a dimly lit bedroom and hid under the bed. He heard more soldiers enter the house, and then more gunshots. He stayed under the bed as long as he could, but that wasn’t long because the Americans set the house on fire. When the heat grew unbearable, Nam ran out the door and hid in a ditch as his village burned. Of the 14 people at breakfast that morning, 13 were shot and 11 killed. Only Nam made it out physically unscathed.”

Around 200 US soldiers were present at in the massacre. One – who went on to commit suicide – said: “I cut their throats, cut off their hands, cut out their tongue, their hair, scalped them.”

Others mowed people down using M16s or by throwing grenades into their homes, or by bayoneting them. Children as young as ten were raped.  One witness said he did not recall seeing a single military-age male among those killed and only three weapons were captured.

The massacre came to light only eighteen months later following an investigation by New Yorker journalist Seymour Hersh. It prompted global outrage when it became public knowledge in November 1969 and fuelled domestic opposition to American involvement in the Vietnam War, both because of the scale of killing and the US military’s attempts to cover up the events.

Calley’s subsequent trial polarised America. It helped mobilise opposition to the war. Yet, despite the overwhelming evidence that Calley had personally killed numerous civilians, a survey found that nearly four out of five Americans disagreed with his guilty verdict. Within three months of the verdict, the White House received more than 300,000 letters and telegrams, almost all in support of him.

The Governor of Indiana ordered the state’s flags to fly at half-mast. Georgia’s Governor  Jimmy Carter, the future president, urged people to “honour the flag” as Calley had done.

Today the village of Son My has a small museum commemorating the massacre. At the entrance is a plaque that bears the names and ages of every person killed in Son My on that day. The list includes 17 pregnant women and 210 children under the age of 13.

The precise number of fatalities was not verified by the US, whose army – as in the Iraq war 35 years later – does not keep a record of the numbers of non-combatants killed. There were massacres in that war too, for example in 2005 in Haditha, where 24 unarmed civilians, including men, women, elderly people and children as young as one, were repeatedly shot at close range. A six-year investigation by the US military led to not a single one of the perpetrators going to jail.

In Vietnam, other alleged massacres have still not been fully investigated. In 1968, a large-scale operation in the Mekong Delta, the densely populated south of Vietnam, is estimated to have killed close to 11,000 people, but produced fewer than 750 captured weapons.

The amount of ammunition fired per soldier in the Vietnam War was 26 times greater than during World War II. By the end of the conflict, the US had unleashed the equivalent of 640 Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs on Vietnam. An estimated two million Vietnamese civilians were killed.

Marking the fiftieth anniversary of the start of the conflict, President Obama called the Vietnam War “a chapter in our nation’s history that must never be forgotten.” But as the US continues to downplay the numbers killed at My Lai and in other massacres, it’s clear that some aspects of the war will be more remembered than others.  

People of a certain generation remember the My Lai massacre. Others born later will struggle to process how such an event could occur. The answer is quite simple: armies are good at dehumanising their soldiers – and even better at dehumanising their enemy. Racism, a central feature of any war, infected every aspect of US policy in the region.

In the past, massacres might be culturally memorialised. Picasso painted Guernica in 1937 in response to the bombing of the Basque town by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy at the request of Franco’s Nationalists. At the time, the Basque Government estimated over 1,600 people were slaughtered. Picasso’s painting immortalised the atrocity.

Less remembered is Picasso’s later painting Massacre in Korea. Finished in 1951, it depicts the killing of a group of naked women and children by a firing squad. It is thought by some to refer to the No Gun Ri massacre in July 1950 when hundreds of South Korean refugees were killed by US air and ground fire. The atrocity was little reported at the time, and it was not until 2001 that the US army investigated. It described the three-day event as “an unfortunate tragedy inherent to war and not a deliberate killing” – a report condemned by survivors as a “whitewash”.

Today it is unlikely that any painting could have the same impact as Picasso’s Guernica. The cultural markers that capture such events tend to be via the media of film or music, usually Western-centric and in the case of motion pictures, invariably requiring considerable up-front investment in what is expected to be a profitably commodity. Stories of massacres told from the standpoint of the victims are not investible and consequently rarely get told.

If, as Milan Kundera said, the struggle of people against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting, the question arises: how do we make sure we remember? The death of William Calley is a timely moment to bring again to public attention the shocking massacre for which he was responsible – and to remind ourselves that such events are intrinsic to imperialist wars, rather than an aberration.

Mike Phipps’ book Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow: The Labour Party after Jeremy Corbyn (OR Books, 2022) can be ordered here.

Image: Monument of the My Lai Massacre at the Son My Vestige site https://www.flickr.com/photos/-jvl-/10316747886 -JvL- Attribution 2.0 Generic CC BY 2.0 Deed