My Lai Massacre Quotes

If one morning in the Spring, a stranger came and said to me, Your mother, father, brother, sister, uncle, lover, friend, is dead. From a b-52, napalm bombing, search and destroy mission, air attack, Tet offensive, My Lai massacre, failed escape, I would not scream but make of my body a net, a tarp, stretched taut across the sky, the sea, over every village and hamlet. Prepared to catch everything from the sky, shade everything on the ground, rain water and receive you, war, with arms outstretched.

If one morning in the Spring, a stranger came and said to me, your mother,father, brother, sister, uncle, lover, friend is dead from a b-52, napalm bombing, search and destroy misson, air attack, Tet offensive, My Lai massacre, failed escape, I would not scream but make of my body a net, a tarp, stretched taut across the sky, the sea, over every village and hamlet, prepared to catch everything from the sky, shade everything on the ground, rain water and receive yyou, war, with arms outstretched

A poster of the massacre at My Lai, picturing women and children lying clumped together in a heap, their bodies riddled with bullets, hung on my wall as a daily reminder of the brutality in the world.

For the survivors, the disaster of the Indy is their My Lai massacre or Watergate, a touchstone moment of historic disappointment: the navy put them in harm's way, hundreds of men died violently, and then the government refused to acknowledge its culpability. What's amazing, however, is that these men, unlike contemporary generations who've been disappointed by bad government, are not bitter. Somehow, a majority brushed aside their feelings of rancor and went on to help build the booming postwar American economy of the fifties.

skulduggery and

The only American soldier convicted in the [My Lai Massacre in Vietnam], Lieutenant William Calley, served three months under house arrest. What the massacre drove home to me was that Oriental life was not terribly valuable. You could extinguish hundreds of Orientals - unarmed villagers, farmers, women, toddlers, infants - and the penalty would be napping and watching television in your apartment for twelve weeks.

    From a labour point of view, there are practically three races, the Malays the Chinese and Tamils. By nature, the Malay is an idler, the Chinaman is a thief, and the Indian is a drunkard. Yet each, in his special class of work, is both cheap and efficient when properly supervised.

When Lieutenant William Calley was tried for his part in the My Lai massacre in the Vietnam War, his psychiatrist defended him with these words: “I do not believe we should make any one person responsible for My Lai. . . . I do not believe we should make any one person or even the nation responsible for My Lai. If you want to hold someone responsible, I think the only one you can point to would be God.” Like the prosecutor falsely pinning the murder charge on Harriet when she was innocent, sin must always end in justifying itself by framing God. God is in the dock. To excuse ourselves, we have to accuse him. In short, sin frames God falsely.

I realized that my community was built in large part from the wreckage of America’s brutal proxy wars against communism. America massacred civilians in No Gun Ri and My Lai, it poisoned fields of crops and buried mines, it left behind machine guns in the wrong hands and let houses turn to rubble. San Jose is America’s consolation prize for those who lost Saigon and Seoul.

Fearing a court martial for disobedience, some of the soldiers at My Lai participated in the massacre. Normative influence leads to compliance, especially for people who have recently seen others ridiculed or who are seeking to climb a status ladder (Hollander, 1958; Janes & Olson, 2000).

When the young army lieutenant William Calley faced trial for his role in the murder of some five hundred Vietnamese men, women, and children in what came to be known as the My Lai massacre, Billy Graham remarked that he had “never heard of a war where innocent people are not killed.” He told, too, of “horrible stories” he’d heard from missionaries of “sadistic murders by the Vietcong,” and he reminded Americans that Vietnamese women and children had planted booby traps that mutilated American soldiers. His moral reflection in the pages of the New York Times was remarkably banal: “We have all had our Mylais in one way or another, perhaps not with guns, but we have hurt others with a thoughtless word, an arrogant act or a selfish deed.”32

What had happened at My Lai may have shocked the American public. But it was not news to the Army. Hugh Thompson, the helicopter pilot who had tried to stop the massacre, reported what he had seen. So did at least five other pilots. The word went steadily up the chain of command—all the way to the division commander, Major General Samuel W. Koster. No one took any action. Instead, the brigade log was falsified to say that 128 Viet Cong had been killed by U.S. artillery. The slaughter was covered up. The Army Public Information Office released a widely disseminated story that described an operation that “went like clockwork” in which the “jungle warriors” of the Eleventh Brigade had killed 128 Viet Cong in a running “day-long battle,” chalking up the largest body count in the brigade’s history. On the strength of reports like these, General Westmoreland had sent his official congratulations.