The My Lai Cases

When his platoon did enter the village, they institute replete(p)ly old men, women and children, all going about the daily calling line of earning a living, none actively involved in military machine or quasi-military activities. Nonetheless, Calley and his men began to separate the people into groups to be executed. at heart a few hours, 357 noncombatants in My Lai had been killed. About 150 to a greater extent than in surrounding villages had also been executed. Many had been raped or mutilated before or after death.

The Army had make a practice throughout the war of wiping out entire villages by bombing them and had been relatively careless about inflicting civilian injuries and deaths. This was in slightly mensuration justified by the reputation of the war: Because so often civilians helped the Vietnamese Army, the U.S. Army could non afford to assume that someone was not a menace because he or she was young or old or not in uniform. It was within this context of a insurrectionist war fought as much by citizens as by soldiers that the slaughter at My Lai seemed a reasonable order to Calley, he would argue at his trial.

However careless the Army had been in killing citizens before this event, higher-up officers recognized that with unrest everyplace the war already growing at home, the public would fight badly to the intelligence of what had happened in My Lai and tried to suppress news about the slaughter. However, On March 29, 1969, Ronald Ridenhour, a soldier who was armed service in another unit, heard abo

Belknap, Michael. The Vietnam War on Trial: (Landmark Law Cases & American golf club Series): The My Lai Massacre and Court-Martial of Lieutenant Calley. Lawrence: U of Kansas, 2002.

Part of what outraged Americans learning about My Lai was that higher Army officers had not been prosecuted for it. The investigation (for war crimes) that the army carried out at the time cover the actions of only a dozen relatively low-ranking officers along with some enlisted soldiers. Of these only five of those who had been at My Lai were court-martialed.

Only Calley was found guilty, and he was sentenced to life sentence imprisonment.

ut the events at My Lai and - sickened by what was being make in the name of his country - told both his representative in Congress and Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird. A journalist named Seymour Hersh found out about Ridenhour's revelations and it became a national story for weeks.

The accumulative effect of Calley's verdict and the support that he received from veterans helped impinge on public support for Calley. More and more Americans began to believe that Calley was thus a scapegoat for a war that had been and was being fought on similarly brutal terms. In no small measure because of public outcry about Calley's sentence, and about the fact that his overlord officers were either acquitted or never tried at all, Calley's sentence was reduced to three years in mansion arrest. He was paroled in 1974 and began to work in the insurance business - a remarkable tame second chapter to a life that came to symbolize a country torn apart by war.

The VVAW more than any other group also argued that Calley had alone been made a scapegoat for a war that was more and more unpopular - and that could arguably be argued to be simply criminal.
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