The evil that was

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Niner
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The evil that was

Post by Niner » Sat Apr 24, 2010 10:14 am

PBS is going to show a documentary about My Lai this coming Monday. My Lai was far and away the largest symbol of evil in the Vietnam War. It served to mark all of us that served as co-responsible in the eyes of much of the public, even when the great majority of those who served in Vietnam never particpated in anything remotely like that atrocity. Only one lieutenant was convicted and he only served three years in jail. Over 5oo villagers were murdered. The military covered it up best it could and added greatly to the shame of the event by doing so.


Here is one story about the documentary and what one man makes of it.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/byron-wil ... 47698.html
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Karl/Pa.
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Re: The evil that was

Post by Karl/Pa. » Sat Apr 24, 2010 11:53 am

I remember when this story broke. It was published in a Penthouse-type magazine named Avant Garde. It only lasted for four issues but I remember reading this in their first issue.
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Re: The evil that was

Post by riptidenj » Sat Apr 24, 2010 3:33 pm

I was in the Army when the My Lai story broke after 18 months of succesful coverup. William Calley was the ONLY officer convicted , the company commander, Ernest Medina, the brigade commander, Oran K. Henderson, were both acquitted, charges against all the other officers involved were dismissed. My Lai was "investigated" by the Peers Commissiion headed by LTG William Peers whom Westmoreland said he selected because "he had a a reputation for integrity." The Peers Commision strove to pin the heaviest blame on 5 officers who were already dead, notably LTC FRank Barker, CO of Task Force Barker which was the parent unit of Medina's company. Barker was KIA in a midair collion on 13 June, 1968.
One consequence of My Lai was a notable deterioration of discipline in an army were it was already kind of shaky.
The higher ups came with the "illegal order-unlawful order" nonsense, we recieved poorly prepared and poorly taught classes that were supposed to teach us the difference between a legal and an illegal order. Everyone came out befuddled and confused, the running gag was an officer of NCo would give a soldier a perfectly legal and valid order, the soldier would reply "I want to talk to a lawyer."
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Re: The evil that was

Post by Niner » Sat Apr 24, 2010 4:08 pm

I think there was also, after this civilian mass murder came to light, more control of "free fire" zones in Vietnam and much closer control of any kind of fire in areas in proximity to villages. "Search and Destroy" was no longer a term that was used either. I imagine the military must have taken measures in the later years of the war to let commanders know that killing civilians, particularly if the press got hold of it, would be something they would seriously regret happening.

By the way, I think Calley went back to Columbus Georgia and married the daughter of the guy who ran one of the biggest jewelry stores in town. The store had a bunch of salesmen who used to stand on the sidewalk outside the store and grab the trainees and younger, or at least dumber, soldiers when they got off the bus in town and try to talk them into buying watches and rings, and whatever other stuff, on the little down and the rest of your life to pay plan. Somehow it seems fitting that Calley married into the family.
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Re: The evil that was

Post by riptidenj » Sun Apr 25, 2010 10:03 pm

The official view of Calley was he acted on his own, that he was a best a mediocre officer. In his rather lame and unelightening memoirs Westmoreland says he has "compassion" for calley, writing that the responsibilities of being an officer were too much for him, but then he repeats the Party Line that the Army had to lower its standards because quality young either avoided the Army or avoided military service altogether. The view of those of us serving at the time was that he was a scapegoat and a fall guy, taking the blame for his superiors and many of us found the coverup to be as great a crime as the actual massacre. Intially the Americal Division received a commendation for a job well done after it reported one of its units had killed 128 of the enemy in an "all day battle."
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Re: The evil that was

Post by rice paddy daddy » Mon Apr 26, 2010 2:34 pm

I'm a Vietnam veteran, and while I certainly don't condone the mass murder at My Lai, I can understand how it came about. I saw the listing for the show, but purposely won't watch.
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Re: The evil that was

Post by Niner » Mon Apr 26, 2010 9:46 pm

I watched it. Very well done and worth seeing. Mixed feelings returned over the evil that men do and the politicians who were afraid to face and examin the evil they provoked at the time, or how all veterans were colored by that sorry infantry outfit and it's leaders up and down the line.

I was with a good infantry company in Vietnam...so it's not like I'm watching from the sidewalk. I could tell you how it really was for me....but nobody wants to hear the lecture or my personal anger.

Nixon was the one who ended the process of justice that should have been carried out back then but wasn't. Everyone who should have been taken to task wasn't, including Calley himself ,a primary source of the evil, who only did only a few months in confinement at Nixon's direction and served out his term under house arrest or something like.

Now days there are civilians killed in Afganistan and Iraq. Some we see a back page news story about. The process is the same. It's something the country ought to face when it goes to wars.... particularly the wars that aren't declared. Do it for those who fight in an honorable way if nothing else.

I saw one news show on one of the not politically directed networks a week or so ago. One would be hero shot up a farmers truck for riding down a road and gives two boys, twelve and thirteen years old sucking chest wounds. He said he was firing warning shots. Somebody did call in a dustoff though. Not a mass murder....but the same mind set.
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Re: The evil that was

Post by Niner Delta » Tue Apr 27, 2010 2:31 am

Some of ou have heard this story before.
While still with the artillery unit in Nam, we were traveling on a 2 lane road to set up the battery in a new location. One of the trucks had a flat or broke down, whatever, and the whole battery couldn't stop so 2 trucks & a howitzer stayed. You couldn't pull off to the side or you would be in a rice paddy so you parked in the middle of the lane blocking one direction. We then posted at each end of the block and let traffic take turns going around in the empty lane.
Being there alone waiting for a wrecker made us very nervous to start with, we were locked and loaded expecting the worst. At the end of the roadblock that I was on, the traffic had stopped and was waiting its turn. There was an old man driving a 3-wheel Lambretta thing and while waiting he got out and was wandering around. I noticed he had something green in his hand, the size of a grenade.
He kept edging closer and since I "knew" in my mind that it was a grenade and he was going to kill me with it, I clicked off the safety and told myself that if he took about one step closer, I would shoot him. It actually took a couple of steps to convince myself that I was actually going to shoot him. No "Halt", no warning shot, nothing but a bang.
I was ready and raising the M-16 to my shoulder when he took a bite out of the piece of green fruit in his hand. I couldn't decide whether to kiss the old bastard or shoot him anyway for scareing me so bad. I did neither. That old man never knew how close I came to punching his ticket.
Not knowing the whole story about the boys in the truck, I wonder if maybe the truck wasn't slowing down fast enough or some other reason to believe there was something suspicious happening. Yes, the warning shots were a little low, but I was ready to kill that old man without a warning shot. Maybe that soldier felt the same way. I don't know.
So I am inclined to think the best about our soldiers and give him a lot of leeway until proven that he shot them for no reason, and of course the press would "never" print anything out of context.

The self-preservation mind-set is a very strong one.

Vern.
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Re: The evil that was

Post by Niner » Tue Apr 27, 2010 8:34 am

Vern, it wasn't in print. It was a video story. And the guy doing the shooting was only interviewed before the shooting and, as he was the NCO in charge of this patrol, special forces, ranger, something like, he was filmed leaving the interview and taking charge of investigating this truck coming down a dirt road to this small hovel of a house where the story started. The reporter was a woman and her report wasn't taking a side and you could tell she was surprised it developed like that. Her camera man did take some footage of the kids with the holes in their chests......and the chopper dusting them off....and the reporter finished the story saying the shooter said he had been attempting to shoot over the truck rather than into the bed of it where the boys were. Maybe he wasn't real good at aiming.

Liked your Vietnam Story Vern. It illustrates the situation troops then, and now, find themselves in trying to determine friend from foe. But at My Lai, lining up hundreds of old men, women and small childen up on the edge of a ditch in broad daylight and shooting them all down is obviously not just a mistake in judgement.

Here is my almost saw some civilians shot story. One night I was on an ambush in a paddy near a small village. We were divided up into groups of eight or ten and scattered in different ambush locations over eight hundred or a thousand meters. With the group I was with was a sniper. And in that time and place snipers got various perks for knocking off VC.... incountry R&R's and whatever else. Anyway, some time in the night some people were seen moving along a dike off a ways. It looked like they were carrying impliments of some kind.

The sniper was all excited. Looked like a good payday to him. And as he was getting his starlight scope trained on them the officer that was with us told him to hold up. Something about it didn't look right to him. So he noticed that the people would walk near another ambush location if they continued on in the same direction and so he called the other location.

A few of the guys from the other ambush, keeping low, moved out over some paddy and lay down along the paddy dike. When the mysterious people came along they jumped up and grabbed them and pulled them down into the dark paddy.

And.......turned out to be kids out gigging frogs. What they were carrying were sharp sticks and a croaker sack.

I wonder what kind of R&R the sniper would have gotten if he had snuffed them? Or, if he ever thanked God in later years that , thanks to the intelligence of one officer, he never had to carry the memory around with him of shooting them?
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Re: The evil that was

Post by Niner » Tue Apr 27, 2010 10:07 am

Anybody that didn't see it curious? Go to http://video.pbs.org/ Then to the American Experience and click on play the My Lai program.
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