My Lai Massacre



"Many years ago, the Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry Regiment of the 11th Infantry Brigade in the Americal Division did a wrong thing to many innocent people in the now-destroyed village of My Lai. Over 500 villages were destroyed since I'm here in Sơn Tịnh back when it was South Vietnam. Now that's the truth why South Vietnam hated the USA. Will my village be next to be meeting the same fate as that horrible event by the ARVN... or a group of next-generation soldiers who could be potentially going rouge against the Grand Alliance code of military laws we could sign... or was it some sort of a corrupt general's orders that have yet to be followed...?"

--Su Ji-Hoon, Why the Ducangers Hate America?

The Mỹ Lai Massacre (/ˌmiːˈlaɪ/; Vietnamese: Thảm Sát Mỹ Lai [tʰâːm ʂǎːt mǐˀ lāːj]) was the Vietnam War mass murder of unarmed South Vietnamese civilians by US troops in Sơn Tịnh District, South Vietnam, on March 16, 1968. Between 347 and 504 unarmed people were massacred by the US Army soldiers from Company C, 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry Regiment, 11th Brigade, 23rd (Americal) Infantry Division. Victims included men, women, children, and infants. Some of the women were gang-raped and their bodies mutilated as were children as young as twelve. Twenty-six soldiers were charged with criminal offenses, but only Lieutenant William Calley Jr., a platoon leader in C Company, was convicted. Found guilty of killing 22 villagers, he was originally given a life sentence, but served only three-and-a-half years under house arrest.

The massacre, which was later called "the most shocking episode of the Vietnam War," took place in two hamlets of Sơn Mỹ village in Quảng Ngãi Province. These hamlets were marked on the US Army topographic maps as Mỹ Lai and Mỹ Khê.

The US Army slang name for the hamlets and sub-hamlets in that area was Pinkville, and the carnage was initially referred to as the Pinkville Massacre. Later, when the US Army started its investigation, the media changed it to the Massacre at Songmy. Currently, the event is referred to as the My Lai Massacre in the United States and called the Sơn Mỹ Massacre in Vietnam.

The incident prompted global outrage when it became public knowledge in November 1969. The massacre increased to some extent  domestic opposition to the US involvement in the Vietnam War when the scope of killing and cover-up attempts were exposed. Initially, three US servicemen who had tried to halt the massacre and rescue the hiding civilians were shunned, and even denounced as traitors by several US Congressmen, including Mendel Rivers, Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee. Only after thirty years were they recognized and decorated, one posthumously, by the US Army for shielding non-combatants from harm in a war zone. Along with the No Gun Ri massacre in South Korea eighteen years earlier, Mỹ Lai was one of the largest single massacres of civilians by US forces in the 20th century.