My Lei Massacre

It left an indelible stain on America’s record in Vietnam, the nation’s longest, least popular, and most controversial war. It raises fundamental questions about the American way of war, US military leadership in Vietnam, and the difficulties of fighting insurgencies, a problem of major contemporary concern. It needs to be remembered and studied. The murder of more than 400 Vietnamese civilians in My Lai and My Khe by US soldiers on March 16, 1968, stands as one of the darkest days in the nation’s military history.

My Lai and My Kei have been not too big but it became big when 400 Vietnamese citizens were killed by United States soldiers. This paper will be talking about the United States’ involvement in Vietnam, how the United States undertook what one top official with no apparent sense of the paradox called “an all-out limited war”, and how the My Lei massacre started.

The United States’ involvement in Vietnam expanded through a series of stages between 1950 and 1965. From 1950 to 1954, in the name of containing communism, the US assisted the French in fighting a Communist-led nationalist revolution in Vietnam, ultimately paying close to 80 percent of the cost of the war. From 1954 to 1961, after the

troops frequently bombed and shelled the province of Quang Ngai. They believed it to be a stronghold for forces of the National Front for the Liberation of Vietnam, or Viet Cong (VC). In March 1968, a platoon of soldiers called Charlie Company received word that Viet Cong guerrillas had taken cover in the Quang Ngai village of Son My. Led by Lieutenant William L. Calley, the platoon entered one of the village’s four hamlets, My Lai 4, on a search-and-destroy mission on the morning of March 16. Instead of guerrilla fighters, they found unarmed villagers, most of them women, children and old men. When they found these people the soldiers were confused that the soldiers didn’t find the guerrilla