My Lai Massacre

March 16, 1968

Overview

“The Military Assistance Command should have learned of what happened almost immediately, but . . . it was not reported above the division —not even the suspicion.” –General William C. Westmoreland, November 1969

Members of Company C, 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry, 11th Brigade of the U.S. Army 23d Infantry Division (Americal) murder up to 500 civilian men, women, and children in the hamlet of My Lai, Quang Ngai Province in I Corps.

Army leadership outside of the Americal Division becomes familiar with the event in April 1969 when a U.S. Vietnam veteran writes to General Westmoreland and some congressmen, requesting an investigation. While Army public affairs officers release some information in September 1969, it does not receive widespread attention until journalist Seymour Hersh publishes a detailed account of the charges in November 1969.

In the Army’s investigation, 13 men are charged with committing these crimes. One, Lieutenant William Calley, is convicted of war crimes and sentenced to life in prison. The investigation also finds that the Americal Division’s chain of command has suppressed reports of the incident.¹

¹Graham A. Cosmas, MACV: The Joint Command in the Years of Escalation, 1968–1973, United States Army in Vietnam (Washington, D.C.: Center of Military History, 2006), 220–221, 224–225; William M. Hammond, Public Affairs: The Military and the Media, 1968–1973, The U.S. Army in Vietnam (Washington, D.C.: Center of Military History, United States Army, 1996), 217, 220–221, 251; George C. Herring, America’s Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950–1975, (4th edition; New York: McGraw-Hill, 2002), 260, 299; Stanley Karnow, Vietnam: A History (New York: Viking Press, 1983), 24, 600–601; William Thomas Allison, My Lai: An American Atrocity in the Vietnam War (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012).