My Lai massacre was an American tragedy: lessons unlearned as warrior culture lives

National Catholic Reporter, Feb 24, 1995 by Jason Berry

On March 16, 1968, a demoralized platoon of U.S. soldiers invaded a South Vietnamese hamlet called My Lai and murdered 500 peasants, mostly women, children and old men. "The killings took place, part maniacally, part methodically," wrote Michael Bolton and Kevin Sim in Four Hours in My Lai. "They were accompanied by rape, sodomy, mutilations and unimaginable random cruelties."

On March 16, 1993 - the same day, 25 years later - Cpl. Clayton Matchee, 29, a Cree Indian in a Canadian peacekeeping regiment in Somalia, tied up a teenage Muslim boy suspected of entering the regiment's compound to commit theft. As Matchee brutally beat the youth, another peacekeeper took photographs and got in a few blows himself.

After hours of agony witnessed intermittently by other soldiers, 16-year-old Shidane Abukar Arone died.

The Canadian military eventually paid Arone's family $15,000 in reparations, or the price of 100 camels, a nomadic tradition of Somali justice. Subsequent reports revealed that another Somali found looting had earlier been killed "execution-style."

Detained by his regiment, Matchee tried to hang himself. He suffered brain damage that makes him unlikely to stand trial.

An atrocity perpetrated in a mission without a strategic offensive underscores Western ambivalence toward peacekeeping in the post-Cold War era. In a year when mass killings in Rwanda and genocide in Bosnia dominated foreign news, peace advocates of yesteryear vainly called for military intervention on humanitarian grounds. The most graphic legacy of the U.S. retreat from Vietnam is a reluctance by politicians and generals to use force without compelling reasons - ones the voters will accept.

The My Lai events have an eerie resonance on the quarter-century anniversary of the first news reports.

"I gave them a good boy," the mother of one soldier said at the time, "and they made him a murderer." How much fault lies with the military culture? What roles do family and community play? Do a society's unresolved conflicts trigger aberrant behavior by soldiers?

"Under duress, the mind can close down or open out," said Robert Jay Lifton, a psychiatrist and award-winning author who pioneered the study of posttraumatic stress disorder, which is common among former soldiers and victims of sexual abuse.

An estimated 800,000 Vietnam-era veterans, of the 3.14 million who fought there, now suffer the symptoms of PTSD: flashbacks, hyper-arousal, nightmares, cold sweats and a psychic numbing that sometimes takes years to ebb. In addition, 370,000 Vietnam vets have suffered PTSD in the past.

In Detroit, a city ravaged by drugs and violence, 17 percent of all teenagers there suffer PTSD. In World War I it was called shell shock; in World War II, battle fatigue.

"I have an image of it in my mind, every night, every day," a black Mississippian of the My Lai platoon told Bolton and Sim. "I constantly have nightmares of the children or someone. I can see the people. I can go somewhere and see a face that reminds me of the people I killed. I can see that vividly like it's happened today. ... I don't let anyone get close to me."

Unlike World War II veterans, who returned as heroes from a war the public supported, soldiers were coming back from Vietnam amid a political controversy, often to scorn and derision. Lifton sought to help them get beyond memories of "atrocity-producing situations."

As the canadian peacekeepers encountered hostile Somalis and daily tension in defending the compound from looting by people they had come to protect, so soldiers in Vietnam, many of whom had grown up in close-knit families and towns, were unnerved by smiling peasants who might or might not be enemies. Vietcong guerrillas used villagers to hide supplies and ambush U.S. and South Vietnam forces.

The U.S. Army paid no reparations to My Lai survivors. It covered up the massacre for nearly 18 months, until journalist Seymour Hersh tapped Pentagon sources and began publishing syndicated stories about My Lai. For that, he won a Pulitzer Prize.

National outrage followed. Although a military investigation excoriated the command leadership, conservative congressmen hatched a legal ploy that allowed dozens of former infantrymen and military brass to appear before a House committee instead of testifying at a court-martial.

"Congress set out to destroy the process," Says William G. Eckhardt, the military prosecutor, now a law professor in Kansas City, Mo. "Evidence dried up. Memories disappeared. Lawyers sent clients to Mexico. It was not very plea ant business.

What do we get out of all of this? need the decency to investigate military atrocities. You have to do something about it. The same problem iq in Bosnia. ... The function of law is to be a deterrent. You learn from the past to prevent in the future."

Eckhardt tried two men: division Capt. Ernest Medina, who was acquitted, and platoon Lt. William J. Calley, who was found guilty of premeditated murder of 22 civilians and drew a five-year sentence, which President Nixon remanded to house arrest. Calley served three years. "Medina ordered this carnage," says Eckhardt. "There is no doubt that there was a pep talk about the village to be burned, livestock killed and wells poisoned. It was legally and morally wrong. But large numbers of men did not shoot." Medina was not at My Lai when the killings occurred.