The My Lai massacre was a United States war crime committed on 16 March 1968, involving the mass murder of unarmed civilians in Sơn Mỹ village, Quảng Ngãi province, South Vietnam, during the Vietnam War. At least 347 and up to 504 civilians, almost all women, children, and elderly men, were murdered by U.S. Army soldiers from C Company, 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry Regiment, 11th Brigade and B Company, 4th Battalion, 3rd Infantry Regiment, 11th Brigade of the 23rd (Americal) Division. Some of the women were gang-raped and their bodies mutilated, and some soldiers mutilated and raped children as young as 12. The incident was the largest massacre of civilians by U.S. forces in the 20th century.
William Laws Calley Jr. was a United States Army officer convicted by court-martial of the murder of 22 unarmed South Vietnamese civilians in the My Lai massacre on March 16, 1968, during the Vietnam War. Calley was released to house arrest under orders by President Richard Nixon three days after his conviction. The United States District Court for the Middle District of Georgia granted him a new trial, but that ruling was overturned by the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. His initial life sentence having been modified to a term of 20 years and then further reduced to ten, Calley ultimately served three years of house arrest for the murders. Public opinion at the time about Calley was divided. After his dismissal from the U.S. Army and release from confinement, Calley avoided public attention.
Tiger Force was the name of a long-range reconnaissance patrol (LRRP) unit of the 1st Battalion (Airborne), 327th Infantry, 1st Brigade (Separate), 101st Airborne Division, which fought in the Vietnam War from November 1965 to November 1967. The unit gained notoriety after investigations during the course of the war and decades afterwards revealed extensive war crimes against civilians, which numbered into the hundreds.
The Phoenix Program was designed and initially coordinated by the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) during the Vietnam War, involving the American, South Vietnamese militaries, and a small amount of special forces operatives from the Australian Army Training Team Vietnam. In 1970, CIA responsibility was phased out, and the program was put under the authority of the Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support (CORDS).
The National Veterans' Inquiry was a national-level inquiry into American war crimes in Vietnam. They were held December 1–3, 1970 in Washington, DC.
Estimates of casualties of the Vietnam War vary widely. Estimates can include both civilian and military deaths in North and South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.
Ronald L. Haeberle is a former United States Army combat photographer best known for the photographs he took of the My Lai Massacre on March 16, 1968. The photographs were definitive evidence of a massacre, making it impossible for the U.S. Army or government to ignore or cover up. On November 21, 1969, the day after the photographs were first published in Haeberle's hometown newspaper, The Cleveland Plain Dealer, Melvin Laird, the Secretary of Defense, discussed them with Henry Kissinger who was at the time National Security Advisor to President Richard Nixon. Laird was recorded as saying that while he would like "to sweep it under the rug," the photographs prevented it.
The "Winter Soldier Investigation" was a media event sponsored by the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) from January 31, 1971, to February 2, 1971. It was intended to publicize war crimes and atrocities by the United States Armed Forces and their allies in the Vietnam War. The VVAW challenged the morality and conduct of the war by showing the direct relationship between military policies and war crimes in Vietnam. The three-day gathering of 109 veterans and 16 civilians took place in Detroit, Michigan. Discharged servicemen from each branch of the armed forces, as well as civilian contractors, medical personnel and academics, all gave testimony about war crimes they had committed or witnessed during the years 1963–1970.
Operation Speedy Express was a controversial military operation conducted by the United States Army's 9th Infantry Division during the Vietnam War in the Mekong Delta provinces of Kiến Hòa and Vĩnh Bình. The operation, led by Major-General Julian Ewell, was part of counterinsurgency operations by the United States Armed Forces which targeted the Viet Cong (VC). U.S. forces aimed to interdict VC lines of communication and prevent Viet Cong personnel from establishing outposts in the region via the operation. The U.S. claimed the operation was successful in achieving its objectives, although the VC denied this and claimed the operation failed to stop their activities in the region.
The National Committee for a Citizens Commission of Inquiry on U.S. war crimes in Vietnam was founded in New York by Ralph Schoenman in November 1969 to document American atrocities throughout Indochina. The formation of the organization was prompted by the disclosure of the My Lai Massacre on November 12, 1969, by Seymour Hersh, writing for the New York Times. The group was the first to bring to public attention the testimony of American Vietnam War veterans who had witnessed or participated in atrocities.
The United States Armed Forces and its members have violated the law of war after the signing of the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 and the signing of the Geneva Conventions. The United States prosecutes offenders through the War Crimes Act of 1996 as well as through articles in the Uniform Code of Military Justice. The United States signed the 1999 Rome Statute but it never ratified the treaty, taking the position that the International Criminal Court (ICC) lacks fundamental checks and balances. The American Service-Members' Protection Act of 2002 further limited US involvement with the ICC. The ICC reserves the right of states to prosecute war crimes, and the ICC can only proceed with prosecution of crimes when states do not have willingness or effective and reliable processes to investigate for themselves. The United States says that it has investigated many of the accusations alleged by the ICC prosecutors as having occurred in Afghanistan, and thus does not accept ICC jurisdiction over its nationals.
The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives is a book about the United States military, written by journalist Nick Turse. It was published in 2008 in hardcover format by Metropolitan Books. The book describes the vast changes in the industrial complex of the U.S. military from the days of President Dwight D. Eisenhower to 2008, its effect on American society, and how the military and private business spheres interact with each other. The book received positive reviews in Mother Jones and Inter Press Service, and a critical review in Kirkus Reviews.
Alexander Demitri "Alex" Shimkin was an American war correspondent who was killed in the Vietnam War. He is notable for his investigation of non-combatant casualties in Operation Speedy Express.
Nick Turse is an American investigative journalist, historian, and author. He is the associate editor and research director of the blog TomDispatch and a fellow at The Nation Institute.
Normand Poirier was an American journalist, essayist, and newspaper editor. His name is often spelled Norman Poirier.
Julian Johnson Ewell was a career United States Army officer who served in World War II, the Korean War and the Vietnam War. He commanded the 9th Infantry Division and II Field Force in Vietnam, and attained the rank of lieutenant general.
Deborah Nelson is a Pulitzer prize-winning freelance journalist at Reuters and the Associate Professor of Investigative Reporting at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland.
The "Mere Gook Rule" (MGR) was a controversial name that U.S. soldiers in the Vietnam War had for what they claim was an unofficial policy under which soldiers would be prosecuted very leniently, if at all, for harming or killing "gooks" – a commonly-used derogatory slang term for the Vietnamese – even if the victims turned out to be civilians with no connection to the Viet Cong or to the North Vietnamese Army.
The Vietnam War body count controversy centers on the counting of enemy dead by the United States Armed Forces during the Vietnam War (1955–1975). There are issues around killing and counting unarmed civilians (non-combatants) as enemy combatants, as well as inflating the number of actual enemy who were killed in action (KIA). For search and destroy operations, as the objective was not to hold territory or secure populations, victory was assessed by having a higher enemy body count.
Rape, among other acts of wartime sexual violence, was frequently committed against female Vietnamese civilians during the Vietnam War. It was an aspect of the various human rights abuses perpetrated by the United States and South Korea, as well as by local Vietnamese combatants. According to American political scientist Elisabeth Jean Wood, the sexual violation of women by American military personnel was tolerated by their commanders. American professor Gina Marie Weaver stated that not only were documented crimes against Vietnamese women by American soldiers ignored during the international legal discourse that occurred immediately after the conflict, but modern feminists and other anti-war rape campaigners, as well as historians, have continued to dismiss them.
