Full credit is due to Yorkshire Television for producing this documentary in 1989, as it is the only one I have researched so far which shows the soldiers involved.
To clue you in if you're the uninitiated, the My Lai 4 massacre happened in March 1968. A platoon of relatively wet about the ears American GI's went into a hamlet in South Vietnam and murdered five hundred children, women and the elderly. At no point during the raid into this hamlet were they shot at by the Vietcong.
It took until late 1969 for the story to be actually verified. The US army hid it, the press corp in Vietnam didn't print it. The chain of command that morning were all exonerated as doing their duty in the fog of war. Only one CO was put to trial - the man who got him off the charges later employed him in his helicopter company.
The lieutenant on the ground - William Calley - did stand trial however the politics at the time (an aggressive Nixonism) severely relaxed his punishment. Calley was later released and, as the documentary shows, went onto own a business in Georgia. He is still alive and enjoys those freedoms the American constitution likes to boast about. He murdered over a hundred woman and children first though, before he could exercise his rights.
Historically, the only consolation out of this was the utter humiliation of the US army in this monstrously fought conflict. Crucially, the history of this massacre has and never will be taught to us in schools. It doesn't stand up to scrutiny when we're told who our heroes are.
Why am I bothering writing about something that happened forty four years ago? I think it is because the message is clear that you cannot trust America and its power. It makes a mockery out of the Everyman.
I constantly tussle with the idea of how I cannot cope any longer with US cultural and military hegemony. And how I want to shut this country out of my life forever. There seems to be no questioning of its consequences, let alone its intention to sully.
The story of the My Lai massacre, with its horror of children dying under the protection of their mothers, of boys arms being blown off and then "put out of their misery", can put anyone on that path.
