Name: Date: My Lai Massacre On March 16, 1968 the angry and frustrated men of Charlie Company, 11th Brigade, America Division entered the Vietnamese village of My Lai. "This is what you've been waiting for -­‐-­‐ search and destroy -­‐-­‐ and you've got it," said their superior officers. A short time later the killing began. When news of the atrocities surfaced, it sent shockwaves through the U.S. political establishment, the military's chain of command, and an already divided American public. Poised for Conflict: My Lai lay in the South Vietnamese district of Son My, a heavily mined area where the Vietcong were deeply entrenched. Numerous members of Charlie Company had been maimed or killed in the area during the preceding weeks. The agitated troops, under the command of Lt. William Calley, entered the village poised for engagement with their elusive enemy. Massacre: As the "search and destroy" mission unfolded, it soon degenerated into the massacre of over 300 apparently unarmed civilians including women, children, and the elderly. Calley ordered his men to enter the village firing, though there had been no report of opposing fire. According to eyewitness reports offered after the event, several old men were bayoneted, praying women and children were shot in the back of the head, and at least one girl was raped and then killed. For his part, Calley was said to have rounded up a group of the villagers, ordered them into a ditch, and mowed them down in a fury of machine gun fire. Call for Investigation: William Calley Word of the atrocities did not reach the American public until November 1969, when journalist Seymour Hersh published a story detailing his conversations with a Vietnam veteran, Ron Ridenhour. Ridenhour learned of the events at My Lai from members of Charlie Company who had been there. Before speaking with Hersh, he had appealed to Congress, the White House, and the Pentagon to investigate the matter. The military investigation resulted in Calley's being charged with murder in Sept. 1969, a full 2 months before the Hersh story hit the streets. Questions About Soldiers' Conduct: As the gruesome details of My Lai reached the American public, serious questions arose concerning the conduct of American soldiers in Vietnam. A military commission investigating the massacre found widespread failures of leadership, discipline, and morale among the Army's fighting units. As the war progressed, many "career" soldiers had either been rotated out or retired. Many more had died. In their place were scores of draftees whose fitness for leadership in the field of battle was questionable at best. Military officials blamed inequities in the draft policy for the often slim talent pool from which they were forced to choose leaders. Many maintained that if the educated middle class ("the Harvards," as they were called) had joined in the fight, a man of Lt. William Calley's emotional and intellectual stature would never have been issuing orders. Orders from Above? Calley, an unemployed college dropout, had managed to graduate from Officer's Candidate School at Fort Benning, Georgia, in 1967. At his trial, Calley testified that he was ordered by Captain Ernest Medina to kill everyone in the village of My Lai. Still, there was only enough photographic and recorded evidence to convict Calley, alone, of murder. He was sentenced to life in prison, but was released in 1974, following many appeals. After being issued a dishonorable discharge, Calley entered the insurance business. 1. Who, if anyone, should be held responsible for the My Lai Massacre and what, if anything, would be an appropriate consequence? Why? 2. [from film clips] How has the passage of time influenced the featured veteran’s (Varnado Simpson) perspective on war? Did war define his identity, or did it bring out a side that was always there? The Pentagon Papers (vs. WikiLeaks) – Compare & Contrast National Security & the Media, Then vs. Now The WikiLeaks documents on the Afghanistan war have brought suggestions such as this one (from The New York Times, the newspaper that published both) that they represent "the Pentagon Papers of our time." Not quite. The Pentagon Papers, of course, were a secret study, commissioned during the Lyndon Johnson administration by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. The period under study ended in 1968, and the papers were not made public until 1971. Johnson left office in 1969, and was succeeded by a president of the opposing party, Richard Nixon. Nixon promised a shift in Vietnam policy, and while his policy did not differ as much in practice as he had hinted that it would while campaigning, he was not held responsible, by most voters, for the deepening mess of the Johnson years. In the current case, as the White House has repeatedly pointed out in the last 18 hours, the papers end before President Barack Obama's announcement last year of an Afghanistan policy that departed from that of President George W. Bush. (That policy, of course, has centered on significantly increasing the number of troops, and focusing more on counterinsurgency.) In terms of important disclosures, it's not even close, with the historical importance of today's documents likely to be relatively minor, and that of the Pentagon Papers enormous. The most significant revelations today include the Taliban's limited use of heat-­‐seeking missiles (which had been previously reported, though little-­‐noticed), and the Pakistani intelligence service's constant double-­‐dealing and occasional cooperation with the Taliban (long the subject of news stories, and even of some official complaints). In 1971, in contrast, the Pentagon Papers revealed a host of important discrepancies between the public posture of the U.S. government with respect to Vietnam and the truth -­‐-­‐ from the Truman administration, through the times of Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson. These included Johnson's dissembling during the 1964 presidential campaign and in the run-­‐up to the key decision in 1965 to send large numbers of combat troops, as well as confirmation of U.S. involvement in the 1963 coup against South Vietnamese premier Ngo Dinh Diem. And perhaps most famously, was the evidence that the administration had decided to escalate the war before the 1964 Tonkin Gulf Resolution gave it the authority to do so. There are many reasons for the differences between these two troves of documents, but perhaps the most important is that today's documents provide a "ground-­‐level" view of the war, while the Pentagon Papers offered a classic "top-­‐down" perspective. Wars are fought on the ground, and the perspective such a view provides can be invaluable. But many of a war's key secrets, especially in political terms, are generated at the top. There is a lot of loose talk today about the impact of the Pentagon Papers. Much of it, I suspect, stems from this in the Wikipedia entry: "The revelations widened the credibility gap between the US government and the people, hurting President Richard Nixon's war effort." In fact, a much stronger argument can be made for the proposition that there was almost no impact on the Nixon administration's ability to conduct the war as it wished. Nixon's policy continued apace, through the peace negotiations of 1972 (during a presidential campaign!), continuing with the Christmas 1972 bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong harbor, and including the January 1973 peace accords. The great antiwar demonstrations that many of us recall -­‐-­‐ the March on Washington, the student Moratorium, Kent State -­‐-­‐ all took place before the publication of the papers. Nixon invaded Cambodia 14 months earlier. What happened after the papers was that Nixon coasted to re-­‐election by one of the largest majorities in American history, and his adviser Henry Kissinger won a share of the Nobel Peace Prize for "ending" the Vietnam War. That said, there were profound effects from the release of the Pentagon Papers. They came in how the Nixon administration responded to the leak and the publication of the papers. First, the administration went to court and soon suffered, in the Supreme Court, the most significant defeat for the executive branch in the national security field since Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus was struck down in 1866 (i.e. after the Civil War ended and after Lincoln was killed). Beyond the legal battle, Nixon and his henchmen launched the "plumbers" operation (to stem more leaks) and thus set off down the road that led to Watergate -­‐-­‐ and all that followed. These became the central American political events of the 1970s, and hugely weakened the presidency, with consequences including the Gerald Ford administration's powerlessness with Congress when the N. Vietnamese violated peace accords in 1975.