On the evening of March 15, 1968, members of the Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry, were briefed by their commanding officer, Captain Ernest Medina, on a planned operation the next day in an area of Quang Ngai Province, South Vietnam that they knew as “Pinkville.”
As unit member Harry Stanley recalled, Medina “ordered us to ‘kill everything in the village.’” Infantryman Salvatore LaMartina remembered Medina’s words only slightly differently: they were to “kill everything that breathed.” What stuck in artillery forward observer James Flynn’s mind was a question one of the other soldiers asked: “Are we supposed to kill women and children?” And Medina’s reply: “Kill everything that moves.”
The next morning, the troops clambered aboard helicopters and were airlifted into what they thought would be a “hot LZ”— a landing zone where they’d be under hostile fire. As it happened, the Americans entering My Lai encountered only civilians: women, children, and old men. Nevertheless, the soldiers of Charlie Company carried out Medina’s orders with horrifying precision.
Over four hours, members of Charlie Company methodically slaughtered more than five hundred unarmed victims, killing some in ones and twos, others in small groups, and collecting many more in a drainage ditch that would become an infamous killing ground. They faced no opposition. They even took a quiet break to eat lunch amid the carnage....
30 individuals were identified as complicit in the My Lai massacre, but only Lt. William Calley, whose death at 80 was announced today, was convicted. Please read more at RS from Turse, author of the excellent "Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam" today: https://responsiblestatecraft.org/my-lai-william-calley-dead/
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Kelley