MY LAI, AND ITS OMENSFrom the archives: Grappling with the massacre on its thirtieth anniversary
By now some readers of this column may be watching or planning to watch Cover-Up, the documentary on my career by Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus now playing in theaters and streaming beginning today on Netflix. One thing the documentary accomplishes is to bring back to light a horrific US Army massacre of close to five hundred Vietnamese civilians in a village called My Lai 4 in 1968. The atrocity was hushed up. The documentary shows how I got a tip about it, chased it down, and put it into America’s conscience. Three decades after the massacre, as the New York Times op-ed I wrote below, published originally on March 16, 1998, reveals, I learned that the senior civilian and military officials running the Pentagon—and the war—had been warned by an extraordinary internal Pentagon study that the majority of American GIs in Vietnam did not understand the laws of war or their responsibility for the humane treatment of prisoners under the Geneva Conventions. This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Thirty years ago today the 100 men of Charlie Company, assigned to Task Force Barker of the Americal Division’s 11th Infantry Brigade, were flown by helicopters to the edge of a small Vietnamese hamlet named My Lai 4. There was no enemy there and, over the next few hours, the GIs, including William L. Calley Jr., a platoon leader, systematically murdered all the women, children, and old men they could find. At least 350 civilians were slain. Less than two miles away, on the same misty morning, Bravo Company of Task Force Barker began a combat assault on My Khe 4, an often attacked hamlet that was believed to be an enemy battalion headquarters. There was no enemy there, and the officers and enlisted men of Bravo Company, as Army investigators discovered in early 1970, murdered all the women, children, and old men they could find. The death toll, as estimated by GIs at the scene, ranged from 60 to 155. The Army’s inquiry into My Lai 4 was officially expanded, with little publicity, to include the murders at My Khe 4; more than 30 members of Bravo Company were compelled to testify in secret before the Peers Panel, an investigative team named after its director, Lieutenant General William R. Peers of the Army. Only William Calley was charged with and convicted of murder. At the recommendation of the Peers Panel, fourteen officers, including two members of Bravo Company, were eventually charged with dereliction of duty and taking part in a cover-up. Only one officer, Colonel Oren Henderson, the commander of the 11th Brigade at My Lai on March 16, 1968, was ordered to stand trial. He was later found not guilty of cover-up charges. In his final report in early 1970, General Peers made no attempt to deal with the substantive issues raised by the massacres on March 16, 1968, but he noted that the troops of the 11th Brigade “were not adequately trained in the provisions of the Geneva Convention, nor were they aware of their responsibilities for the reporting of war crimes.” The Peers report included only one recommendation, written in antiseptic language: that the Army consider changing its training standards “in order to correct the apparent deficiencies noted.” What General Peers and the American people did not know was that the “deficiencies” that led up to My Lai 4 and My Khe 4 were recognized months earlier, and ignored. A Pentagon study found in the late summer of 1967 that a majority of troops in South Vietnam did not understand their responsibilities under the Geneva Conventions, which set standards for the humane treatment of prisoners of war. That finding came in a remarkably candid 208-page report prepared at Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara’s direction by the Inspector General’s office of the Defense Department after newspaper articles in early 1967 reported that troops of the Special Forces committed atrocities in Vietnam. The report was submitted August 15, 1967, seven months before My Lai, and was ordered rewritten by an assistant secretary of defense. After Mr. McNamara resigned in February 1968, the report was placed in “review status,” effectively killing it. The report, titled “Alleged Atrocities by US Military Forces in South Vietnam,” was prepared under the direction of W. Donald Stewart, chief of the Investigations Division of the Inspector General’s office (then officially known as the Directorate for Inspection Services). Mr. Stewart and a team of agents visited 23 military installations in the United States, South Vietnam and Asia and conducted interviews with hundreds of enlisted men and officers. The team’s goal was not to uncover new atrocities, but to probe how well the troops understood the Geneva Conventions. The troops were asked two basic questions: how far would they go to get information from a prisoner of war, and what would they do with a prisoner if they suddenly found themselves in a firefight? The results were unsettling. When 179 Marine second lieutenants were asked whether they would mistreat a prisoner to obtain desired information, only six indicated they would not. Many said they would kill the prisoner in case of a firefight. In separate interviews, a few Army men talked about the practice of clipping the right ear of dead enemy soldiers for trophy purposes. Despite such testimony, the report noted that “a great majority of the troops” in South Vietnam who had “eyeball-to-eyeball” combat with the enemy were “extremely humane and would rarely maltreat or kill a prisoner.” Nonetheless, the report concluded, many soldiers, even those who said they would not mistreat prisoners, “lack a clear understanding of their responsibility in regard to the Geneva Convention.” “[W]e have come to the conclusion that the training in the [Geneva] Conventions does not appear to be realistic,” the report said, “in that it does not relate to the specific type of warfare situations being encountered in Vietnam.” The report found that many military lecturers on the Geneva Conventions were poorly informed and that the troops considered such instructions to be of little relevance. “In many cases,” the report said of the troops, “they felt they were at liberty to substitute their own judgment for the clear provisions of the Convention. . . . It was found in this investigation that it was primarily the young and inexperienced troops who stated they would maltreat or kill prisoners, despite having just received instructions” on international law. Donald Stewart retired in 1975 after twenty-seven years of government service and began a second career as a private investigator in Florida. The recent publicity over the thitieth anniversary of My Lai 4 led him to dig out the unpublished Pentagon report and pass it along to me. He told me that he understood by early 1968 that his report, with its troubling findings, might never be released. “It wouldn’t have been good for the political image” of the Defense Department or the Lyndon B. Johnson Administration, he told me recently. “People were sending their eighteen-year-olds over there, and we didn’t want them to find out that they were cutting off ears,” he said. “I came back from South Vietnam thinking that things were out of control. Some of the people [in combat] had their own sense of rules. I understood Calley—very much so.” Mr. Stewart believes that if more attention had been paid to the report, the military commands in South Vietnam might have been compelled “to tighten control over their soldiers.” This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Invite your friends and earn rewardsIf you enjoy Seymour Hersh, share it with your friends and earn rewards when they subscribe. © 2025 Seymour Hersh |