Since it began in 1988, PBS's continuing series "The American Experience" has given Americans a window into the significant events of our history, and oftentimes uncovering things we either never knew or things that past historians may have gotten wrong on such events. As of this writing, one of the series' biggest triumphs was Ken Burns' massive mini-series about the Vietnam War. But in 2010, the series explored a singular event that demonstrated how divisive the Vietnam War was making America, and divisive in a way that had not been seen since the Civil War. That event, arguably the worst war crime in American history, was the My Lai Massacre. And that's where the "American Experience" episode MY LAI, which first aired in April 2010.
On March 16, 1968, the U.S. Army's Charlie Company, commanded by Captain Ernest Medina and Lieutenant William Calley, acting on reports that Vietcong and North Vietnamese Army insurgents who had decimated their company with booby traps and 1960s-era improvised explosive devices were in their area, swarmed into the village of My Lai in the Quang Nai province of northern South Vietnam. The company's soldiers, unhinged by what had happened to their colleagues over the previous few months, went completely insane and embarked on a mass killing spree that lasted several hours that day. As many as 567 Vietnamese, men, women, and children alike, were slaughtered-and not a one of them was anything close to an enemy combatant. This was nothing short of a war crime; but what the Army did afterwards, in covering it up, was much worse, and much more corrosive. Of course, cover-ups don't last forever, because once pictures of the massacre managed to make their way onto the pages of Life Magazine and numerous newspapers, a bad situation in the form of a thoroughly unpopular war became an American firestorm in the form of this one singular event. Only Calley was ever tried and convicted for his activities on that horrible day; and after a mere four months in the Army stockade at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, he was paroled by then-president Richard Nixon, and subsequently lionized by the pro-war and political right wing factions in the United States as a hero.
Writer/director Barak Goodman gives all the room to the members of Charlie Company to relive a day and an event they would clearly like to put behind them, but will never be able to. The sense one gets from these men is that, given the circumstances of what they had seen in the weeks and months leading up to March 16, 1968, they felt they were following legitimate and justifiable orders from their superiors to go into that village and shoot and kill everything that moved, but almost as quickly found their consciences bothering them, especially when they were advised not to talk about it whatsoever to each other. But if there were "villains" in the personages of Medina and Calley, there were also heroes as well. As MY LAI points out, the helicopter crew of Hugh Thompson, Lawrence Colburn, and Glenn Andreotta put their aircraft between innocent villagers and Calley's platoon; and Thompson gave Andreotta, his door gunner, an order to open fire on that platoon if they so much as fired a single round at the villagers. Thompson's humanitarian gesture that day wasn't recognized until thirty years later; and in those intervening years, while Calley was being hailed as a "hero" because of his actions, Thompson was condemned by the Right as a "traitor" for not only not "participating" in the massacre but actively trying to stop it. History, thankfully, rectified that disgraceful misjudgment while Thompson was still alive (he passed away in 2006).
After the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre of Cheyenne Indians in Colorado, My Lai has to count as a sickening blight on both the U.S. military and our nation. It further polarized an already polarized America; but it also forced Americans to ask questions not only of their elected leaders, but of themselves, of how they had allowed their own sons to become so dehumanized by the war that a massacre of this sort was, if not inevitable, then certainly possible. MY LAI is a painful episode of "The American Experience" to watch at times, but it should be seen and discussed, so that we may understand how the whole of the Vietnam War in general, and this massacre in particular, so severely damaged the heart and soul of our nation.
On March 16, 1968, the U.S. Army's Charlie Company, commanded by Captain Ernest Medina and Lieutenant William Calley, acting on reports that Vietcong and North Vietnamese Army insurgents who had decimated their company with booby traps and 1960s-era improvised explosive devices were in their area, swarmed into the village of My Lai in the Quang Nai province of northern South Vietnam. The company's soldiers, unhinged by what had happened to their colleagues over the previous few months, went completely insane and embarked on a mass killing spree that lasted several hours that day. As many as 567 Vietnamese, men, women, and children alike, were slaughtered-and not a one of them was anything close to an enemy combatant. This was nothing short of a war crime; but what the Army did afterwards, in covering it up, was much worse, and much more corrosive. Of course, cover-ups don't last forever, because once pictures of the massacre managed to make their way onto the pages of Life Magazine and numerous newspapers, a bad situation in the form of a thoroughly unpopular war became an American firestorm in the form of this one singular event. Only Calley was ever tried and convicted for his activities on that horrible day; and after a mere four months in the Army stockade at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, he was paroled by then-president Richard Nixon, and subsequently lionized by the pro-war and political right wing factions in the United States as a hero.
Writer/director Barak Goodman gives all the room to the members of Charlie Company to relive a day and an event they would clearly like to put behind them, but will never be able to. The sense one gets from these men is that, given the circumstances of what they had seen in the weeks and months leading up to March 16, 1968, they felt they were following legitimate and justifiable orders from their superiors to go into that village and shoot and kill everything that moved, but almost as quickly found their consciences bothering them, especially when they were advised not to talk about it whatsoever to each other. But if there were "villains" in the personages of Medina and Calley, there were also heroes as well. As MY LAI points out, the helicopter crew of Hugh Thompson, Lawrence Colburn, and Glenn Andreotta put their aircraft between innocent villagers and Calley's platoon; and Thompson gave Andreotta, his door gunner, an order to open fire on that platoon if they so much as fired a single round at the villagers. Thompson's humanitarian gesture that day wasn't recognized until thirty years later; and in those intervening years, while Calley was being hailed as a "hero" because of his actions, Thompson was condemned by the Right as a "traitor" for not only not "participating" in the massacre but actively trying to stop it. History, thankfully, rectified that disgraceful misjudgment while Thompson was still alive (he passed away in 2006).
After the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre of Cheyenne Indians in Colorado, My Lai has to count as a sickening blight on both the U.S. military and our nation. It further polarized an already polarized America; but it also forced Americans to ask questions not only of their elected leaders, but of themselves, of how they had allowed their own sons to become so dehumanized by the war that a massacre of this sort was, if not inevitable, then certainly possible. MY LAI is a painful episode of "The American Experience" to watch at times, but it should be seen and discussed, so that we may understand how the whole of the Vietnam War in general, and this massacre in particular, so severely damaged the heart and soul of our nation.