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March 16, 1968
That morning,
the villagers had started their cooking fires and were making breakfast. Most of the farmers were already out in the fields. The older children had gone to fetch water from wells or to check how many fish they had netted in the river. After a brief bombardment near the landing zone, some of the villagers took shelter in their homes or in bunkers that they had dug for safety. Some began to leave the village on a road that led to Quang Ngai City or to the coast.
Roughly 100 soldiers from Charlie Company were flown by helicopter to the My Lai 4 hamlet in Son My Village. At the same time, Bravo Company was assaulting a village hamlet designated on military maps as My Khe 4, a mile to the east on the South China Sea.
7am
Artillery barrage begins to clear the landing zone for the helicopters. Some shells hit the village. Villagers begin to flee or shelter in bunkers.
7:30am
Barrage ends. Helicopter gunships pepper the landing zone and the edge of the village with machine gun fire and also shoot some of the fleeing villagers.
By 8:00 a.m., the soldiers of Charlie Company leave their helicopters and advance on the village. Two other companies (Alpha and Bravo) are in position north and south of My Lai and ready to move.
8am
The massacre begins. “Over a period of four hours, the Americans methodically slaughtered more than 500 Vietnamese civilians.
“Along the way, they also raped women and young girls, mutilated the dead, systematically burned homes, and fouled the area’s drinking water.”
-Nick Turse, journalist
A little after 11 a.m., most of the killing is over. Soldiers of Charlie Company break for lunch.
11:40am
A ceasefire is ordered by the captain of the company.
1:30pm
The soldiers of Charlie Company leave My Lai, meet up with Bravo Company — who also have been killing, raping and burning villages —and set up camp in a graveyard south of the village.
A woman killed by U.S. soldiers lies dead on the ground.
photo by Ronald Haeberle
Survivor Han Thi Qui
“In the early morning, just after we got up, the helicopters came and started shelling, and soldiers poured out onto the fields. I was eating breakfast. We thought it might be like the other times the Americans came into the village. They gave the children candy. Or like the second time, when Americans came to take water from the well to fill their canteens, and then left, and they didn’t do any harm to the people.
But [this time] when they came to the hamlet they rounded up all the people. Some they took to the roadside and shot right away…. First they shot Mr. Cau. He was a monk. He lived in the pagoda. Then they forced everyone into the ditch and shot them.
The soldiers
The killing continued. A group of soldiers gunned down 20 women and children from behind as they knelt in prayer at a Buddhist temple with incense burning near the center of the village.
Han Thi Qui
“I was wounded in the backside. At first I felt very, very hot, and later on very cold. …. They fired a first time into the ditch, and many men, children and women were killed. They cried, “Mother.” They were screaming. The soldiers fired three more times and finished the cries of the people. The first time there were still people screaming. They fired a second time, and the third time it was finished, all the people were killed.”
Meadlo
Soldier Paul Meadlo remembers firing on villagers in a ditch. “They were begging and saying, ‘No. No.’ And their mothers were hugging their children, but they kept on firing — well, we kept right on firing. They was waving their arms and begging.”
-Interview on CBS News on November 24. 1969
Han Thi Qui
“Afterwards, I got up to go back to my house, and I saw nothing. All the houses had been burned. They had cut down our village tree by the pond. They had cut all the trees down in the orchards. They had killed everyone. There were dead bodies all over the village.”
“I took a little dead baby back to the house from the roadside. It was my daughter’s child.”
Haeberle & Simpson
Army photographer Ron Haeberle summed up the soldiers’ actions: “It was just to shoot, shoot, shoot at anything. I don’t care what moved. I mean, it’s just — the person would come out of the hut. Bang. Shoot! It was just complete carnage there on that day.”
Soldier Vernardo Simpson saw a tall, blond-haired, blue-eyed soldier towering over the Vietnamese and shouting,”Kill them all”…. “Don’t turn them over to the company, kill them all”….. “Don’t let none of them live.”
Han Thi Qui
“I went to the next hamlet and found my younger sister-in-law killed, lying on the floor. And I found her daughter’s body, a fifteen-year-old girl, all her clothing torn off and her legs were spread open-raped by Americans.
“They had no mercy, the Americans. You see, they had come here many times and we got along with them. Then they came and killed all the people. They showed no mercy for the people. We had done nothing to them. If they had killed people at the beginning, one or two, we would have known to run, but we didn’t know.”
-Han Thi Qui’s recollection as told to Martha Hess and documented in Hess’ book, Then the Americans Came
Gonzales
Soldier Leonard Gonzales watched a tall soldier standing next to the bloody remains of seven naked Vietnamese women ranging in age from their late teens to their mid 30s. He was loudly boasting that he had persuaded the women to strip by warning that he would shoot them if they refused. And that when he grabbed one and demanded “Boom boom,” they all screamed in fright and clung to each other. Then he had coolly backed away a few steps and killed them all with his M-79.
Sources:
– Howard Jones, My Lai: Vietnam 1968, and the Descent into Darkness
– Nick Turse, The Pentagon Makes History the First Casualty, TomDispatch.com
– Michael Bilton and Kevin Sim, Four Hours in My Lai
– Martha Hess, And Then the Americans Came: Voices from Vietnam
In JUST Four Hours
504 VILLAGERS from 247 families WERE KILLED
24 FAMILIES completely obliterated.
Three generations destroyed with no survivors: Grandparents, both parents, and all their children
182 Women
17 pregnant
173 Children
56 infants
60 elder men
Mission Accomplished
The village was completely destroyed. All the houses were burned, in addition to the temple and community center. Trees and gardens cut down. Livestock killed. Wells poisoned. The village remained unoccupied for the next seven years, until the end of the war.