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– an officer in the 2nd Platoon remarking his men sexually assaulting Vietnamese women
Women and children talk to U.S. soldier.
NARA
Nguyen Thi Cuong remembers soldiers bursting through the door and pulling her husband, her mother and her 12- year-old son out of her house.
She was stripped of her clothes and then held down, as three soldiers raped and sodomized her. Then the soldiers pushed her outside into a group of fifteen villagers. When the soldiers opened fire, she was hit in the arm and lost consciousness. When she came to, her family and all the villagers were dead around her. Her home and all the animals were destroyed.
American soldiers were moving through the hamlet rounding up villagers. Lt. Calley noticed one of the enlisted men with his pants down. He was pointing his rifle at the head of a woman’s small child. She was desperately clutching her child as she was on her knees in front of the soldier, who was trying to force the woman to give him oral sex.
Calley sprinted over to the soldier yelling, “Get on your goddamn pants. Get over there where you are supposed to be!”
In an interview later, Calley said his issue with the soldier was that he wasn’t being “combat effective.”
U.S. soldiers committed at least 20 rapes — including at least two gang rapes. The victims ranged from age 10 to 45. Of these women and girls, nine were under the age of eighteen.
Many of these assaults were gang rapes and many involved sexual torture.
– Based on eyewitness testimony documented by the U.S. Army’s Criminal Investigation Division (CID) findings and the U.S. Army’s Peers Inquiry
Sources:
– Seymour Hersh, My Lai 4: A Report on the Massacre and Its Aftermath
– Howard Jones, My Lai: Vietnam 1968, and the Descent into Darkness
Although Charlie Company had been in Vietnam for less than five months, a number of men had already earned reputations as “double veterans”: soldiers who were known to have first raped women and then killed them, sometimes after performing sadistic acts. They often left the company’s calling card — the likeness of an ace of spades — carved on the victim’s chest.