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“We have no honorable intentions in Vietnam.”

— Martin Luther King, Jr.
1967

The My Lai Massacre, 1968

Photo by Ronald L. Haeberle

“There were numerous occasions when you were sent out on missions of ‘search and destroy’... in military-speak that means to shoot anything moving and set the village on fire... The results were almost always catastrophic... Lt. Calley was just one of the few who got called on it.”

— Jim Linnen
U.S. Army platoon leader in Vietnam

“The order was to destroy My Lai and everything in it.”

And the fully premeditated intention of Charlie Company was to murder every last man, woman and child in it as well.

Even though they were assigned to commit this routine American war crime by their officers, the soldiers’ personal motivation for the My Lai massacre was revenge, rape and racism — the Three R’s of the bestial education provided by the U.S. military. American troops were trained by the U.S. Army to see Vietnamese people as “things” or “animals”. GI jokers said “anything that’s dead and isn’t White is a VC.” It was open season on all Vietnamese people, including women and girls who were routinely raped. In their own sick minds American soldiers dehumanized the Vietnamese people, calling them “gooks” and “dinks”.

Journalist Seymour Hersh wrote of Charlie Company that by March of 1968 “many in the company had given in to an easy pattern of violence.” Such soldiers were totally blind to the humanity of the Vietnamese people because the American soldiers had degraded themselves to the status of filthy, evil, bloodthirsty animals. It takes a human being to recognize the humanity in another. A great many American soldiers chose to murder their own humanity with the officially-encouraged sadism of the Vietnam Genocide.

German Nazis and Israeli soldiers have exactly the same psychopathic mentality. And they too make the cowardly excuse that they were “just following orders.”

Encouraged by their evil officers, sadistic American soldiers systematically beat and tortured unarmed civilian people, sometimes using electric shocks to the genitals of both men and women. American soldiers murdered many civilian people in cold blood, usually by shooting or stabbing them. Shoving them out of high-flying helicopters so they could watch them fall to their deaths was a favorite entertainment. Some American soldiers liked to cut off people’s ears. Other American soldiers liked to cut off people’s fingers. American soldiers even cut off people’s heads. They burned whole villages. They poisoned wells. They shot people’s dogs and cattle for fun. It was not uncommon for American soldiers to sodomize and rape women and young girls before murdering them.

American animals-in-uniform were truly demon-possessed, and that was their own responsibility, regardless of the orders of their satanic officers. But all their countless atrocities were actually part of a vast operation called the Phoenix Program, an official CIA campaign of massive, systematic state terrorism in which Vietnamese people were tortured and murdered by the hundreds of thousands.

In the CIA’s psychopathic worldview, the Vietnamese “Commies” had to be mass-murdered and terrorized into seeing how fine, democratic and freedom-loving the system of American capitalism was.

$   $   $   $   $

The heroic American soldiers who raped, stabbed and machine-gunned the women, old men, boys, girls and babies of My Lai 4 were led by Lt. William Calley and Capt. Ernest Medina.

Capt. Medina participated fully in the slaughter at My Lai. A young Vietnamese woman had been shot and was lying wounded on the ground. At one point Medina was seen nudging her body with his boot. Seeing that she was still alive, Capt. Medina took a step back, pointed his gun down at her and blew her away.

In a 1969 interview with Mike Wallace of CBS News, a totally unrepentant Capt. Medina tried to justify the slaughter of women, children and babies by suggesting they may have planted mines which killed American troops.

A total of 504 helpless human beings were sadistically slaughtered at My Lai 4 by soldiers of the United States Army. All of the victims were either old women, young women, old men, boys, girls or babies. There were no young Vietnamese men there. The American soldiers were never fired upon. They found no Viet Cong and no weapons.

The following photos and captions are from:
http://www.pathfinder.com/photo/essay/mylai/mylaicon.htm

Photographs by Ronald L. Haeberle, 1968.
Photo captions from LIFE December 5, 1969 © Time Inc.

Shortly after sunrise on March 16, 1968, a bright, clear, warm day, the helicopters began lifting approximately 80 men of Company C (First Battalion, 20th Infantry, 11th Light Infantry Brigade) from the base camp at Landing Zone Dottie and delivering them 11 kilometers away in the paddies west of My Lai 4.

“Our landing zone was the outskirts of town, on the left flank. There were about 25 of us and we went directly into the village. There wasn’t any enemy fire.”

“Guys were about to shoot these people,” photographer, Ron Haeberle remembers. “I yelled, ‘Hold it,’ and shot my picture. As I walked away, I heard M-16s open up. From the corner of my eye I saw bodies falling, but I didn’t turn to look.”

“When these two boys were shot at,” says Haeberle, “the older one fell on the little one, as if to protect him. Then the guys finished them off.”

“This man was old and trembling so that he could hardly walk. He looked like he wanted to cry. When I left him I heard two rifle shots.”

“This man and two little boys popped up from nowhere. The GIs I was with opened up, then moved in close to finish them.”

“To us they were no civilians,” said SP4 Varnado Simpson. “They were VC sympathizers. You don’t call them civilians. To us they were VC. You don’t have any alternatives. If they were VC and got away, then they could turn around and kill you.”

Haeberle found these bodies on a road leading from the village. “Most were women and babies. It looked as if they tried to get away.”

Haeberle remembers that the body in front of a burning house kept twitching and that one GI commented, “He’s got ghosts in him.”

Intent on destroying everything that might be of use to the Vietcong, a soldier stokes a fire with the baskets used to dry rice and roots.

American crimes against humanity

What follows are some of the details which came out in Calley’s court martial and in the Life magazine article of 1969. This is what many of “our boys” were really up to in Vietnam — in many places like My Lai. Massacres like the one at My Lai were the official policy of the CIA’s Phoenix Program. When you read about the ugly incidents below, you are seeing the true and permanent face of American foreign policy.

This cowardly, sadistic, bestial evil is not merely tolerated, it is encouraged at the highest levels of the United States Corporate Mafia Government and military. America’s political and military leaders feel that state terrorism is an essential element of U.S. foreign policy. Their mentality is exactly the same as any other mafia. If the American plutocracy had an ounce of human morality they would never permit such evil and they would vigorously prosecute perpetrators of past crimes. But they choose to make excuses for them instead — because behind their pious public masks America’s rulers are every bit as evil and inhuman as the soldiers of Charlie Company.

At one point Haeberle focused his camera on a little boy about five feet away, but before he could get his picture American soldiers blew the little boy away with their M-16s. The force of the bullets’ impact was so great that the boy’s body flew backwards through the air for several feet before crumpling to the ground where he died.

Haeberle angered some GIs when he tried to photograph them as they fondled the breasts of a fifteen-year-old Vietnamese girl — before they raped and murdered her.

Testimony at Calley’s court martial revealed that the first victim was an old man whom American soldiers stabbed in the back with a bayonet. Then a middle-aged man was picked up, thrown down a well, and American soldiers lobbed a grenade in after him.

A group of fifteen to twenty mostly older women were gathered around a Buddhist temple, kneeling and praying. American soldiers executed them all with shots to the back of their heads.

Eighty people were dragged from their homes and herded to the plaza area. Many cried out “No VC! No VC!” Calley told soldier Paul Meadlo, “You know what I want you to do with them.” When Calley returned ten minutes later and found the Vietnamese people still alive in the plaza he said to Meadlo, “Haven’t you got rid of them yet? I want them dead! Waste ’em!”

Meadlo and Calley then began firing into the group from a distance of ten to fifteen feet. A few people survived because they were covered by the bodies of those who died.

“We huddled ’em up. We made them squat down... I poured four clips into the dinks...the mothers kept hugging their children...we kept on firing...”

— Paul Meadlo
United States Army

The drainage ditch

Another major slaughter location was a large, water-filled drainage ditch on the east side of the village. Led by Lt. Calley, the American soldiers marched a group of 70 to 80 women, children and babies to the ditch.

Calley ordered the dozen or so platoon members there to push the people into the ditch, and three or four GIs did. The people were ordered to kneel in the muddy water as the American soldiers set up their machine guns.

For some reason the people were then ordered to stand up again. But now the American troops were able to see their victims’ faces. Unable to look the women and children in the eyes, the American soldiers ordered them to turn around and kneel in the mud again. Calley ordered his men to shoot into the ditch. Some refused, others obeyed. The American soldiers opened up with their machine guns and slaughtered all the helpless people.

One who followed Calley’s order was Paul Meadlo, who estimated that he killed about twenty-five civilian people. Calley joined in the massacre. At one point, a two-year-old child who somehow survived the gunfire began running towards the hamlet. Calley grabbed the tiny child, threw him back into the muddy ditch, then shot him dead at point-blank range.

“Lunch break, boys!”

By 11 A.M. the sadistic orgy of mass murder was nearly over and Capt. Medina called for a lunch break. There was almost nobody left to point an M-16 at and all that raping and slaughtering had worked up a healthy appetite in the hale and hearty young American GIs.

As the dead and dying people lay in the bloody ditch, Lt. Calley decided it was time to sit down and reward himself with a can of peaches. But the dying people were disturbing his lunch. Bodies were twitching, dying women and children were moaning in the bloody water.

As he enjoyed the peaches, Lt. Calley ordered a young African-American private sitting nearby to finish off the dying people to shut them up. The private refused. Calley told him if he didn’t obey orders he’d be finished off too.

The private pointed his gun at Calley and said:

“Well I guess we’re both going to die then!”

Calley backed off. Presumably he didn’t enjoy the rest of his peaches.

 
A few human Americans at My Lai [1]

A chopper pilot, Chief Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson and his crew were the only other soldiers who had the guts to stand up to the filthy homicidal psychopaths of the United States Army at My Lai.

Thompson’s mission was to fly above the troops and draw enemy fire so the Viet Cong could be located and murdered. (The VC had this funny idea that they had a right to defend their own country against the murdering, raping American invaders.) But there were no Viet Cong at My Lai that day. Only women, old men, children and babies.

When Thompson and his crew saw what was happening on the ground, they couldn’t believe it at first. Then they were sickened. Then they became enraged. Thompson said some very, very evil stuff was going on down there. They repeatedly saw young boys and girls being shot at point-blank range. As often happened in Vietnam, they saw American soldiers sodomizing and raping girls and women before murdering them.

Thompson and his crew saw some women and children hiding in a bunker. Some American soldiers from both Charlie and Bravo Companies were approaching them. Thompson figured the women and children had about 15 seconds to live. He told his crew they were going to save those people and his crew was totally with him. He landed his chopper in a field between the American soldiers and the women and children.

Thompson got out of his chopper and approached the soldiers, saying “Hey, there’s some civilians over here in this bunker. Can you get them out?”

One of the soldiers said: “Well, we’re gonna get them out with a hand grenade.”

Thompson then warned the soldiers that his crew was ready to open up on them if they tried to murder the women and children. The soldiers backed off. Thompson says he noticed that some of them actually looked relieved. (I would say his heroism made it possible for them to avoid their own evil cowardice. Just this once.)

There were too many women and children for Thompson’s chopper to get them all out in one trip. He knew that whoever he left behind would be raped and murdered by the American soldiers. He called on the radio to another helicopter gunship requesting it to help him get the terrified people to safety. Fortunately the other pilot agreed. Thompson kept the people around him for protection while the gunship made two trips to get all the people. They were flown about 10 miles away to relative safety.

At one point Thompson was flying over the ditch where all the women and children were dying. He, or one of his crew saw that a little boy among them was still alive. He landed his chopper and his machine-gunner Larry Colburn dashed out and waded into the ditch. He had to wade through and over all the dead bodies. Arms of dying people reached out to him, begging for help. But he figured they were too far gone and the boy had a chance to live.

Larry carried the little boy back to the chopper and they flew to a hospital/orphanage and delivered him to relative safety. Thompson says that hospitals in Vietnam were usually combined with orphanages.

Thanks to America, land of the free and home of the brave, there were a lot of orphanages in Vietnam.

 
The information in the above rescue story, as well as the earlier anecdotes about Lt. Calley and his peaches, and Capt. Medina shooting the girl, were given in a talk by Hugh Thompson on September 28, 2000 at Humboldt State University in Arcata, California.

It was a very good and heart-felt presentation, but Thompson said one thing which indirectly supports U.S. military-government damage-control propaganda that My Lai was an “isolated incident”. Somebody asked him if there were other such massacres, and he said only that it was so horrible that if he thought it had happened in many other places he was afraid he might “lose it”. However the fact that such brutal massacres were actually the routine policy of the U.S. Army is testified to by a great many ex-soldiers, John Kerry and platoon-leader Jim Linnen being well-known examples. Thompson must be perfectly aware of this. He said he was employed in some kind of program to help Vietnam vets. If that program is funded by the U.S. government it would explain why he would feel pressured to support the blatant lie which was first promoted by President “Tricky Dick” Nixon, that My Lai was an “isolated incident”. [Back]

See also the book:
Forgotten Hero of Mylai: The Hugh Thompson Story

Aftermath

If not for the determined efforts of Ronald Ridenhour, a twenty-two-year-old ex-GI from Phoenix, the world would never have found out about the horrors that occurred on March 16, 1968 at My Lai 4. Physically courageous though they were, Hugh Thompson and his crew would have kept it to themselves, like the babykillers of Charlie Company and most other Vietnam vets. At least Thompson and his crew refused to lie for the stinking Army once the story was out, but they didn’t make any effort on their own to publicize it until many years later.

Ridenhour served in a reconnaissance unit in Duc Pho, where he heard five eyewitness accounts of the My Lai massacre. He began his own investigation, traveling to Americal headquarters to confirm that Charlie Company had in fact been in My Lai on the date reported by his witnesses. Ridenhour was shocked by what he learned.

When he was discharged in December, 1968, Ridenhour said “I wanted to get those people. I wanted to reveal what they did. My God, when I first came home, I would tell my friends about this and cry — literally cry.”

In March, 1969, Ridenhour composed a letter detailing what he had heard about the My Lai massacre and naively sent it to President Nixon, the Pentagon, the State Department, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and numerous members of Congress. Most recipients either ignored it or put him on their hit list.

As fate would have it, however, there happened to be a few Representatives who had a human conscience. You can almost always count on all 100 U.S. Senators to be the abject whores of the corporate/banking plutocracy. Most U.S. Representatives are likewise whores. But occasionally there are a few U.S. Representatives who actually have a basic human morality. Representative Morris Udall was one of these, and he aggressively pushed for a full investigation of Ridenhour’s allegations.

When President “Tricky Dick” Nixon heard about it he launched his typical deceit campaign, trying to downplay the horrors at My Lai as an unfortunate aberration, “an isolated incident”.

But to this day, the Vietnamese people themselves testify that there were many, many My Lais. Even American soldiers admit there were many My Lais.

By November, 1969, the American public was finally beginning to learn the details of what happened at My Lai 4. The massacre was the cover story in both Time and Newsweek. CBS ran a Mike Wallace interview with Paul Meadlo. Seymour Hersh published in-depth accounts based on his own extensive interviews. Life magazine published Haeberle’s graphic photographs.

Meanwhile the U.S. Army’s Criminal Investigation Division dragged on with its separate investigation. It kept delaying until most of the enlisted men who had raped and murdered young girls and blew little children away with M-16s had received their “honorable” discharges from the military. Thus they were immune from prosecution by court-martial.

(Isn’t that convenient? The U.S. Army’s “Criminal Investigation Division” is criminal indeed. And speaking of war criminals, the unelected Bush regime’s Secretary of State, Colin Powell, was a major player in the attempted cover-up of the My Lai massacre. That’s why the slimebag was rewarded with a stellar career in the U.S. Army, presiding over yet more war crimes in Iraq in 1991, then later rising high in the U.S. government. The more evil and corrupt you are, the higher you rise in the U.S. military and government.)

Decisions were made to prosecute a total of twenty-five officers and enlisted men, including General Koster, Colonel Oran Henderson and Captain Medina. In the end, however, only a few would be tried. And only one, William Calley, would be found guilty.

Note:
This has become the standard M.O. of the U.S. Army when its crimes against humanity are revealed to the public. Damage control consists of sacrificing just one soldier to make the crime look like an isolated incident. All the rest get away with it.

It’s very similar to the case of the American KFOR soldiers in Kosovo who gang-raped, tortured, sodomized and then murdered an eleven-year-old Albanian girl. Only the ringleader (based at Fort Bragg, N.C.) finally pled guilty. The rest got away with it.
See http://crash.to/KFORMYASS for more information.

Medina goes free

Captain Ernest Medina was charged with murdering 102 Vietnamese civilian people.

To save his sorry ass, the Army got the infamous attorney F. Lee Bailey for his defense. The flamboyant Bailey conducted his usual highly successful defense, impressing the gullible jury and manipulating the law to protect his criminal client. He forced the prosecution to drop key witnesses and kept damaging evidence, such as Ronald Haeberle’s photographs, from being seen by the jury. After fifty-seven minutes of “deliberation”, the jury acquitted Medina on all charges.

Months later, when a perjury prosecution was no longer possible, Medina admitted that he had suppressed evidence and lied to the brigade commander about the number of civilian people murdered at My Lai 4.

Calley found guilty... and set free

The strongest case was that against Lt. William Calley, however. On November 12, 1970, in a small courthouse in Fort Benning, Georgia, young Prosecutor Aubrey Daniel stood to deliver his opening statement: “I want you to know My Lai 4. I will try to put you there.”

Baby-faced baby killer lies to the press (as strategically-placed mother-figure looks on approvingly)

Lt. Calley said he felt like he was merely killing “animals” when he murdered Vietnamese women and babies. Besides, like the Nazis, and Israeli soldiers, he was “just following orders”. Orders given by Capt. Medina, to be exact. So to save himself, Capt. Medina stabbed his Lieutenant in the back and swore that he gave no orders to murder women and children.

In March 1971, after thirteen days of deliberations, the longest in U.S. court-martial history, the jury returned its verdict: Calley was guilty of premeditated murder on all specifications.

After hearing pleas on the issue of punishment, jury head Colonel Clifford Ford pronounced Calley’s sentence: “To be confined at hard labor for the length of your natural life; to be dismissed from the service; to forfeit all pay and allowances.”

Calley spent exactly 3 days in jail.

President “Tricky Dick” Nixon, feeling sympathy for a fellow criminal, ordered Calley removed from the stockade and placed in the more comfortable circumstance of house arrest.

Crooked judges then granted the great American war hero several sentence reductions. Finally, on November 9, 1974 the Secretary of the Army announced that Calley would be paroled. And today, as with Capt. Medina and all the other babykilling, girl-raping soldiers of the United States Army, William Calley is walking around loose, a free man in America.

In 1976, Calley married. Presumably his wife was assured that their own babies would be too White for him to blow away with an M-16. As of this writing, he works in the jewelry store of his father-in-law in Columbus, Georgia.

And to this day, a great many sick, psychopathic Americans regard Lt. William “Babykiller” Calley as a hero.

That, folks, is what passes for “justice” in the satanic United States of America — the world’s number-one perpetrator of state terrorism.

“The only lesson that the U.S. government seems to have learned from Vietnam is the need for absolute control of the press.”

— David McGowan
author of Derailing Democracy

Related sites

Famous Trials: The Mylai Massacre Trial
http://www.jurist.law.pitt.edu/trials3.htm

The full text of the article on the My Lai massacre from LIFE magazine, Vol. 67 No. 23; December 5, 1969 can be found at:
http://www.pathfinder.com/photo/essay/mylai/mylait01.htm

Vietnamese-American.org
http://vietnamese-american.org/

“Mission Statement: To preserve the Vietnamese culture and empower the Vietnamese people.”

This site has a wealth of valuable, truthful information about the Vietnam Genocide and its devastating effect on the people and land of Vietnam. An example: in the “Vietnam War” section there are excerpts from Then the Americans Came, by Martha Hess, which contains personal testimonies from surviving Vietnamese victims of massive bombing and torture at the hands of Americans.

Bob Kerrey, CIA War Crimes, And The Need For A War Crimes Trial
by Douglas Valentine
http://www.counterpunch.com/valentine.html

“By now everybody knows that former Senator Bob Kerrey led a seven-member team of Navy SEALS into Thanh Phong village in February 1969, and murdered in cold blood more than a dozen women and children.

“What hardly anyone knows, and what no one in the press is talking about (although many of them know), is that Kerrey was on a CIA mission, and its specific purpose was to kill those women and children. It was illegal, premeditated mass murder and it was a war crime.

“And it’s time to hold the CIA responsible. It’s time for a war crimes tribunal to examine the CIA’s illegal activities during and since the Vietnam War.”

Bob Kerry:
the Life and Times of a Throat-Slitter
by Richard Gibson
http://www.counterpunch.org/gibson.html

“Further outside the imperial gaze, even today, is the heroism of the Vietnamese, not only those who Kerrey and many other US officers caught up in the genocidal invasion sought to exterminate, but those who defeated the empire, politically, militarily, and morally, causing imperial troops to run away in their helicopters, pushing their allies off the struts as they ran.”

Robert Kerrey and the bloody legacy of Vietnam
by Patrick Martin and David North
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2001/may2001/kerr-m04.shtml

“Former US Senator Robert Kerrey, newly inaugurated as the president of the New School University, one of the most prestigious positions in American academia, has admitted participating in a death squad attack on a Vietnamese village [Thanh Phong] 32 years ago, in which he and six soldiers under his command killed 21 women, children and elderly men.

“In the course of the nighttime assault, the American raiders [U.S. Navy SEALS] killed every Vietnamese they encountered — men, women, children. They used every weapon in their arsenal, from knives to rifles and grenades to light anti-tank weapons, expending more than 1,200 rounds of ammunition on a village where only a few dozen people lived.

“...the SEALS slit the throats of an elderly man, his wife and three grandchildren in the first hut they encountered when they entered the village. The graves of these five victims, marked with a common date of death, can be seen in the village today.”

See also:

What is at stake in the fight to remove Robert Kerrey?
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2001/jun2001/kerr-j01.shtml

Writings by Peace Activist S. Brian Willson
http://www.brianwillson.com/

Brian Willson is a courageous Vietnam vet who was wounded in combat — but not during the Vietnam Genocide. He was fighting a war of conscience. In 1987 a military train at a U.S. Navy munitions base intentionally ran over him and severed his legs as he and two other veterans sat on the tracks to block it. The train was carrying weapons to be used in America’s ongoing holocaust of innocent civilian people in Nicaragua, Guatemala and El Salvador.

His autobiography is heartfelt, utterly unself-pitying and very instructive, particularly his experiences from Vietnam onward. Brian Willson’s writing is extremely valuable, being from a deeply intelligent and genuinely moral man who has witnessed firsthand the horrors of American state terrorism around the world.

From the site:

“THIS SITE CONTAINS essays describing the incredible historic pattern of U.S. arrogance, ethnocentrism, violence and lawlessness in domestic and global affairs, and the severe danger this pattern poses for the future health of Homo sapiens and Mother Earth. Other essays discuss revolutionary, nonviolent alternative approaches based on the principle of radical relational mutuality. This is a term increasingly used by physicists, mathematicians and cosmologists to describe the nature of the omnicentric*, ever-unfolding universe. Every being, every aspect of life energy in the cosmos, is intrinsically interconnected with and affects every other being and aspect of life energy at every moment.”

*everything is at the center of the cosmos at every moment

Vietnam Veterans Against the War Anti-Imperialist — VVAW-AI
http://www.oz.net/~vvawai/

“Vietnam Veterans Against the War Anti-Imperialist is part of a network of anti-imperialist veterans who are proud of our resistance to U.S. aggression around the world. In the 1970s, to be a Vietnam veteran was to be against the war. That proud legacy must be carried forward through the 1990s and into the next millennium. As veterans, we have been to the edge and seen the viciousness of Amerikkka unmasked. We have no doubt that the bastards who sent us to war will use their nuclear arsenal, along with unspeakably cruel conventional weapons, to maintain their empire — and after the Gulf War, do you?”

Vietnam Veterans Against the War — VVAW
http://www.vvaw.org/

VVAW was founded in 1967 by vets who realized that what we were doing in Vietnam was a monstrous evil. Through courageous political activism and grassroots organizing the VVAW helped to awaken the heavily brainwashed American people to the horrible reality of America’s greatest campaign of racist genocide in the 20th century.

Veterans For Peace
http://www.veteransforpeace.org/

“We, having dutifully served our nation, do hereby affirm our greater responsibility to serve the cause of world peace.

“To this end we will work, with others:

• Toward increasing public awareness of the costs of war;

• To restrain our government from intervening, overtly and covertly, in the internal affairs of other nations;

• To end the arms race and to reduce and eventually eliminate nuclear weapons; and

• To abolish war as an instrument of international policy.

“We urge all veterans who share this vision to join us.”

WAR is HELL
http://www.warishell.com/warishell/index.htm

This is the website for book Bloody Hell: The Price Soldiers Pay, which provides “a platform for veterans to speak for themselves. Page after page of searing testimony to the brutal, bloody, unmerciful, dehumanising, haunting, destructive, grim black void of war. The pain. The lies. The reality. The aftermath.”

An account of American terrorism in Vietnam
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2000/jun2000/viet-j06.shtml

“At a time when acts of military aggression perpetrated or planned by the US government are typically justified in the name of fighting ‘international terrorism,’ a book has appeared which documents America’s role as the organizer of the biggest campaign of terrorism and sabotage since World War II.”

Related pages

The Phoenix Program, My Lai and the “Tiger Cages”

American Genocide of the Vietnamese people

Book review:
The Phoenix Program

American Genocide of the Laotian people

American Genocide of the Cambodian People

American Patriots and the Napalm Attack on the People of Trang Bang

Neighborhood Bully: American Militarism
interview with Ramsey Clark

Maps:

Southeast Asia during the Vietnam Genocide

South Vietnam during the American Occupation and Genocide

“Until we go through it ourselves, until our people cower in the shelters of New York, Washington, Chicago, Los Angeles and elsewhere while the buildings collapse overhead and burst into flames, and dead bodies hurtle about and, when it is over for the day or the night, emerge in the rubble to find some of their dear ones mangled, their homes gone, their hospitals, churches, schools demolished — only after that gruesome experience will we realize what we are inflicting on the people of Indochina...”

— William Shirer
author
1973

Bibliography

The My Lai Massacre and Its Cover-up
by Joseph Goldstein
published by: The Free Press, 1976

Cover-Up
by Seymour Hersh
published by: Random House, 1972

Hostages of War
by Don Luce
published by: Indochina Resource Center, 1973

Long Time Passing
by Myra MacPherson
published by: Signet, 1984

The Phoenix Program
by Douglas Valentine

“One of the best books ever written on the secret history of the Vietnam war. Valentine presents an unsparing account of the Phoenix Program, the CIA/US Army ‘pacification’ program in Vietnam that practiced plunder, torture and widespread assassination.”

Then the Americans Came
by Martha Hess
published by: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1996

People of the Lie:
The Hope for Healing Human Evil
by M. Scott Peck, M.D.
published by Simon & Schuster; 1983, 1985

See chapter 6, “MyLai: An Examination of Group Evil”

Forgotten Hero of Mylai: The Hugh Thompson Story

Deadly Deceits:
My 25 years in the CIA
by Ralph W. McGehee

Blackshirts and Reds:
Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism
by Michael Parenti

The Beast Reawakens
by Martin A. Lee

What Uncle Sam Really Wants
by Noam Chomsky

Killing Hope:
U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since WWII
by William Blum

On Killing:
The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society
by Dave Grossman
published by: Little, Brown

Examines the consequences of the U.S. Army’s conditioning of American soldiers to overcome the instinctive loathing of murdering fellow human beings. Shows how it has increased post-combat stress disorder and how contemporary society — especially the American media — replicates the U.S. Army’s conditioning techniques, resulting in increased violence in American society.

Viet Cong: A Photographic Portrait
by Edward J. Emering
published by: Schiffer

Unique compilation of photographs taken by the Viet Cong themselves. Details Viet Cong guerrillas, main force Viet Cong, political gatherings, weapons, awards, artistic troupes, and jungle life. Fully illustrated, some in color.

Ho Chi Minh
by William J. Duiker
published by: Hyperion

Takes full advantage of recently declassified archives to create a riveting portrait of the immensely important and elusive figure. Impeccable research chronicles Ho’s life from his childhood as the son of a poor yet brilliant scholar, through his career as the first president of his country, during which he demonstrated phenomenal political abilities.

Reporting Vietnam: Media and Military at War
by William M. Hammond
published by: UPKs

Uses classified documents as well as extensive interviews to examine the bitter animosity that developed between the U.S. government and the news media during the genocidal Vietnam war. Tells how they first shared a common vision, but as the war dragged on, the truth fell victim to the U.S. government’s “management” of the press.

Nowadays, of course, the mainstream press wouldn’t dream of reporting the latest American military atrocities. The U.S. Corporate Mafia Government has gotten much better over the years at “managing” the press and all the mass-media.

The four books immediately above are available from:
Edward R. Hamilton, Bookseller
Falls Village, CT  06031-5000

Online book:

Vietnam: the Croatia of Asia
http://www.reformation.org/holoc23.html

This is Chapter 23 of the online book The Vatican’s Holocaust by Avro Manhattan. Details the little-known relationship between the Vatican, the U.S. and the fanatic Catholic regime of President Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam.

The events surrounding this relationship led directly to America’s escalation of its war against the Vietnamese people.

Diem was another puppet-dictator installed by the U.S. government. But this particular puppet was also backed by the Vatican.

Serious problems began when his, and his wife’s, religious fanaticism got out of control. In the name of “God” he murdered and terrorized his own people — with the blessings of the Vatican and the U.S. government, of course. He was finally assassinated in 1963, but it was too late, the damage had been done. Diem’s bloody tyranny over his own, mostly Buddhist, country helped to radicalize large numbers of Vietnamese people. It opened the eyes of those with eyes to see, to the truly demonic nature of the United States Corporate Mafia Government and military.

Bloody Hell:
The Price Soldiers Pay
by Daniel Hallock

The Fire This Time:
U.S. War Crimes in the Gulf
by Ramsey Clark

Desert Slaughter:
The Imperialist War Against Iraq
by the Workers League

Rogue State:
A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower
by William Blum

Against Empire
by Michael Parenti

The Sword and the Dollar:
Imperialism, Revolution and the Arms Race
by Michael Parenti

A People’s History of the United States:
1492 — Present
by Howard Zinn

Apocalypse 1945:
The Destruction of Dresden
by David Irving

The Real Terror Network:
Terrorism in Fact and Propaganda
by Edward S. Herman

Western State Terrorism
Alexander George, editor; essays by Noam Chomsky, Edward S. Herman, Gerry O’Sullivan and others

Terrorizing the Neighborhood:
American Foreign Policy in the Post-Cold War Era
by Noam Chomsky
Pressure Drop Press, 1991

Pirates and Emperors, Old and New:
International Terrorism in the Real World
by Noam Chomsky

The Culture of Terrorism
by Noam Chomsky

War At Home:
Covert Action Against U.S. Activists and What We Can Do About It
by Brian Glick

Inventing Reality:
The Politics of News Media
by Michael Parenti

War, Lies & Videotape:
How media monopoly stifles truth
edited by Lenora Foerstel; multiple authors