Published at: 20/03/2024 09:00 PM

• The complaints and graphic evidence that betrayed the cruelty of a genocide
• (Time Magazine, April 2, 1972 - Granma, December 21, 1969)
• During the Nixon administration, on the morning of March 16, 1969, a village inhabited by defenseless peasant families was razed to the ground by U.S. Marines, from Company C, Charlie, who belonged to the 11th. Brigade of the 23rd. United States Marine Division under the command of Lieutenant William Calley.
• This mass murder was kept secret until, a year and a half later, it was brought to light, thanks to the “in situ” report prepared by Cap. Hugh Thompson, to letters from some soldiers and to the publication of an editorial by the prominent analyst Seymour Hersh, on November 3, 1969, in the Dispatch New Service newspaper.
• A week later, on November 20, 1969, photographer Ronald L. Haeberle, who was stationed in that infantry unit to record military action, published, in the Cleveland Plain newspaper, all the photos taken from his own color camera. The official photographs of that American military mission, taken with the army's camera, were confiscated by the Pentagon's top military hierarchy, and kept secret until the scandal broke out.

MASS MURDER

• Early that day, at 7:00am, the Charlie company landed in helicopters in the peasant village of My Lai, located in the Son My region. The order was to go through arms to all the inhabitants of the town. 504 defenceless people were killed.
• The massacre lasted about four hours and was commanded by Lt. Calley.
• The women were tied to trees and gang-raped, then their breasts and fingers were mutilated and topped with gunshots to the skull.
• Many female villagers were trapped inside their shacks that were burned and burned to death; those who ran away were awaited by bursts of machine guns fired at the discretion of the marines with M-16 assault rifles or hit with N-35 grenade launchers in the rice fields surrounding the hamlet.
• A hundred peasant women with their sons and daughters were tied up and taken to ditches dug on the side of the roads where they were executed with their children.
• During the butchery, some soldiers expressed their dissatisfaction with the savage procedure. Those who were reluctant to shoot were threatened with being shot on the spot or taken to the War Council.
• At the end of the massacre, the entire unit was convinced of the immorality of what they had done. Over the years, some underwent psychiatric treatment, with strong electroshock shocks and powerful doses of all kinds of anxiolytics and antidepressants. Others simply couldn't live with these memories and committed suicide.
• What happened in My Lai is just one of the many massacres committed in the same way by the U.S. military during the Vietnam War, against unarmed populations that are known to the public. The difference is that it was denounced by daring journalists, daring photographers and courageous soldiers who did not comply with the genocidal order and jeopardized the arms status quo that governs that country.
• The hundreds of thousands of cases of farmers sprayed with Agent Orange have left irreversible consequences that deserve reparation. This is just one of many examples that merit admission of guilt and a final conviction.
• After 51 years, this war crime continues to be suspended over time as a crime against humanity, even with impunity. The lives of 504 South Vietnamese villagers still cry out for justice and compensation that the United States has always refused to give and recognize.
• Four years later, TIME magazine in New York highlighted the material author of the butcher shop on its full-color cover (Lte. William Calley); inquiring about the intellectual responsibility of the White House.
• Intellectual authorship rests with all the presidents, tenants of that mansion, who for 20 years gave the order to bomb and exterminate the exemplary people of Vietnam.
• To Cap. Hugh Thompson, because of his report, had to face all the internal persecution. Without their intervention, Charlie Company would have perpetrated acts of the same nature in other villages in South Vietnam, without saying anything about the modus operandi of these genocidal missions. He personally risked his life and escorted several Vietnamese survivors to safe places or hospitals so that they would not be massacred. Later, his American army was decorated five times, and invited by the revolutionary government of Vietnam to inaugurate a school in the same place where the massacre took place.
• For his part, the material author of this fact, Lte. William Laws Calley, was pardoned by President Nixon, and he still lives unpunished in the solitude of his memories, hidden in a town in Atlanta and protected like another from so many war criminals.

Mazo News Team