Nixon's Pardon in the My Lai Massacre
* What: The massacre of the Vietnamese village of My Lai in 1968 by US troops and its subsequent cover up by the US military. Only one soldier, Lt. William Calley, was convicted of the massacre. Nixon, bowing to pressure from his conservative supporters, pardoned him. Calley never served a day in prison.
* The Body Count: 504 Vietnamese civilians murdered, almost all women, children, and elderly. Many of the murder victims as well as survivors were raped and mutilated.
* Who Else Gets the Blame:
* Lieutenant William Calley, the commander of Charlie Company, was the immediate officer carrying out the massacre and personally killed 22 Vietnamese civilians, including a three year old child.
* Captain Ernest Medina, Calley's immediate superior, also gave orders to carry out the massacre. Medina also personally killed three of the massacre victims, according to eyewitness accounts. Medina planned the assault on the village and was charged with war crimes. He denied ordering the killings and claimed he did not know they were being carried out until too late. His defense attorney, the famed F. Lee Bailey, successfully got him acquitted. Medina resigned after the court martial and went to work in a plant owned by Bailey.
* US military law today uses the Medina standard, also called command responsibility. This holds that any officer who is aware of human rights violations will be held legally responsible for failing to stop them.
* At least fourteen US Army officers were either responsible for the massacre or covering it up. Among them was the future Commander of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Secretary of State, and candidate for US President, four star General Colin Powell.
* At least 33 soldiers from Charlie Company carried out the massacre. None except Calley were convicted. It is important to note, over 100 soldiers in that company committed no violent crimes. They did fail to stop or report these murders and rapes.
* A US Army hierarchy and old boy network that first covered up and then failed to convict the soldiers guilty of the massacre. It is extremely rare for any but the lowest level US officers to be punished for war crimes. The usual pattern is that first and second lieutenants are the only officers to get punished. Among the enlisted and NCOs, privates and corporals are far more likely to be punished than high ranking NCOs. *
* As bad as that record is, the US military record has slightly improved since the US-Vietnam War. Along with some enlisted, a few high ranking officers were reprimanded during the torture scandal at Abu Ghraib. As bad as the US military record is, it is still far better than many military institutions around the world. In Guatemala, for example, an officer guilty of genocide became president. (See Section One.)
* An American public that reflexively admires all veterans, or believed Calley was a scapegoat, pressured Nixon to pardon Calley. Among those calling Calley a scapegoat was the Governor of Georgia at the time, Jimmy Carter.
* The massacre at My Lai was one of the most horrifying outrages of the US-Vietnam War. There were over 700 civilians in the village. The statistics are brutal: 504 villagers were murdered, 50 of them younger than three years old, 69 between four and seven years old. Many women and girls were raped. Many victims were mutilated, with body parts chopped off, heads scalped. Some American soldiers apparently played with the body parts, and even ate their meal with dead bodies all around them.
* Company C had taken 28 casualties prior to the massacre, including five dead. The dead and wounded were from sniper fire or booby traps. But the company had not found the enemy. They were told the enemy would be at My Lai. Many of the soldiers were angry and vengeful. Many also were drunk or high, or hungover from the night before.
* By most accounts, Lt. William Calley was the worst possible choice as an officer. Lightly trained and in over his head, he was both unpopular with his men and brutal and contemptuous towards them. He encouraged his men to take out their anger against the villagers, and he personally committed nearly two dozen murders as well.
* How the massacre ended is as important as that it happened. Chief Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson, the chief and pilot of a helicopter crew, stopped the massacre and rescued the remaining 200 villagers. Thompson saw the massacre from above, landed, and ordered Calley to stop. When Calley would not, Thompson ordered his crew to train their weapons on the platoon, and threatened to open fire unless the platoon stopped.
* Almost immediately, officers Captain Ernest Medina, who had planned the massacre, and his superior Colonel Oran Henderson began to cover these atrocities up. The massacre would have remained unknown to the US public if not for Ron Ridenhour, a chopper gunner, writing thirty letters to Congress and the military on My Lai.
* Lt. General WR Peers ordered an inquiry, calling 403 witnesses and filing charges against 28 officers and two NCOs. Army lawyers finally charged fourteen officers. Thirty soldiers were charged with committing murder, rape, sodomy, and mutilation. Seventeen left the army, and their charges were dropped.
* Inquiries found 33 of the 105 soldiers in C Company committed the massacre. But charges were only filed against thirteen men. In the end, Calley was the only one convicted, found guilty of responsibility for the murder of 104 villagers. He personally murdered 22 Vietnamese civilians, including a child of three years old.
* Calley never went to prison. He had only been briefly jailed before being confined to house arrest. He was still under house arrest when he was finally pardoned, and received many visitors, including a longtime female companion.
* From the beginning, much of the American public sympathized, not with hundreds of massacred Vietnamese villagers, but with Calley. Many refused to believe he had committed the crimes, or that any American soldier could have done so. Others argued the crimes were excused by wartime circumstances. Still others believed the ultimate responsibility lay with higher ranking officers or civilian leaders.
* The third argument may have some validity, but does not change the fact of Calley being a mass murderer who should have faced justice, in this case the death penalty. Calley and Mendoza should have been punished as harshly as any civilian mass murderer, for they are equivalent to monsters like Jeffrey Dahmer and Timothy McVeigh.
* Nixon pardoned Calley before he ever served a day in prison, claiming bizarrely he had been punished enough. Calley's pardon was obviously done to curry favor with conservative voters. One can imagine the outrage the same voters would feel had a North Vietnamese officer been pardoned for killing, hypothetically, over 500 wounded soldiers and medical personnel in an American hospital. Sympathy for a man like Calley is the rankest hypocrisy, like sympathizing with a serial killer rather than his victims.
* Calley publicly apologized over 40 years later, in 2009. With more than a little irony, Calley was invited as a guest of the Kiwanis Club of Columbus, Georgia, a charity known for its worldwide endeavors for justice and children's welfare. Calley's remorse did seem genuine, but was hardly a substitute for justice.
* For the apology was offered in America, to Americans and only indirectly Vietnamese, and seemed designed to get forgiveness from his fellow countrymen, not his victims or their families. A Vietnamese survivor in fact said that Calley should send an apology by mail or email, and that others guilty should also apologize, as should the US government. None of that happened.
* As for Hugh Thompson, the crew commander who saved over 200 villagers and the noblest military man in the whole horrific episode, he received numerous death threats after his testimony in the My Lai trials. In 1998, he and his crewmen finally received the Soldier's Medal in recognition of their actions saving the lives of the villagers from murder by US soldiers. The military slowly learned the lessons of My Lai, as all Americans should about their military and their wars.