Charlie Company's Responsibility In The Vietnam War
The Vietnam War was not short of its share of controversies and opposition; However, March 16, 1968 marked a particularly dark moment for both Vietnam and the U.S. military. The barbaric torture, rape, and murder of around 400 unarmed civilians by Charlie Company in ‘Pinkville’, though initially covered up, left an extensive paper trail gathered at length and compiled by James S. Olson and Randy Roberts in My Lai: A Brief History with Documents. Olson and Roberts include testimonies from the tardy investigation of key participants as well as survivors to paint an accurate image of the events leading up to, during, and after the massacre, and attempts to objectively examine the question of culpability. Michael Bilton and Kevin Sim do not veil
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their contempt for the atrocities committed at My Lai in their book Four Hours in My Lai. Drawing from interviews held with both American and Vietnamese survivors, they delve deeper into the psychology and reasoning behind the soldiers’ actions and how their actions have affected them so many years later. Similarly, in a two-part special radio series for BBC titled “The My Lai Tapes”, journalist Robert Hodierne reconstructs the unfortunate events of that day. The voices of those interviewed effectively bring a somber realism to it that evokes more emotion and empathy than pure text. Claude Cookman, a professor of the history of photography, centralizes on the vital nature of the few journalistic photographs taken at My Lai by Ron Haeberle. In his article published in The Journal of American History titled “The My Lai Massacre Concretized in a Victim’s Face”, Cookman examines how these vivid visual accounts brought necessary attention to the massacre and also to the myth of American innocence. To summarize the events that transpired, Charlie Company, on March 16, 1968 in the village of Son My, utterly destroyed all livestock, residences, massacred and tortured its citizens – from children to old men and pregnant women. After four hours, the village of Son My was burning and everyone and thing was dead. The merciless and senseless massacre was subsequently covered up, despite initial efforts to lodge formal complaints. Nearly two years later after hearing from multiple primary sources about the incident, Ronald Ridenhour, a veteran of aviation during the war, wrote his local democratic congressman a letter detailing the events of that day. His letter spurred a long-awaited investigation headed by Lieutenant General William Peers and eventually identified 224 serious violations of the military code. The investigation and its findings triggered national controversy throughout the United States, and the results of the trials were equally, if not more, controversial. Of all those involved, only William Calley was found guilty, convicted of the premeditated murder of 22 civilians and sentenced to life in prison in 1971. Ultimately, however, Calley was released on parole in 1974 having served only three and a half years. All other officers either merely had their rank in the army reduced, were acquitted or had all charges dropped. If there were a legitimate hero that day, the authors concede, Hugh Thompson Jr., the helicopter pilot that landed his chopper between Lieutenant Calley and a group of Vietnamese civilians to prevent more slaughter, was the one. James S.
Olson and Randy Roberts confront the difficult question of who was ultimately to blame for the complete destruction of the villages of Son My. The military named the village of Son My containing My Lai, My Khe, and Co Luy ‘Pinkville’ in reference to the color designated to the region by combat maps. Pinkville resided in the Quang Ngai province; an area known to the military to be largely occupied with Viet Cong and Viet Cong sympathizers. U.S. military and civilian leaders were beginning “to view the war in terms of territorial conquests, not the attainment of the villagers’ support”. Charlie Company 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry under Captain Ernest “Mad Dog” Medina and Lieutenant William Calley arrived in Quang Ngai in 1967. Olson and Roberts immediately point out the emphasis the company’s training had made regarding obeying orders at all costs. Right away they raise the question of whether or not there is a conflict between following the orders of superiors and following one’s conscience. Paul Meadlo, a rifleman in C Company, recalls what he took from his training: “…you’re trained to take orders from the first day you go to that damned service, and you come back and, all right, you want to try some people that had to take orders”. To make matters worse, C Company’s leader of the 1st Platoon, William Calley was incompetent. All four sources agree on the fact that Calley was painfully ordinary and demonstrated the bare minimum of what was necessary of an officer. He could hardly even read the military maps. His promotion to Lieutenant came at a time when there was a shortage of second lieutenants, but most certainly not because he was well qualified. As the platoon moved throughout Quang Ngai, his poor leadership was evident. He constantly got his men lost and Captain Medina often referred to him as “Lieutenant Shithead”. Aside from being an evident poor leader, the company was becoming discouraged and frustrated by the guerilla-style warfare the VC
conducted. The men began to see “the sharp line between civilians and Viet-Cong…blur”. Varnado Simpson, a rifleman from the 3rd Platoon who had participated in the massacre, described the mental process of the average soldier in Vietnam: “Who is the enemy? How can you distinguish between the civilians and the non-civilians? The same people who come and work in the bases at daytime, they just want to shoot and kill you at nighttime. So how can you distinguish between the two? The good or the bad? All of them look the same”. During the Peer’s Inquiry, many members of C Company were called individually to explain the events at My Lai. The blame for whom the final order to kill and destroy everything came from was not perfectly clear. While many pinned Calley as the man who had insisted on taking no prisoners, others pointed the blame at Captain Medina. When Medina and Calley were questioned, each contended that their orders had come from higher up the line of command. Much of the American public believed Calley was a scapegoat for higher commanding officers for their orders. While the majority of the public seemed to view Calley as just another victim of My Lai and not a war criminal, the authors as well as antiwar liberals felt justice had been miscarried. The public “vested him with heroic status, or perhaps even made him another of the era’s antiheroes”. In Calley’s final statement to the Peer’s Commission he states proudly, “I felt then and I still do that I acted as I was directed, and I carried out the orders that I was given, and I do not feel wrong in doing so”. Olson and Roberts end their analysis of the events calling the events “a cancer to the conscience of America”. Michael Bilton and Kevin Sim draw from their encounters with the soldiers at My Lai an analysis of their mental state before, during and after the slaughter. Of the men in Charlie Company, they describe and interview Varnado Simpson, Kenneth Hodges, Greg Olsen, Harry Stanley, and finally William Laws Calley. Immediately the authors refer to Varnado Simpson. Twenty years after the events at My Lai, Varnado is found shut away in his own home, too guilt-ridden and paranoid to be anything but reclusive. Having been admitted to a Veterans Administration hospital multiple times for suicidal tendencies and depression, Varnado was on a barrage of medications and the interviewers remark that his “hands were still shaking wildly. He tried in vain to rest them on his legs but his legs shook too. His whole body shuddered in distress”. When attempting to explain what happened and why, he says, “I just went. My mind just went…I just killed. Once I started…the training, the whole programing part of killing, it just came out…it can happen to anyone”. At the end of his interview, Varnado expresses his feelings about the way his life has turned out and what he has done: “There’s more destructiveness in my mind than goodness...I’m ashamed, I’m sorry, I’m guilty. But I did it, you know…It happened”. Kenneth Hodges was a farmer’s boy, enticed by the idea of travel and seeing the world, and enlisted into the Army. He came from a strong Christian family. Similarly, Greg Olson came from a devout Mormon family whose family had expected him to go to college. However, like Kenneth, he was enchanted by the idea of adventure and was naïve. Harry Stanley was raised in a large family whose values emphasized equality. He joined after a disagreement with his father and after he came back from the My Lai incident his mother “…viewed [him] as a different person, somebody you don’t want to trust”. William Calley had come from an average “…stable family; he had been neither popular nor unpopular; he had no particular talents and few, if any, enthusiasms…throughout a long education he had shown no aptitude for learning. His college career had simply fizzled out”. He had joined the army at the age of 22. Bilton and Sims find from these men that during their training, they were less than prepared for the war. Varnado Simpson recalls his training and explains how they are essentially hyped up for the kills but nothing was realistic. Greg Olsen found the whole experience depressing and believed the men were “thugs”. After the massacre, he wrote to his father relaying his feelings on the actions of his fellows: “These are all seemingly normal guys…it was murder, and I’m ashamed of myself for not trying to do anything about it…my faith in my fellow men is shot all to hell”. “The My Lai Tapes” narrated by Robert Hodierne presents similar information as Four Hours in My Lai with the advantage of audio. The tapes found and reported on include recordings of testimonies made at the Pentagon during the Peers Inquiry. While the interviews and information is the same presented in Four Hours in My Lai as the tapes were a vital resource for Bilton and Sim, “The My Lai Tapes” relay the impact of the emotions behind each voice involved. In addition to the testimonies, there are recordings from the helicopters as they advanced into Son My, giving the listener a sense of the event as it began. Varnado Simpson recounts their actions with a voice of resignation and guilt, while Calley’s sounds cavalier and is clearly not remorseful in his Peer’s interview. These interviews and recordings render the events in a new perspective that brings to life the massacre. Finally, in Claude Cookman’s Journal of American History article, “The My Lai Massacre Concretized in a Victim’s Face”, Ron Haeberle’s photos are analyzed for their role in the uncovering of the events that took place in Son My village. Without his photos and their publication in both “Life” and “Time” magazine, the events in My Lai would have made little or no impact on the American public. The color pictures Haeberle had taken were with his own camera as opposed to the army-issue black-and-white camera, and he did not tell his superiors about his own film. Cookman reviews the many shocking photographs made public, commenting upon the scale of the killings demonstrated by piles of bodies of not only elderly men but of children and women, too. Cookman identifies one of Haeberle’s images, the one most frequently published of “two women, two teenage girls, and three children, standing barefoot” just before they are gunned down, as the most “emotionally compelling photograph”. The image captures one of the young women refastening her blouse after being assaulted by a soldier, an older woman’s face in angst, and a young boy clutching at his baby sibling’s leg. Cookman acknowledges the fact that the victims’ eyes are meeting those of the soldiers’ at whose mercy they are at, as opposed to the camera and the eventual audience of the world. While many argue that these photographs simply objectify a foreign concept of “unbridgeable…cultural and socioeconomic differences”, Cookman is firm in his belief that through “their expressions of confusion, fear, disbelief, sadness, and incomprehension...we can see them as more than ‘gooks’”. Reception to the photos was mixed. Many believed the images challenged the idea of American innocence and denied the photos and their revelations, while others, including Cookman, believed the photographs were vital to American understanding of the responsibility each person has as a human and as a citizen, and their importance in debunking the idea of moral superiority. Cookman best responds to contrary beliefs when he states: “What is unpatriotic is to believe that God approves of everything our country does and to adopt a “my-country-right-or-wrong” attitude, because those positions let us abdicate our responsibility to govern ourselves…it should teach us to speak out during current and future wars.” It is evident that none of the authors contest to the atrocious and debilitating nature of the juncture at My Lai, but their feelings towards the significance of the proceedings differ. James Olson and Randy Roberts offer not only an introduction but actual physical evidence in transcripts of the events at My Lai, but also examine the question of culpability in their book My Lai: A Brief History with Documents. Bilton and Sim, in their book Four Hours in My Lai, answer the question of what exactly was going through these men’s minds as they committed these murders and rapes. They provide an intimate look into the soldiers’ lives prior to and after Vietnam. In conjunction with Four Hours in My Lai, a BBC reporter in a podcast provides a unique audible attribute in the form of interviews and radio recordings. The audio proves to be meritorious to the audience as it sheds light on the key personalities behind the massacre and lends to an understanding of their dispositions. Finally, the article from The Journal of American History titled “The My Lai Massacre Concretized in a Victim’s Face” explains thoroughly the significance of the color photos taken that day and the telling way in which the American public reacted. One quote used unanimously throughout all the sources best sums up the consensus of the authors on the subject: “A country without a conscience is a country without a soul, and a country without a soul is a country that cannot survive.”
--------------------------------------------
[ 1 ]. James Olson and Randy Roberts, My Lai: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1998), 7.
[ 2 ]. Olson and Roberts, My Lai: A Brief History with Documents, 11.
[ 3 ]. Olson and Roberts, My Lai: A Brief History with Documents, 16.
[ 4 ]. Olson and Roberts, My Lai: A Brief History with Documents, 45.
[ 5 ]. Olson and Roberts, My Lai: A Brief History with Documents, 179.
[ 6 ]. Olson and Roberts, My Lai: A Brief History with Documents, 186.
[ 7 ]. Olson and Roberts, My Lai: A Brief History with Documents, 190.
[ 8 ]. Michael Bilton and Kevin Sim, Four Hours in My Lai (New York: Penguin Books Ltd., 1993), 6.
[ 9 ]. Bilton and Sim, Four Hours in My Lai, 7.
[ 10 ]. Bilton and Sim, Four Hours in My Lai, 8.
[ 11 ]. Bilton and Sim, Four Hours in My Lai, 49.
[ 12 ]. Bilton and Sim, Four Hours in My Lai, 50.
[ 13 ]. Bilton and Sim, Four Hours in My Lai, 55.
[ 14 ]. Bilton and Sim, Four Hours in My Lai, 93.
[ 15 ]. Claude Cookman, “My Lai Concretized in a Victim’s Face”, The Journal of American History 94 (2007).
[ 16 ]. Cookman, “My Lai Concretized in a Victim’s Face”.
[ 17 ]. Cookman, “My Lai Concretized in a Victim’s Face”.
[ 18 ]. Cookman, “My Lai Concretized in a Victim’s Face”.
[ 19 ]. Cookman, “My Lai Concretized in a Victim’s Face”.
[ 20 ]. Olson and Roberts, My Lai: A Brief History with Documents, 3.
their contempt for the atrocities committed at My Lai in their book Four Hours in My Lai. Drawing from interviews held with both American and Vietnamese survivors, they delve deeper into the psychology and reasoning behind the soldiers’ actions and how their actions have affected them so many years later. Similarly, in a two-part special radio series for BBC titled “The My Lai Tapes”, journalist Robert Hodierne reconstructs the unfortunate events of that day. The voices of those interviewed effectively bring a somber realism to it that evokes more emotion and empathy than pure text. Claude Cookman, a professor of the history of photography, centralizes on the vital nature of the few journalistic photographs taken at My Lai by Ron Haeberle. In his article published in The Journal of American History titled “The My Lai Massacre Concretized in a Victim’s Face”, Cookman examines how these vivid visual accounts brought necessary attention to the massacre and also to the myth of American innocence. To summarize the events that transpired, Charlie Company, on March 16, 1968 in the village of Son My, utterly destroyed all livestock, residences, massacred and tortured its citizens – from children to old men and pregnant women. After four hours, the village of Son My was burning and everyone and thing was dead. The merciless and senseless massacre was subsequently covered up, despite initial efforts to lodge formal complaints. Nearly two years later after hearing from multiple primary sources about the incident, Ronald Ridenhour, a veteran of aviation during the war, wrote his local democratic congressman a letter detailing the events of that day. His letter spurred a long-awaited investigation headed by Lieutenant General William Peers and eventually identified 224 serious violations of the military code. The investigation and its findings triggered national controversy throughout the United States, and the results of the trials were equally, if not more, controversial. Of all those involved, only William Calley was found guilty, convicted of the premeditated murder of 22 civilians and sentenced to life in prison in 1971. Ultimately, however, Calley was released on parole in 1974 having served only three and a half years. All other officers either merely had their rank in the army reduced, were acquitted or had all charges dropped. If there were a legitimate hero that day, the authors concede, Hugh Thompson Jr., the helicopter pilot that landed his chopper between Lieutenant Calley and a group of Vietnamese civilians to prevent more slaughter, was the one. James S.
Olson and Randy Roberts confront the difficult question of who was ultimately to blame for the complete destruction of the villages of Son My. The military named the village of Son My containing My Lai, My Khe, and Co Luy ‘Pinkville’ in reference to the color designated to the region by combat maps. Pinkville resided in the Quang Ngai province; an area known to the military to be largely occupied with Viet Cong and Viet Cong sympathizers. U.S. military and civilian leaders were beginning “to view the war in terms of territorial conquests, not the attainment of the villagers’ support”. Charlie Company 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry under Captain Ernest “Mad Dog” Medina and Lieutenant William Calley arrived in Quang Ngai in 1967. Olson and Roberts immediately point out the emphasis the company’s training had made regarding obeying orders at all costs. Right away they raise the question of whether or not there is a conflict between following the orders of superiors and following one’s conscience. Paul Meadlo, a rifleman in C Company, recalls what he took from his training: “…you’re trained to take orders from the first day you go to that damned service, and you come back and, all right, you want to try some people that had to take orders”. To make matters worse, C Company’s leader of the 1st Platoon, William Calley was incompetent. All four sources agree on the fact that Calley was painfully ordinary and demonstrated the bare minimum of what was necessary of an officer. He could hardly even read the military maps. His promotion to Lieutenant came at a time when there was a shortage of second lieutenants, but most certainly not because he was well qualified. As the platoon moved throughout Quang Ngai, his poor leadership was evident. He constantly got his men lost and Captain Medina often referred to him as “Lieutenant Shithead”. Aside from being an evident poor leader, the company was becoming discouraged and frustrated by the guerilla-style warfare the VC
conducted. The men began to see “the sharp line between civilians and Viet-Cong…blur”. Varnado Simpson, a rifleman from the 3rd Platoon who had participated in the massacre, described the mental process of the average soldier in Vietnam: “Who is the enemy? How can you distinguish between the civilians and the non-civilians? The same people who come and work in the bases at daytime, they just want to shoot and kill you at nighttime. So how can you distinguish between the two? The good or the bad? All of them look the same”. During the Peer’s Inquiry, many members of C Company were called individually to explain the events at My Lai. The blame for whom the final order to kill and destroy everything came from was not perfectly clear. While many pinned Calley as the man who had insisted on taking no prisoners, others pointed the blame at Captain Medina. When Medina and Calley were questioned, each contended that their orders had come from higher up the line of command. Much of the American public believed Calley was a scapegoat for higher commanding officers for their orders. While the majority of the public seemed to view Calley as just another victim of My Lai and not a war criminal, the authors as well as antiwar liberals felt justice had been miscarried. The public “vested him with heroic status, or perhaps even made him another of the era’s antiheroes”. In Calley’s final statement to the Peer’s Commission he states proudly, “I felt then and I still do that I acted as I was directed, and I carried out the orders that I was given, and I do not feel wrong in doing so”. Olson and Roberts end their analysis of the events calling the events “a cancer to the conscience of America”. Michael Bilton and Kevin Sim draw from their encounters with the soldiers at My Lai an analysis of their mental state before, during and after the slaughter. Of the men in Charlie Company, they describe and interview Varnado Simpson, Kenneth Hodges, Greg Olsen, Harry Stanley, and finally William Laws Calley. Immediately the authors refer to Varnado Simpson. Twenty years after the events at My Lai, Varnado is found shut away in his own home, too guilt-ridden and paranoid to be anything but reclusive. Having been admitted to a Veterans Administration hospital multiple times for suicidal tendencies and depression, Varnado was on a barrage of medications and the interviewers remark that his “hands were still shaking wildly. He tried in vain to rest them on his legs but his legs shook too. His whole body shuddered in distress”. When attempting to explain what happened and why, he says, “I just went. My mind just went…I just killed. Once I started…the training, the whole programing part of killing, it just came out…it can happen to anyone”. At the end of his interview, Varnado expresses his feelings about the way his life has turned out and what he has done: “There’s more destructiveness in my mind than goodness...I’m ashamed, I’m sorry, I’m guilty. But I did it, you know…It happened”. Kenneth Hodges was a farmer’s boy, enticed by the idea of travel and seeing the world, and enlisted into the Army. He came from a strong Christian family. Similarly, Greg Olson came from a devout Mormon family whose family had expected him to go to college. However, like Kenneth, he was enchanted by the idea of adventure and was naïve. Harry Stanley was raised in a large family whose values emphasized equality. He joined after a disagreement with his father and after he came back from the My Lai incident his mother “…viewed [him] as a different person, somebody you don’t want to trust”. William Calley had come from an average “…stable family; he had been neither popular nor unpopular; he had no particular talents and few, if any, enthusiasms…throughout a long education he had shown no aptitude for learning. His college career had simply fizzled out”. He had joined the army at the age of 22. Bilton and Sims find from these men that during their training, they were less than prepared for the war. Varnado Simpson recalls his training and explains how they are essentially hyped up for the kills but nothing was realistic. Greg Olsen found the whole experience depressing and believed the men were “thugs”. After the massacre, he wrote to his father relaying his feelings on the actions of his fellows: “These are all seemingly normal guys…it was murder, and I’m ashamed of myself for not trying to do anything about it…my faith in my fellow men is shot all to hell”. “The My Lai Tapes” narrated by Robert Hodierne presents similar information as Four Hours in My Lai with the advantage of audio. The tapes found and reported on include recordings of testimonies made at the Pentagon during the Peers Inquiry. While the interviews and information is the same presented in Four Hours in My Lai as the tapes were a vital resource for Bilton and Sim, “The My Lai Tapes” relay the impact of the emotions behind each voice involved. In addition to the testimonies, there are recordings from the helicopters as they advanced into Son My, giving the listener a sense of the event as it began. Varnado Simpson recounts their actions with a voice of resignation and guilt, while Calley’s sounds cavalier and is clearly not remorseful in his Peer’s interview. These interviews and recordings render the events in a new perspective that brings to life the massacre. Finally, in Claude Cookman’s Journal of American History article, “The My Lai Massacre Concretized in a Victim’s Face”, Ron Haeberle’s photos are analyzed for their role in the uncovering of the events that took place in Son My village. Without his photos and their publication in both “Life” and “Time” magazine, the events in My Lai would have made little or no impact on the American public. The color pictures Haeberle had taken were with his own camera as opposed to the army-issue black-and-white camera, and he did not tell his superiors about his own film. Cookman reviews the many shocking photographs made public, commenting upon the scale of the killings demonstrated by piles of bodies of not only elderly men but of children and women, too. Cookman identifies one of Haeberle’s images, the one most frequently published of “two women, two teenage girls, and three children, standing barefoot” just before they are gunned down, as the most “emotionally compelling photograph”. The image captures one of the young women refastening her blouse after being assaulted by a soldier, an older woman’s face in angst, and a young boy clutching at his baby sibling’s leg. Cookman acknowledges the fact that the victims’ eyes are meeting those of the soldiers’ at whose mercy they are at, as opposed to the camera and the eventual audience of the world. While many argue that these photographs simply objectify a foreign concept of “unbridgeable…cultural and socioeconomic differences”, Cookman is firm in his belief that through “their expressions of confusion, fear, disbelief, sadness, and incomprehension...we can see them as more than ‘gooks’”. Reception to the photos was mixed. Many believed the images challenged the idea of American innocence and denied the photos and their revelations, while others, including Cookman, believed the photographs were vital to American understanding of the responsibility each person has as a human and as a citizen, and their importance in debunking the idea of moral superiority. Cookman best responds to contrary beliefs when he states: “What is unpatriotic is to believe that God approves of everything our country does and to adopt a “my-country-right-or-wrong” attitude, because those positions let us abdicate our responsibility to govern ourselves…it should teach us to speak out during current and future wars.” It is evident that none of the authors contest to the atrocious and debilitating nature of the juncture at My Lai, but their feelings towards the significance of the proceedings differ. James Olson and Randy Roberts offer not only an introduction but actual physical evidence in transcripts of the events at My Lai, but also examine the question of culpability in their book My Lai: A Brief History with Documents. Bilton and Sim, in their book Four Hours in My Lai, answer the question of what exactly was going through these men’s minds as they committed these murders and rapes. They provide an intimate look into the soldiers’ lives prior to and after Vietnam. In conjunction with Four Hours in My Lai, a BBC reporter in a podcast provides a unique audible attribute in the form of interviews and radio recordings. The audio proves to be meritorious to the audience as it sheds light on the key personalities behind the massacre and lends to an understanding of their dispositions. Finally, the article from The Journal of American History titled “The My Lai Massacre Concretized in a Victim’s Face” explains thoroughly the significance of the color photos taken that day and the telling way in which the American public reacted. One quote used unanimously throughout all the sources best sums up the consensus of the authors on the subject: “A country without a conscience is a country without a soul, and a country without a soul is a country that cannot survive.”
--------------------------------------------
[ 1 ]. James Olson and Randy Roberts, My Lai: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1998), 7.
[ 2 ]. Olson and Roberts, My Lai: A Brief History with Documents, 11.
[ 3 ]. Olson and Roberts, My Lai: A Brief History with Documents, 16.
[ 4 ]. Olson and Roberts, My Lai: A Brief History with Documents, 45.
[ 5 ]. Olson and Roberts, My Lai: A Brief History with Documents, 179.
[ 6 ]. Olson and Roberts, My Lai: A Brief History with Documents, 186.
[ 7 ]. Olson and Roberts, My Lai: A Brief History with Documents, 190.
[ 8 ]. Michael Bilton and Kevin Sim, Four Hours in My Lai (New York: Penguin Books Ltd., 1993), 6.
[ 9 ]. Bilton and Sim, Four Hours in My Lai, 7.
[ 10 ]. Bilton and Sim, Four Hours in My Lai, 8.
[ 11 ]. Bilton and Sim, Four Hours in My Lai, 49.
[ 12 ]. Bilton and Sim, Four Hours in My Lai, 50.
[ 13 ]. Bilton and Sim, Four Hours in My Lai, 55.
[ 14 ]. Bilton and Sim, Four Hours in My Lai, 93.
[ 15 ]. Claude Cookman, “My Lai Concretized in a Victim’s Face”, The Journal of American History 94 (2007).
[ 16 ]. Cookman, “My Lai Concretized in a Victim’s Face”.
[ 17 ]. Cookman, “My Lai Concretized in a Victim’s Face”.
[ 18 ]. Cookman, “My Lai Concretized in a Victim’s Face”.
[ 19 ]. Cookman, “My Lai Concretized in a Victim’s Face”.
[ 20 ]. Olson and Roberts, My Lai: A Brief History with Documents, 3.