Ronald Haeberle Essay

Ronald Haeberle Ronald Haeberle was an Army photographer that was assigned to C Company when the troops entered the hamlet of My Lai in the March of 1968. His role in the massacre as a combat photographer was to take pictures of the expected battle between American soldiers and Viet Cong in My Lai. The pictures he took had a huge impact in across the world when they were released to the public, and all of them were innocent My Lai men, women, and children cowering at gunpoint, or in piles of dead bodies. These same pictures were used to conduct an investigation lead by the Army to find the truth about what really happened in My Lai (Theiss). As combat photographer, Haeberle was tasked with taking pictures of the My Lai assault on March
of 1968 with the soldiers of C Company, 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry Regiment, 11th Light Infantry Brigade (Corrigan). Haeberle was not informed of the exact orders of the soldiers , he only knew there was supposed to be a fight with the Viet Cong. There was no fight, there were no Viet Cong, there was only hundreds of innocent civilians. The soldiers were ordered to kill anyone in the village, and even though it was clear there was no Viet Cong they still followed the orders. When asked about the American soldiers that were doing the killing Haeberle replied, “There was no feeling, nothing human about it” (Corrigan). Haeberle followed through with his orders too. He took pictures of the women, children and and the elderly cowering in fear and lumped into piles of dead bodies. These same pictures were later released to “Time” magazine and to the “Plain Dealer” after being used by the military to launch an investigation (Experience). In the end of the investigation the “U.S. Army board charged 14 officers of crimes related to the events at My Lai; only one was convicted”(History). Despite Ronald Haeberle turning in sufficient evidence of the crimes committed, only fourteen men were ever convicted, and all but one walked free. When Haeberle released the photos of the massacre, the impact was widespread mistrust and disbelief throughout an already war-weary American public.
After the public discovered what happened in My Lai, the people no longer knew what to think of the military efforts, they just knew they were sick of the war and constant bloodshed. When news of the massacre came out “Demands for withdrawal from Vietnam continued to grow, while others questioned the idea of blind loyalty to military leadership” (Experience). The people were already not happy with the war, but knowing that hundreds of innocents had been slaughtered completely destroyed their trust; more people began asking for a withdrawal from Vietnam and questioning the ideal of blindly following orders. These pictures didn’t just impact the Americans at home however, after the implementation of “Vietnamisation” many of the ground troops began to lose morale. The morale was so low among the ground troops that “many of them were annoyed, frustrated and addicted to drugs as a result”(Rohn). The My Lai massacre served as a huge turning point in the public opinion of the war; people no longer supported the war and soldiers could not handle such low morale, to the point where many soldiers turned to drugs. A mix of all these things coming together brought forth the idea of Vietnamisation, a system to equip and expand South Vietnamese soldiers and pull out American
soldiers.