History of the United States II / Unit 15 USH2 2139 worked example, 60 to 90 seconds
My Lai
The idea
In nineteen sixty-eight Captain Ernest Medina led about one hundred soldiers of Charlie Company into My Lai, a village suspected of hiding Viet Cong fighters, with orders to destroy it. Members of the First Platoon under Lieutenant William Calley forced seventy to eighty unarmed people, children and infants among them, into an irrigation ditch and shot them. The anchor says the dead numbered between three hundred forty-seven and five hundred four; none was armed, and the Americans were never fired upon.
In practice
Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson landing his helicopter to evacuate women and children.
Where people slip
The army first claimed one hundred fifty dead, most of them Viet Cong, in a firefight. The helicopter gunner Ron Ridenhour wrote to thirty members of Congress in April nineteen sixty-nine, and the reporter Seymour Hersh exposed the massacre that year, the Yawp records. Nearly half of those asked in a Minnesota poll refused to believe it had happened.
Your place on the trail
Every lesson rests on earlier ones and opens later ones. Tap any to jump.
Builds on
Unlocks
Something wrong in this lesson? Flag it · Sources for History of the United States II