American Experience: My Lai

Do Ba was eight years old in 1968. He lived in My Lai. Before March 16, he says, “I saw American soldiers whenever they came. They would gather up everyone, they would bring cake and candy for the children.” Slightly slowed-down home-movie-style footage shows skinny village kids in shorts, jumping to catch food packages tossed by a GI. He has his back to camera, their smiles are wide, and Do Ba continues. “Everyone would have some and then they would let us go home.”

For his interview in Barak Goodman’s documentary My Lai, Do Ba wears a striped Western-style shirt, his face lined, his eyes haunted. He remembers the massacre on 16 March 1968, when he and his family were led to an irrigation ditch, and one by one, they were shot dead. “I hid under my mother’s stomach,” he remembers, “as the ditch filled with blood.”

Do Ba and other My Lai survivors appear separately in the film, premiering 26 April as part of PBS’ American Experience. In this, at least, they are positioned much like the Americans who entered their village 42 years ago, shot unarmed civilians and burned their homes. Before that moment, radio operator Fred Widmer recalls, “There was nothing special about us. We were just your common, ordinary team.” The film illustrates his memory much as it does Bo Da’s: snapshots show young, lean American men, their faces unlined and their uniforms loose. They smile for the camera, posing with their weapons or squinting in the sunlight: Charlie Company at ease.

They were not at ease for long. Even before they entered the village in Quang Ngai Province known as “Pinkville,” the men of Charlie Company were increasingly on edge, frustrated and frightened, beset by snipers and land mines. Widmer, who appears in a snapshot smiling with Vietnamese children, explains the changing “attitude toward the villagers… Everybody’s an enemy. You don’t know who to trust, you don’t know who is a friend, who is a foe.” Footage shows Vietnamese wearing shorts and baggy shirts, with their hands tied behind their backs, heads down. Squad leader Lawrence La Croix asserts that civilians “know where the mines and booby traps are; they have to or they can’t move between villages.” And then he describes the next step in his and hi fellow GIs’ thinking: “But they’re not gonna tell you. They’re gonna let you blow your leg off. You begin to hate and that hatred becomes very intense and very real.”

But, My Lai suggests, that real hatred was also misdirected. Even before the massacre (which left 507 civilians dead), Widmer remembers the company’s shift into another gear: “You just throw the rule book away… You went into villages, started ripping shit apart.” La Croix says that company leaders encouraged aggression: Captain Ernest Medina “wanted us to carry aces of spades and every time we killed a Viet Cong, we were to leave the ace of spades on it, so that, you know, they knew that it was from the Death Dealers.” Team leader Thomas Turner situates Lt. William Calley as a problem, too invested in his military identity, too eager to please Medina: “To me,” Turner says, “In my mind, it made Captain Medina resent him even more.”

If the film doesn’t resolve the officers’ psychology or pathology, it does set a stage for the men’s willingness to commit the crime. Squad leader John Smail remembers, “We wanted contact, we wanted to fight the enemy,” and took as truth the bad information that the village was full of enemy personnel (writer Michael Bilton puts it this way: “The entire premise for going to My Lai was entirely false”). Squad leader Kenneth Hodges still looks back on the day with an unnerving, if understandable, sense of self-preservation: “The order was to kill or destroy everything in the village,” he says. “The children happened to be there. The people of that village were Viet Cong or Viet Cong sympathizers. Maybe some see it differently. That’s the way I see it.”

Other men on the scene, like army photographer Ron Haeberle, remember the horrors per se, without attribution to individuals: “It was just shoot, shoot, shoot at anything” (his photos, published in http://www.cleveland.com/plain-dealer-library/index.ssf/2009/11/plain_dealer_exclusive_my_lai_massacre_photos_by_ronald_haeberle.html”>The Plain Dealer in 1969, helped to raise U.S. public awareness, as the military began its investigation of the crime and the subsequent cover-up). And still others, like helicopter gunner Lawrence Colburn, remember efforts to stop the killing as it happened: Colburn, his crew chief Glenn Andreotta, and their pilot Hugh Thompson, Jr., witnessed Charlie Company’s attack. Mr. Thompson’s decision to intervene shocked Colburn, as they and another pilot landed their helicopters, and took on civilian survivors, training their own guns at Americans to keep them back.

While the film relies on a conventional talking-heads structure, it repeatedly juxtaposes the memories of soldiers with those of victims, insisting on the Americans’ stunning misreading of the situation. So, Widmer says, “Once the first civilian was killed, it was too late. Whoever killed the first civilian, that was the end of the situation… It went out of control.” Following several of Haeberle’s photos of bodies and screaming women and children, Tran Nam says, “I saw my father collapse and then my mother… They all continued to fall, my brother, younger than me, three years old: one shot and his head blasted onto the floor.” His voiceover ends on a photograph of a child, his face half gone.

While the documentary allows that the Americans were under stress and following orders, it insists that many of them made bad decisions — during and after the massacre. Colburn recalls his and Thompson’s efforts to report the crime, which lead to Thompson’s repeated assignments, alone, to “very dangerous areas.” Thompson (who died in 2006) told Colburn he “thought the higher ups wanted him to go away.”

For all that went wrong at My Lai and afterwards within the U.S. military, the film aligns itself with prosecutor Aubrey Daniel, who made the case against Calley, and planned to prosecute others — until Richard Nixon stepped in to “review” the case, following public outcries to “Free Calley.” Aubrey reads from his 1970 letter to the president: “How shocking it is if so many people across the nation have failed to see the moral issue which was involved in the trial of Lieutenant Calley — that it is unlawful for an American soldier to summarily execute unarmed and unresisting men, women, children, and babies.” But, he continues, “How much more appalling it is to see so many of the political leaders of the nation who have failed to see the moral issue, or, having seen it, to compromise it for political motive in the face of apparent public displeasure with the verdict.”

My Lai does not explicitly judge the men who have agreed to speak. But it is plain about its indictment of broader systems — military, political, cultural — that helped to make those men, that put them in dire situations, prepared them poorly, encouraged their rage and aggression, and then took no responsibility.