Vietnam War/My Lai Massacre

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Event.png Vietnam War/My Lai Massacre (war crime)  History CommonsRdf-entity.pngRdf-icon.png
My Lai massacre.jpg
Date16 March 1968
LocationSon My,  village,  Sơn Tịnh District,  of,  South Vietnam
Coordinates15.178333, 108.869444
PerpetratorsUS Army
Blamed onTask force from the United States Army Americal Division 2LT. William Calley (convicted and then released by President Nixon to serve house arrest for two years)
TypeMassacre
Deaths504
Injured (non-fatal)?"?" is not a number.
Exposed bySeymour Hersh
DescriptionThe systematic, cold-blooded murder, butchery and rape of 504 Vietnamese civilians including 173 children by a company of 115 US army soldiers.

The 26 soldiers charged who committed rape and murdered hundreds of men, women, children and infants, eventually served a total of only 3½ years under house arrest. Seymour Hersh broke the story in 1969.[1][2][3]

Developments before the massacre

In 1968, an American journalist, Jonathan Schell, wrote that in the Vietnamese province of Quang Ngai, where the Mỹ Lai massacre occurred, up to 70% of all villages were destroyed by the air strikes and artillery bombardments, including the use of napalm; 40 percent of the population were refugees, and the overall civilian casualties were close to 50,000 a year. Regarding the massacre at Mỹ Lai, he stated, "There can be no doubt that such an atrocity was possible only because a number of other methods of killing civilians and destroying their villages had come to be the rule, and not the exception, in our conduct of the war".[4][5][6][7]


 

The Official Culprit

Name
Task force from the United States Army Americal Division 2LT. William Calley (convicted and then released by President Nixon to serve house arrest for two years)
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References


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