>Merdina’s orders were followed to a T. Soldiers of Charlie Company killed. They killed everything. They killed everything that moved.Â
Advancing in small squads, the men of the unit shot chickens as they scurried about, pigs as they bolted, and cows and water buffalo lowing among the thatch-roofed houses. They gunned down old men sitting in their homes and children as they ran for cover. They tossed grenades into homes without even bothering to look inside.Â
An officer grabbed a woman by the hair and shot her point-blank with a pistol. A woman came out of her home with a baby in her arms and was shot down on the spot. As the tiny child hit the ground, another GI opened up on the infant with his M-16 automatic rifle.
Over four hours, members of Charlie Company methodically slaughtered more than five hundred unarmed victims, killing some in ones and twos, others in small groups, and collecting many more in a drainage ditch that would become an infamous killing ground. They faced no opposition. They even took a quiet break to eat lunch in the midst of the carnage. Along the way, they also raped women and young girls, mutilated the dead, systematically burned homes, and fouled the area’s drinking water.Â
* Nick Turse, *Kill Anything That Moves*
My Lai was not an isolated incident or an accident. It just happened to make the headlines. In the Mekong Delta, Central Highlands, and the Quang Tri borderlands, American forces routinely killed civilians in violation of international law, strafing them from helicopters, bombing their villages wholesale, and gunning down families in cold blood.
SasquatchMcKraken on
We sort of gloss over the fact that we were measuring success by body count, it stands to reason that this wouldn’t incentivize making sure every body was VC or NVA. That’s not even getting into things like the Phoenix program. We treat Vietnam like it was our tragedy but we’ll probably never know how many Vietnamese we killed. Most estimates are probably low-balling it.Â
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>Merdina’s orders were followed to a T. Soldiers of Charlie Company killed. They killed everything. They killed everything that moved.Â
Advancing in small squads, the men of the unit shot chickens as they scurried about, pigs as they bolted, and cows and water buffalo lowing among the thatch-roofed houses. They gunned down old men sitting in their homes and children as they ran for cover. They tossed grenades into homes without even bothering to look inside.Â
An officer grabbed a woman by the hair and shot her point-blank with a pistol. A woman came out of her home with a baby in her arms and was shot down on the spot. As the tiny child hit the ground, another GI opened up on the infant with his M-16 automatic rifle.
Over four hours, members of Charlie Company methodically slaughtered more than five hundred unarmed victims, killing some in ones and twos, others in small groups, and collecting many more in a drainage ditch that would become an infamous killing ground. They faced no opposition. They even took a quiet break to eat lunch in the midst of the carnage. Along the way, they also raped women and young girls, mutilated the dead, systematically burned homes, and fouled the area’s drinking water.Â
* Nick Turse, *Kill Anything That Moves*
My Lai was not an isolated incident or an accident. It just happened to make the headlines. In the Mekong Delta, Central Highlands, and the Quang Tri borderlands, American forces routinely killed civilians in violation of international law, strafing them from helicopters, bombing their villages wholesale, and gunning down families in cold blood.
We sort of gloss over the fact that we were measuring success by body count, it stands to reason that this wouldn’t incentivize making sure every body was VC or NVA. That’s not even getting into things like the Phoenix program. We treat Vietnam like it was our tragedy but we’ll probably never know how many Vietnamese we killed. Most estimates are probably low-balling it.Â
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