A portrait of Lieutenant Colonel Frank A. Barker, 34, taken while he was stationed at Fort Bragg. He is believed to be the architect of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam in 1968. Barker was the commander of Task Force Barker, the unit responsible for the massacre (North Carolina, 1962) [562 x 896].

[Roots of My Lai Massacre lie with task force leader’s ambition, historian contends](https://www.stripes.com/theaters/asia_pacific/2024-03-14/my-lai-massacre-vietnam-war-13312699.html)

>The atrocity’s roots lead most clearly to the task force commander who concocted the mission, historian Marshall Poe argues in *The Reality of the My Lai Massacre and the Myth of the Vietnam War* published late last year. Poe contends that the massacre would have likely never happened if not for Lt. Col. Frank Barker, the ambitious officer who planned the mission and longed for a battalion command. Barker’s role has been largely overlooked because he was killed in a helicopter crash only a few months after the massacre; he thus faced no court-martial nor could he offer testimony in the subsequent investigation.
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>”Barker was a highly decorated officer who’d been in the Army for a long time, and he was well respected,” Poe told Stars and Stripes by phone March 4. “His actions on the day are really pretty much inexplicable, outside my hypothesis that he was really hoping the [Viet Cong] were in this village and he was going to get a big victory with a big body count.” Poe, who taught history at Harvard and Columbia universities and is founder of New Books Network, pored over nearly 25,000 pages of documents, including hundreds of transcripts generated by the Peers inquiry.
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>Poe contends that Barker essentially ordered the troops to kill everyone in the hamlet designated by the Army as My Lai (4).