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66 CHAPTeR FoUR “Uncharted Legal Waters” The My Lai Massacre and the Jordan Memorandum In the spring of 1969 a Vietnam veteran named Ronald Ridenhour acted on some painful knowledge that had been weighing heavily on his conscience: while he was still in Vietnam some of his fellow soldiers had told him of the massacre of a whole village. He was aware of incidents in which villagers had been killed in twos and threes, but this was different. Initially disbelieving, he made a point of questioning his service buddies and acquaintances while in Vietnam until he was certain in his own mind that a large-scale atrocity had taken place, and he continued his inquiries with fellow veterans once in the United States. Ridenhour decided to reveal what he learned, and he turned out to be an unusually eloquent and effective witness. His report not only divulged that a crime had taken place and prompted an investigation and legal proceedings against certain suspects; it also validated the long-held fears that in the absence of legislation closing the jurisdictional gap perpetrators who had left the armed forces could literally get away with murder. The massacre of which Ridenhour had learned took place on March 16, 1968, when Task Force Barker, a unit of the Americal Division, attacked the village of Son My, located near the coast of Quang Ngai province.1 The plan was to surprise the 48th Viet Cong Local Force Battalion, a unit that had fought the South Vietnamese and the Americans tenaciously during the previous three years, in one of their village strongholds.2 Task Force Barker, commanded by Lt. Col. Frank A. Barker, consisted of three companies.3 Charlie Company’s target in the first phase of the operation was a place the Americans identified as My Lai (4), a subhamlet of Son My. The majority of the killings took place in My Lai (4). elements of Bravo Company entered another hamlet marked on maps as My Khe (4), as part of the operation directed at the nearby My Lai (1), which was reputed to be the Viet Cong 67 “Uncharted Legal Waters” stronghold. A second massacre took place at My Khe (4). Alpha Company acted as a blocking force and took little direct part in the killings that day. The day before the attack, Barker addressed the gathered troops, telling them he wanted all the buildings in the Son My area burned, the foodstuffs destroyed, and the livestock killed.4 The army’s review of the massacre, the Peers Inquiry, later found that these orders “were clearly illegal” and conveyed to a sizable number of the soldiers engaged in the assault that everyone in the village was the enemy and that the enemy was to be destroyed. The orders were repeated in briefings by the commanders of Bravo and Charlie Companies and “in that context were also illegal.”5 The assault on My Lai (4) began with preparatory artillery fire, delivered without warning. When the villagers heard the artillery striking, most of them fled to bunkers, although some remained in their houses.6 Helicopter gunships attacked the subhamlet with rockets and machine-gun fire, and the door gunners of the helicopters airlifting the troops to My Lai (4) shot up the tree lines surrounding the landing zone.7 Several helicopter lifts brought Charlie Company onto the landing zone. Before entering My Lai (4), the soldiers killed several Vietnamese fleeing the area. The Viet Cong battalion they sought was not present, however. As the Peers Inquiry found, “No resistance was encountered at this time or later in the day.”8 As 1st and 2nd Platoons of Charlie Company entered My Lai (4) and approached its houses, they broke into smaller units: squads and even smaller groups consisting of just a few men. Members of the two platoons intermingled rather than remaining with their units.9 Because of the vegetation that separated groups of houses from each other, the various groups were often out of eyesight of one another and were acting to a large extent independently of one another.10 Members of both platoons roved through the village and killed everyone they encountered, from the very young to the very old. In parts of the village the killings were organized and systematic; elsewhere the soldiers ran wild. Some of the GIs raped or gang-raped women and girls, sexually mutilated several of the victims, and mutilated other corpses. The troops burned the houses by lighting their...

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