Word: lai
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...military activities. Although no one can be sure, the chances are that no other atrocity of comparable scope has taken place in Viet Nam. But inevitably, the My Lai revelation has started a flood of other horror stories. Dozens of journalists, soldiers and visitors to Viet Nam have begun to recall other incidents of U.S. brutality. Individual acts of senseless ?sometimes gleeful?killing of civilians by U.S. troops apparently happened often enough to be deeply disturbing...
Terry Reid, 22, a former infantryman in the same Americal Division, claimed last week that he counted "60 dead bodies?women, children and maybe a few old and decrepit men" after U.S. troops had shot up a village 130 miles south of My Lai in early 1968. A Viet Nam veteran at Fort Benning, Ga., who would not give his name said he and other G.I.s had taken three Viet Cong prisoners up in a helicopter. "We told them to talk or we'd throw them out. The first guy wouldn't talk, so we tossed him out. The second...
...important to remember that the U.S. in Viet Nam faces an unusually brutal enemy who uses terror deliberately (see box, page 29). But that certainly is no excuse for American behavior at My Lai. It is also small comfort to the U.S. that other Western nations have been guilty of wartime atrocities. The French executed some 15,000 Moslems in the long Algerian war of the 1950s. At Amritsar in India's Punjab, British Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer marched 50 of his soldiers toward a menacing mob of Indians in 1919 and, without warning, they killed 379 people with rifle...
...desire to equate all such savagery is tempting to some. Moscow's Trud compared My Lai "to the destruction by the Hitlerites of the Czechoslovak village of Lidice, the French town of Oradour-sur-Glane, and to the Nazi atrocities on Soviet soil." A baker in Bonn was overheard telling a customer who asked about the massacre: "What else can you expect?they're just doing the same
...attempt to face and understand My Lai, some contributing causes help explain, if not condone. There is, unfortunately, a racial element. To the G.I., the Vietnamese, both North and South, "slant." is a "gook," "dink," "slope".; The terms, often used unthinkingly, tend to shift the object into a thing rather than a person ? and hence something that it is easier to kill...