Word: lai
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...area I was from, I guess you would call real patriotic." Samples first saw action in June 1968 at Chu Lai. When he started firing at Viet Cong in a paddyfield, he told himself with a certain wonder, "This is fun." That day he won a Bronze Star for taking out a V.C. position at great personal risk. But there followed a different kind of killing. Samples came upon a Viet Cong gunner who was wounded, lying on his back, begging for help. "We radioed the company and said, 'What do you want us to do with...
...front lines. Reality tended to melt into layers of unknowability. The same person could be a friend and an enemy?the smiling laundress in the morning carried a V.C. satchel charge at night. The enemy might even be a child with a basket. The ambiguity made Americans twitch. "My Lai?" says Larry Mitchell. "There were lots of My Lais...
Larry Mitchell would know. He understands the murderous brew of rage and fear and firepower that produced My Lai. A Philadelphia-born black, Mitchell, 38, went to Viet Nam in 1965 as a sergeant in the Green Berets. "They told us that we were going to make the country a democracy," he remembers now. "I still thought of war in John Wayne terms: only the bad guys got killed." Mitchell was chastened in a hurry; he was rocketed a few minutes after he arrived in the combat zone. "You never saw the enemy. That was the most frightening part. Even...
...that prizes submission may retard the evolution of civilian society toward that goal (if, indeed, it is moving in that direction). At the very least, mindless obedience inside the military was responsible for the single event that most turned public opinion against the last war--the massacre at My Lai...
...dawning that saturation bombing means blowing up every village in a province designated "strategic" by a Pentagon flunkie, and that anti-personnel devices are grenades filled with steel pins designed expressly to rip humans apart. No Thermopylae for us not even any Chateaux Thierry. We read about My Lai when we were nine or ten, and it will take more than the Iranian crisis to make us forget that the ditches in that small Asian town were filled with civilians, with children...