Word: lai
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Only a shadow of a doubt now remains that the massacre at My Lai was an atrocity, barbaric in execution. Yet almost as chilling to the American mind is the character of the alleged perpetrators. The deed was not performed by patently demented men. Instead, according to the ample testimony of their friends and relatives, the men of C Company who swept through My Lai were for the most part almost depressingly normal. They were Everymen, decent in their daily lives, who at home in Ohio or Vermont would regard it as unthinkable to maliciously strike a child, much less...
Inevitably, there were those who, while not denying the deed, felt it would be better left untold. After a G.I. witness described on television what he had seen at My Lai, Colorado Senator Peter Dominick asked: "What kind of country do we have when that kind of garbage gets put on the air?" A more pertinent question was raised by William Fulbright, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. "This incident can cause grave concern all over the world," he said, "as to what kind of country we are." Countless U.S. citizens, whether foes or critics...
...living with the knowledge of what they did. When Private Meadlo stepped on a land mine shortly after the massacre and it ripped away his foot, he screamed: "God has punished me for what I did in the village." Other men of the company have recurrent nightmares about My Lai. The scene itself is quiet now. All that remains today is a low pile of red-brick rubble, scorched black by fire and surrounded by fields filled with graves...
...strangeness of Viet Nam to freshly arrived U.S. troops and the frustrations of guerrilla warfare do not adequately explain My Lai. In March of 1968, most members of C Company of the Americal Division's 11th Infantry Brigade had never been tested in direct combat with any large numbers of the enemy. Trained together in Hawaii, they had been in Viet Nam only one month. Yet as part of Task Force Barker, their assignment in March was a fearsome one: to clear the Viet Cong out of Quang Ngai province?an area long known as "the cradle of revolution...
...inexperienced Charlie Company, commanded by Captain Ernest Medina, 33, thus had ample cause for fear as it prepared to assault My Lai, a village with bricked-up huts and extensive hidden tunnels in an area called Pinkville (because its cluster of nine hamlets was populous enough to be tinted pink on war maps). The infantrymen were also angry. Repeatedly lashed by booby traps and sniper fire from unseen Viet Cong, the company's strength had already been cut from 190 to about 105. Of those, about 80 men were helicoptered into a grassy spot on the outskirts of My Lai...