Word: pentagons
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Army last week began investigating its own investigation of the My Lai massacre. Two floors below ground level in the Pentagon's Army Operations Center, Lieut. General William R. Peers, who has been assigned to find out whether the Army originally whitewashed the affair, quizzed some of the key figures. Lieut. William Galley, charged with the murder of 109 civilians, testified for four hours, then stonily ignored questions from reporters outside the hearing room. Peers' panel also called Colonel Oran K. Henderson, commander of the brigade in which the accused C Company operated in March...
...major aim of the Pentagon investigation by General Peers is to find out why it took more than a year for word of the atrocity to reach Washington. One of the Pentagon's leading experts on guerrilla warfare, Peers was selected because he had commanded a division in Viet Nam but had no connection with the involved Americal Division. From what the Army has revealed so far, no suggestion that the My Lai deaths might have amounted to a massacre got past the Americal Division headquarters in Viet Nam. The only on-scene alarm seemingly was voiced by Helicopter...
Washington seems to have been alerted for the first time by letters mailed on April 2, 1969, by Viet Nam Veteran Ronald Ridenhour. As Army Chief of Staff, Westmoreland ordered a full Pentagon investigation on April 23. As a result of that investigation, Laird says, he personally informed President Nixon in August that "we would have to court-martial Galley for murder-and the President told me to go right ahead." On Sept. 5, the charges were announced, but with no mention of how many killings were involved. It was not until November that journalists learned of the magnitude...
...Pentagon was appalled that no full mobilization of U.S. manpower was ordered, and that their suggestions for committing up to 750,000 troops as soon as they could be assembled were ignored. "Gradualism was the classic mistake of the McNamara crowd," sums up one Pentagon officer. Says another: "The American people won't support a long war-but they would have supported a short one if we had got in and got out quickly...
...even earlier, asserts TIME Pentagon Correspondent John Mulliken, top military officers should have exercised "their responsibility of advising the civilian leadership in military matters." Instead of automatically embracing President Johnson's proposition in 1965 that U.S. combat forces might go into Viet Nam, the Joint Chiefs should have warned with greater insight-and greater force-of the difficulty of waging guerrilla warfare against an enemy that could match U.S. manpower...