Word: viets
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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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...
TIME Correspondent Frank McCulloch, who spent 31 years covering the war, recalls: "I have seen men pushed out of airplanes, shot with their hands tied behind their backs, drowned because they refused to answer questions. I have also seen the bodies of women and children disemboweled by the Viet Cong." He recalls a young Marine who flung a Vietnamese woman to the ground and robbed her at knife-point of all her money because she failed to produce 15 piastres in change for some cookies he had bought from her. He saw Americal Division troops pound sand into the mouth...
...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...
...events of the '60s have profoundly disturbed the American sense of reality. The longest war in the nation's history, with the American combat dead and wounded last week passing 300,000, seems at once horribly strange and grimly familiar. All too accustomed to daily deaths in Viet Nam, Americans needed time to grasp the fact that these particular deaths, caused by these particular young Americans, represented a very tragic difference...
...Mexico, taking pictures of real estate for insurance appraisers from time to time. In Albuquerque in mid-1966, a month before his mother's death, he enlisted in the Army. Once in uniform, he was soon recommended for officer candidate school, commissioned a lieutenant and posted to Viet Nam. His elder sister. Mrs. Marian Keesling, of Gainesville, Fla., reports that Calley clothed and fed a little Vietnamese girl; one day he returned to find the child's house bombed and the girl missing. "He was pretty broken up about the child," says Mrs. Keesling...