Word: viets
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...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 on the warm, sunny morning of March...
...wearing black pajamas. "A G.I. grabbed the girl and with the help of others started stripping her," Roberts related. "Let's see what she's made of," a soldier said. "V.C. boom-boom," another said, telling the 13-year-old girl that she was a whore for the Viet Cong. "I'm horny," said a third. As they were stripping the girl, with bodies and burning huts all around them, the girl's mother tried to help her, scratching and clawing at the soldiers...
...whether they had seen any soldiers shooting civilians. The repeated response was no. He concluded that some 20 bodies he found at the scene were those of civilians caught in advance shelling and crossfire between U.S. and enemy forces. He dismissed Vietnamese claims of unnecessary killings as "common Viet Cong propaganda technique" and reported his findings orally to the commander of the Americal Division, Major General Samuel Koster, now superintendent at West Point. This "conspiracy of silence," as one participant terms it, kept any official alarm from reaching Washington for many months...
Although it sounded "fishy," he asked no further questions. Nor did anyone else, it seems, until a troubled Viet Nam veteran, who had served with many of the men at Charlie Company, wrote his now-famous letters to some 30 Washington officials, including the President, the Sec retary of Defense and ? most important ? key Congressmen...
...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...