Word: war
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Quang Ngai province?an area long known as "the cradle of revolution" in Viet Nam. The province had produced and harbored some of the Viet Minh's most effective fighters against the French. It had even been the target of the very first U.S. assault in the war. That was Operation Starlight, in which Marines claimed to have killed 700 Communist soldiers, leading General William Westmoreland to boast that the Marines "could meet and defeat any force they might encounter." But despite repeated similar sweeps, in which more than 3,000 Communist deaths were reported, the province remained a stronghold...
...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...
...House Appropriations Committee and the Armed Services Committees of both houses plan hearings. The Saigon government issued a statement that My Lai amounted to "a normal act of war"?the pro forma response of a loyal ally and a government that does not want to add fuel to the considerable anti-Americanism of its population. But two committees of the South Vietnamese Senate have challenged the government and announced a joint investigation of their...
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...
...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 fire. The Germans bombed and machine-gunned to death 1,600 people of the tiny...