Facing the Unthinkable
The March 16, 1968 My Lai Massacre
Can we look directly at the unthinkable and still carry on?
And if it’s so difficult a task, must we really undertake it?
On this 56th anniversary of the My Lai Massacre—in which an estimated 500 South Vietnamese were mown down by American soldiers in cold blood—I invite you read a poem about this nearly inexplicable low point in the Vietnam War—and in American history—and to consider two things:
What those soldiers did was indeed a war crime but they did not act alone.
The road to healing may be a long one and the main question is will we/you be ready when an opportunity for it comes?
The Poem
“KILL ANYTHING THAT MOVES,” were the direct orders given by Captain Ernest Medina
They forgot to kill the wind
that spread the truth
to distant hearts and minds.
They forgot to kill the conscience
that moved some soldiers
to tell what they saw.
They forgot to kill the photographers
whose pictures cast the corpses
before eyes that could not unsee them.
And they forgot to kill the ghosts
that still haunt us from dirty ditches
where angry, frightened men
aimed to kill their frustration
but killed 504 defenseless people instead.
Fifty years on, they cannot kill
the memory that arises still
from the tender patties
of our hearts.
Found in the My Lai Memorial Exhibit journal
by Stephen Jones
Detroit – October 12, 2018
How could this happen?
CIA officer Tom Glenn was one of the last officials to get out of Vietnam. He describes the harrowing and psychologically damaging last days in a 2015 article, “Bitter Memories.”
As Saigon was literally blowing up around him, he struggled to get others to see sense, to call for an immediate evacuation, but nothing was done. People carried on as if were business as usual and he nearly lost his mind until the truth dawned on him.
I finally understood what was going on. The embassy was a victim of what sociologists now call groupthink syndrome—firm ideology, immune to fact, shared by all members of a coterie.
The ambassador [Graham Martin], and therefore his subordinates, could not countenance the prospect of a communist South Vietnam and therefore dismissed evidence of the coming disaster.
The soldiers who entered the village were not only under orders to “shoot anything that moved,” they were part of the groupthink that put Americans on a level in which they were so far above other people—notably people of a different race and ethnicity—that it was entirely within reason to mow them down where they stood.
Note: not every American soldier complied. Chopper pilot Hugh Thompson led his team in an effort to save some of the civilians from harm’s way.
As we stare this atrocity in the face, I hope that each of us wishes things could be different.
But is there really hope for reconciliation within ourselves and with those we have faced in such daunting times?
I think we can find a clue in a moment in the life of writer and veteran Philip Caputo. In the introduction of 10,000 Days of Thunder, he writes that the Vietnam War began for him on March 8, 1965, when his battalion landed at the port city of Da Nang, and though he was home by the middle of the following year, the war stayed alive in him.
In 1990 he attended a dinner of the Da Nang chapter of the Vietnamese Writer’s Union.
A poet named Ngan Vinh gave a brief speech and then read one of his works, “After the Rain in the Forest”. . .
During the war, Vinh had been a platoon leader like me, commanding forty-two men in the First Battalion, 40th Brigade, of the North Vietnamese Army, and his poem was about carrying a wounded comrade to safety after a battle in the monsoon of 1967. The words and imagery of the weight of the man on his shoulders, blood mixed with rain spilling into the mud of the trail astonished me because they were so like the words and images of a poem I had written in1966. It was called “Infantry in the Monsoon,” and it was about carrying wounded comrades in the rain.
I mentioned this coincidence to Vinh after the meal . . . We got to talking and discovered that his battalion and mine had operated in the same valley southwest of Da Nang in early 1966. Though we determined that we had never fought each other, that was close enough.
Vinh filled two glasses with vodka and said we had to drink together. We tossed our glasses back, and then Vinh embraced me and said, “You and me, Philip, we are brothers in arms,” and that night, June 21, 1990, was when the Vietnam War ended for me.
Not all of us may be able to sit down with our direct enemy and find such common ground, but who knows when the opportunity for reconciliation and reckoning might come? Can we extricate ourselves from any binding and limiting “groupthink” that may no longer serve us, so that we can take advantage of that moment?
And of course, it matters that the military also continues to confront this unthinkable moment in our history.
In a 2018 NPR article, 50 Years On, My Lai Remains a Gaping Wound, NPR veterans correspondent, Quill Lawrence, describes how the My Lai incident is taught at our nation’s service academies.
“Who are going to be our future heroes?” asks Air Force Maj. Logan Sisson, ethics teacher at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs.
“Hopefully, we can prevent this, but who are going to be the heroes to stop it once it starts? . . . that's why we're talking about it. We're not pushing it underneath a rug.”
Thank you for reading.
Until next time,
Kat ❦
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To learn more about my books or school visits, visit Kat-Fitzpatrick.com.
Thus is so powerful, Kat. Almost beyond words. Thank you.