The Mylai Massacre - text page 1

The action at Mylai received only a passing mention at the weekly Saigon briefing in March of 1968. Elements of the American Division had made contact with the enemy near Quangngai city and had killed 128 Vietcong. There were a few rumors of civilian deaths, but when the Army looked into them -- a month after the incident -- it found nothing to warrant disciplinary measures. The matter might have ended there except for a former GI, Ron Riddenhour, now a California college student. After hearing about Mylai from former comrades, he wrote letters to congressmen, warning that "something rather dark

and bloody " had taken place. Now an officer has been charged with murder of "an unknown number of Oriental human beings" at Mylai, and 24 other men of Company C, First Battalion, 20th Infantry are under investigation. Congressmen are demanding to know what happened at Mylai, who ordered it, and whether or not U.S. troops have committed similar acts in Vietnam.

Because of impending court-martials, the Army will say little. The South Vietnamese government, which has conducted its own investigation, states that Mylai was "an act of war" and that

any talk of atrocities is just Vietcong propaganda. This is not true. The pictures shown here by Ronald Haeberle, an Army photographer who covered the massacre, and the interviews on the following pages confirm a story of indisputable horror -- the deliberate slaughter of old men, women, children and babies. These eyewitness accounts, by the men of Company C and surviving villagers, indicate that the American troops encountered little if any hostile fire, found virtually no enemy soldiers in the village and suffered only one casualty, apparently a self-inflicted wound. The people of Myali were simply gunned down.