William Calley, face of My Lai massacre, dead at 80

[Wicked Blue]

A former US officer who was the only person to be convicted in connection with the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam War has died, according to reports.

William Calley died on 28 April at the age of 80, the Washington Post and New York Times reported, citing official death records.

Calley led the US Army platoon that carried out the mass murder of hundreds of civilians, including women and children, in the Vietnamese village of Son My in 1968.

He was sentenced to life in prison in 1971 for killing 22 civilians, but only served three days behind bars after then-President Richard Nixon ordered his release under house arrest.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c9wv9l7pe9po

[dweller]

1. War Criminal

Rot In Pieces



✌🏻

[malaise]

10. THIS

Rec

[liberalhistorian]

30. Amen!

Good fucking riddance to him!

[kentuck]

31. He was out in the bush and obviously did not have the respect of the troops under him.

He had no control over them. Tet had just happened. They were angry and worn out from the war. The attitude was "kill the little gooks -they just grow up to be big gooks". They were like a violent mob.

That's how I recall the time.

[Voltaire2]

2. He didn't just lead the platoon, he ordered the massacre.

However, this was not an anomaly. It was very likely that it was instead official, if undocumented, policy.

3 days for 22 innocent lives.

[Wicked Blue]

9. Between 347 and 504 civilians were killed

From Wikipedia:

Victims included men, women, children, and infants. Some of the women were gang-raped and their bodies mutilated, and some soldiers mutilated and raped children as young as 12. It is the largest massacre of civilians by U.S. forces in the 20th century.

[Voltaire2]

13. Largest That we know of

My Lai was not an anomaly. It just wasn’t covered up well enough.

You are of course correct about the size of the massacre. 22 is what he was convicted for.

[electric_blue68]

23. Forgot that many. It was horiffic then, and now.

[malaise]

11. Was?

Still is

[GreenWave]

3. Old National Lampoon rhyme on a more serious note:

William Calley pudding and pie
shot the boys and made them die.
And when the girls came to surrender
Willie just ignored their gender.

[Sky Jewels]

4. Fucking evil POS.

[underpants]

5. Colin Powell's first big showing of being a loyal career manager

Colin Powell

Among the U.S. Army’s internal investigators of the My Lai massacre was Major Colin Powell, who later became Secretary of State under President George W. Bush.

According to Powell’s report, “although there may be isolated cases of mistreatment of civilians and POWs, this by no means reflects the general attitude throughout the division.”

Regarding accusations of atrocities committed by American soldiers, Powell stated that, “In direct refutation of this portrayal is the fact that relations between Americal Division soldiers and the Vietnamese people are excellent,” a statement that many critics have derided as “whitewashing,” and accusing Powell of being a participant in the My Lai cover-up.


https://www.history.com/topics/vietnam-war/my-lai-massacre-1

[Kid Berwyn]

7. Yee-ep.

Faithful soldier Colin Powell would go on to deliver “proof” Iraq possessed WMD to the UN General Assembly.

[underpants]

12. #2 was signing off on weapons shipments to Iraq.

[Kid Berwyn]

17. He was just doing what Poppy would have ordered.

The man who knew too much

He was the CIA's expert on Pakistan's nuclear secrets, but Rich Barlow was thrown out and disgraced when he blew the whistle on a US cover-up. Now he's to have his day in court. Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark report

The Guardian, October 13, 2007

EXCERPT...

He prepared briefs for Dick Cheney, when Cheney was at the Pentagon, for the upper echelons of the CIA and even for the Oval Office. But when he uncovered a political scandal - a conspiracy to enable a rogue nation to get the nuclear bomb - he found himself a marked man.

In the late 80s, in the course of tracking down smugglers of WMD components, Barlow uncovered reams of material that related to Pakistan. It was known the Islamic Republic had been covertly striving to acquire nuclear weapons since India's explosion of a device in 1974 and the prospect terrified the west - especially given the instability of a nation that had had three military coups in less than 30 years . Straddling deep ethnic, religious and political fault-lines, it was also a country regularly rocked by inter-communal violence. "Pakistan was the kind of place where technology could slip out of control," Barlow says.

Barlow was relentless in exposing what he saw as US complicity, and in the end he was sacked and smeared as disloyal, mad, a drunk and a philanderer. If he had been listened to, many believe Pakistan might never have got its nuclear bomb; south Asia might not have been pitched into three near-nuclear conflagrations; and the nuclear weapons programmes of Iran, Libya and North Korea - which British and American intelligence now acknowledge were all secretly enabled by Pakistan - would never have got off the ground. "None of this need have happened," Robert Gallucci, special adviser on WMD to both Clinton and George W Bush, told us. "The vanquishing of Barlow and the erasing of his case kicked off a chain of events that led to all the nuclear-tinged stand-offs we face today. Pakistan is the number one threat to the world, and if it all goes off - a nuclear bomb in a US or European city- I'm sure we will find ourselves looking in Pakistan's direction."

US aid to Pakistan tapered off when the Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan. Dejected and impoverished, in 1987 Pakistan's ruling military responded by selling its nuclear hardware and know-how for cash, something that would have been obvious to all if the intelligence had been properly analysed. "But the George HW Bush administration was not looking at Pakistan," Barlow says. "It had new crises to deal with in the Persian Gulf where Saddam Hussein had invaded Kuwait."

As the first Gulf war came to an end with no regime change in Iraq, a group of neoconservatives led by Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney, Lewis "Scooter" Libby and Donald Rumsfeld were already lobbying to finish what that campaign had started and dislodge Saddam. Even as the CIA amassed evidence showing that Pakistan, a state that sponsored Islamist terrorism and made its money by selling proscribed WMD technology, was the number one threat, they earmarked Iraq as the chief target.

CONTINUES...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/oct/13/usa.pakistan

[underpants]

19. Quite a read.

The Pakistan element is confusing but the NeoCons always had their eyes on Egypt. Iraq was closer and they influence more of the Middle East from there. That’s the goal I keep in mind with them.

[Kid Berwyn]

24. Big Oil means Petrodollars

The biggest money maker ever. And those who pocket the trillions in profits from the mineral extraction industry are relatively few in number.

[UTUSN]

25. And Colon made his whole career

[brewens]

6. I actually had an old lady telling me he was innocent not ten years ago. Once bullshit is fed to some people nothing

ever gets through to them.

[Voltaire2]

14. They still think there are secret pow camps

in Vietnam filled with geriatric rambos.

[pdxflyboy]

8. Good. N/T

[Frasier Balzov]

15. Must've lived in pretty obscure obscurity.

To have his death take three months to be discovered.

[struggle4progress]

16. Casualties of War

An atrocity in Vietnam.
By Daniel Lang
October 10, 1969

... For as long as she lived, Eriksson did not know her name. He learned it, eventually, when the girl’s sister identified her at court-martial proceedings—proceedings that Eriksson himself instigated and in which he served as the government’s chief witness. The girl’s name—her actual name—was Phan Thi Mao. Eriksson never exchanged a word with her; neither spoke the other’s language. He knew Mao for slightly more than twenty-four hours. They were her last. The four soldiers with whom he was on patrol raped and killed her, abandoning her body in mountain brush. One of the soldiers stabbed her three times, and when defense counsel challenged Eriksson at the court-martial proceedings to describe the sound that the stabbings made, he testified, “Well, I’ve shot deer and I’ve gutted deer. It was just like when you stick a deer with a knife—sort of a thud—or something like this, sir” ...

... Eriksson now believes he should have foreseen that sooner or later one of these incidents was bound to strike him with special, climactic force. He had scarcely landed in Vietnam, in October, 1966, when he was made aware of these occurrences, each of them apparently impulsive and unrelated to military strategy. He told me that beatings were common—random, routine kicks and cuffings that he saw G.I.s administer to the Vietnamese. Occasionally, official orders were used for justifying gratuitous acts of violence. Thus, early in his tour of duty, Eriksson recalled, G.I.s in his unit were empowered to shoot any Vietnamese violating a 7 p.m. curfew, but in practice it was largely a matter of individual discretion whether a soldier chose to fire at a stray Vietnamese hurrying home a few minutes late to his hootch—the American term for the mud-and-bamboo huts in which most natives lived. Similarly, it was permissible to shoot at any Vietnamese seen running, but, as Eriksson put it, “the line between walking and running could be very thin” ...

Usually, Eriksson said, it took time for the unexpected to develop, but now—more than half a day before the patrol was to leave platoon headquarters—it happened with stunning abruptness. It happened when the Sergeant, having delivered his instructions, concluded the briefing by telling the assembled men that they were going to have a good time on the mission, because he was going to see to it that they found themselves a girl and took her along “for the morale of the squad.” For five days, the Sergeant said, they would avail themselves of her body, finally disposing of it, to keep the girl from ever accusing them of abduction and rape—both listed as capital crimes in the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Rafe later testified at his court-martial, “Meserve stated we would leave an hour ahead of time so that we would have time to find a woman to take with us on the mission. Meserve stated that we would get the woman for the purpose of boom boom, or sexual intercourse, and at the end of five days we would kill her” ...

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1969/10/18/casualties-of-war

[electric_blue68]

22. Such hideious, heinious behavior.

[Aristus]

18. Calley was the face of an Army that was scraping the bottom of the manpower barrel

in a war that should never have been fought. Calley had no real leadership skills, and was so incompetent as an infantryman, he couldn't even read a map; a ground-floor basic skill in the service.

His supporters, if there are any left, can talk about scapegoats until they're blue in the face. He murdered innocent people. He is no less guilty just because he thought he was following orders. When I was in, we were told in no uncertain terms, that if we were given an illegal order, we were legally bound to disobey it.

Three and a half years of house arrest.

[electric_blue68]

21. I sort of knew about the concept of illegal orders. Later on it was -hightlighted fictionaly- in a portion of episodes..

of the 5 yr Science Fiction TV novel "Babylon 5". That part involved the Military Governor of the B5 space station - specifically in his military role.

[underpants]

28. On campus protests drained the potential officer pool

The John Kerry Fred Smith and Dick Pershing types just a few years earlier signed up to follow their fathers/family into service as they had done in WWII when it was all hands on deck. Very quickly what’s usually the core of the officer corps were not signing up or actively avoiding it.

BTW we were told exactly the opposite. You WILL do it and THEN complain. “Mission comes before the welfare of the soldier” - that sort of thing.

[valleyrogue]

20. The good die young. n/t

[MrWowWow]

26. He's Definitely Not Going to Be Buried With Honors

at Arlington National Cemetery!

[Old Crank]

27. Yes he was guilty of mass murder

And deserved his full sentence.

But nothing was done to the people that instigated this murder spree.

[kentuck]

29. I was in Vietnam when this happened.

It was right after Tet of '68.

I remember hearing about it from the Vietnamese people right after it happened.

It could have been predicted.

[Doc Sportello]

32. Hugh Thompson, the hero who stopped the slaughter

You might call him the anti-Calley. Thompson was the helicopter pilot who flew in support and then realized what was happening and brought the massacre to an end. His actions blow the "only following orders" defense out of the water. They knew what they were doing was wrong but it was "OK" in their minds because of racism and revenge.

https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-wiener-my-lai-hugh-thompson-20180316-story.html

Calley should have spent the rest of his life in prison but right wing forces and a military cover-up derailed justice.

[Wicked Blue]

33. More on Thompson

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugh_Thompson_Jr.