Printed below are excerpts from OUT NOW! A Participant's Account of the Movement in the United States Against the Vietnam War by Fred Halstead. The selection quoted comes from the chapter entitled, "The March Against Death and November 15, 1969." It describes the impact of the major U.S. news media finally breaking the story of the massacre of Vietnamese civilians by U.S. forces in the village of My Lai in March 1968. Copyright © 1978, reprinted by permission.
BY FRED HALSTEAD
On November 9, the GI Press Service of the Student Mobilization Committee ran a full page ad in the Sunday edition of the New York Times. It was signed by 1,365 active duty GIs, many of them stationed in Vietnam. The ad, which carried the name, rank, and station of each signer, appealed for Americans to attend the demonstrations in Washington and San Francisco November 15. It also stated: "We are opposed to American involvement in the war in Vietnam. We resent the needless wasting of lives to save face for the politicians in Washington. We speak, believing our views are shared by many of our fellow servicemen. Join us!"
Nothing like this had ever happened before in American history, and, according to Washington correspondent William McGaffin, "the Pentagon obviously does not like it one bit."
"Pentagon officials," wrote McGaffin, "were frankly surprised that this many GIs would permit their names to be used in a protest ad."1 This only showed the Pentagon's blindness to the real mood among rank-and-file GIs. Although the Pentagon tried, it failed to find signers who would declare their names had been used falsely. (The GI Press Service had each authorization in writing before it published the ad.)
Lawyers from the Judge Advocate sections of the army, navy, air force, and marine corps were assigned to find something illegal in what the GIs had done. The best they could come up with was that signing might be construed as "conduct of a nature to bring discredit upon the armed forces," which was a quote from the catchall Article 134 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice.
The GI Civil Liberties Defense Committee threatened to sue against persecution of the GI signers. The Pentagon dropped the matter rather than precipitate another cause célèbre.
This incident was only one item in the veritable crescendo of antiwar activities, publicity, and interest that was generated between October 15 and November 15, in spite of the counterefforts of the Nixon administration. One of the most dramatic of these was the breaking into the major American news media of the story of the My Lai massacre.
My Lai was a hamlet in the village of Son My (sometimes written "Songmy" and occasionally referred to by Americans as "Pinkville") in South Vietnam. On the morning of March 16, 1968--that is, a year and half before the story surfaced--My Lai was occupied by a unit of U.S. infantry from the Americal Division. The villagers offered no resistance and none of them bore arms. They were ordered out of their houses, which were dynamited if made of stone and burned if made of wood. All this was standard operating procedure on American "search and destroy" missions in Vietnam. What followed was more unusual. The villagers--799 men, women, and children--were assembled in groups and some of the Americans fired directly at them with automatic rifles until not one seemed left alive. That was the My Lai massacre.
As it turned out, 132 of the Vietnamese survived, lying under the bodies of their relatives and neighbors, until their murderers left. Some of them reported the story to local Vietnamese officials who were, however, under U.S.-Saigon control. But the atrocity was no secret. In addition to those who ordered it, and committed it, there were other Americans who had evidence of the crime. Nevertheless it was covered up as far as the American press was concerned.
One reason for this was that the indiscriminate killing of noncombatants was not uncommon in Vietnam, especially by American air strikes. My Lai was just an especially brutal example of the kind of counterrevolutionary war against a whole population that the U.S. military machine was engaged in.
An American GI, Ronald Lee Ridenhour, heard about the My Lai massacre and for his remaining eight months in Vietnam devoted his free time to gathering and sifting accounts of the affair.
He returned to the U.S. with a substantial dossier and wrote a summary of his findings. In early 1969 he sent this to the White House, the secretary of defense, and a number of "dove" senators. He received one visit from an army investigator.
In June 1969, tired of waiting for official action, he gave his report to a literary agent who offered it to major newspapers, magazines, and at least one of the three major TV networks. None were interested. Ridenhour gave up.
In September 1969, the army, as unobtrusively as possible, announced through the command at Fort Benning, Georgia, that an army officer had been charged with murder in the death of an unspecified number of civilians in Vietnam in 1968. The Associated Press carried this on its wire September 6, but few papers picked it up and none assigned an investigative reporter to follow up. It was not until shortly after the October 15 Moratorium that a reporter began to pursue the affair. He was Seymour M. Hersh, a free-lancer, operating on a $1,000 grant from the Foundation for Investigative Journalism, funded by Philip M. Stern, a resident of Washington and a supporter of the Moratorium and the New Mobe. Incidentally, Stern was one of many Washingtonians who offered housing to antiwar staffers from out of town, and Brad Lyttle was staying at Stern's home at the time.
Hersh resurrected Ridenhour's memorandum and found three GIs who had witnessed the My Lai massacre. He arranged for one of them, Paul Meadlo, to appear on television.
Militant reporter Robert Langston later commented:
The capitalist media had been wholly indifferent to Ridenhour's report, and to the September AP dispatch. Two months earlier, they could and would have given the same treatment to Hersh's story.... But in the second week of November that was virtually impossible. The antiwar movement's activity had made the Songmy story the hottest piece of merchandise in the journalistic market. 2
The day the first installment of Seymour Hersh's My Lai series broke into the major dailies was November 13, 1969. The macabre story would be in the news for years and haunt the war-makers as no other publicity in the history of the war had done.
1 New York Post, November 11, 1969.
2Militant, December 12, 1969.