Time magazine included this photo as one of the 100 most important photographs of all time: a Vietnam War general killing a civilian with a shot to the head. 50 years have passed since then. Behind this document, illustrating those cruel times, lies a whole story.
An entire movie is dedicated to this scene. At first everything was quite ordinary: another day of the Vietnam War on the streets of Saigon. Short stature a man dressed in shorts and a plaid shirt, barefoot, with his hands cuffed behind his back. Several soldiers lead him through the city. Suddenly, from somewhere to the right, another person enters the frame. He waves the pistol, driving away other people, and then extends his right hand forward, pointing the pistol at the prisoner, and shoots him in the head. Just.
At the same moment, he pressed the “trigger” of his camera and American photographer Eddie Adams. So exactly 50 years ago, on February 1, 1968, a photograph appeared that later became one of the most famous war photos in history: a civilian was killed - in fact, executed - by a military man. Many believe that this photo influenced the entire further course of the Vietnam War.
The man in the checkered shirt was Nguyen Van Lem. He was just over 30 years old and married. Among other rebels in the communist Viet Cong, Nguyen Van Lem fought under Ho Chi Minh against US-backed South Vietnam. In fact, both sides agreed on a truce on the occasion of the Vietnamese New Year, which is celebrated on February 1. But, despite the agreement, Ho Chi Minh the day before gave the order to begin a large-scale campaign, which went down in history as the Tet Offensive.
Was the victim a member of a suicide squad?
Fierce fighting also took place in Saigon, and Lem took part in it. Presumably (this is still unknown for sure), he was a fighter in one of the “death squads” that acted against South Vietnamese police officers and their families. Lem was allegedly captured that morning not far from mass grave, which contained 34 corpses. Australian cameraman Neil Davis later said that Lem, in particular, killed the friends of Saigon police chief Nguyen Ngoc Loan, as well as his godchildren.
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Sike 06/26/2014 Loan is the same man with the revolver. 37-year-old general, former pilot, student friend of the Prime Minister of South Vietnam. He later claimed that Lem killed the family of one of his officers. This version coincides with the statement of the Australian photographer. Whether this is really so, apparently, no one will ever know. But, be that as it may, the general, without hesitation, pulled the trigger of his 38-caliber Smith & Wesson.Several journalists watched the scene
Several war reporters saw this scene at once. Some of them said that Loan would never have just shot a Viet Cong. The video, made by cameraman Vo Suu for the American television channel NBC, can now be easily found on YouTube. It shows Lem falling to the ground as blood begins to flow from his head. Loan, in turn, holsters the gun and leaves.
But the photograph taken by Adams had an even greater effect than the television footage. The American, who was 34 years old at the time, worked for information Agency Associated Press and was already an experienced employee. According to him, he was going to photograph how the military would interrogate the detainee. "Then it was business as usual“that the detainees were interrogated while being held at gunpoint,” the photographer said. But that time it turned out differently.
In the following days, this photo was published by all the major newspapers in the United States, as well as many other countries around the world. People saw the general, his hand, the pistol, and then the face of Nguyen Van Lem, who was destined to die in the next second. His left eye is still open. Many saw this photo as confirmation that the United States supported the wrong side in Vietnam. Therefore, American political circles gradually began to oppose this war.
One of the hundred most important photos of all time
This photo was chosen as the main photo of 1968. Adams received the Pulitzer Prize for it, the top journalistic award in the United States. And Time magazine included it in its list of the top 100 photographs of all time. Nevertheless, Adams later emphasized each time that he regretted taking this photo. According to him, it was taken out of context, so it is only “half true.” “The general killed the Viet Cong, and I killed the general with my camera,” said the photographer.
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Vietnam War
Foreign Media 03/02/2015 By his own admission, Adams sometimes asked: “What would you do if you were in the place of this general? At that moment in that place? On that hot day? If you caught this (supposedly) scoundrel who has already killed two or three American soldiers? He asked himself this question until his death in 2004.Loan instantly became famous throughout the world. The operator later told how he immediately after the shot approached the journalists and said: “These are killing our comrades. I think Buddha will forgive me." The photographs taken a little later show him drinking beer, smoking, and laughing. And three months later he received seriously injured and lost his right leg.
The general fled to the USA
After withdrawal American troops from Saigon in 1975, the general and his family fled to the United States. Some demanded that he be tried as a war criminal, but this never happened. He lived in Virginia, where he opened his own pizzeria, which, however, was forced to close when information about his past became public. In 1998, he died of cancer at the age of 67.
In Saigon, now called Ho Chi Minh City, nothing else reminds of this scene. Hundreds and thousands of mopeds are now in full swing along Li Tai To Street in the 10th district, where it took place. There is no memorial plaque or other reminder of what happened. The city's war museum contains a photo of Adams, among many others, also telling of a time when death stalked the country.
InoSMI materials contain assessments exclusively of foreign media and do not reflect the position of the InoSMI editorial staff.
We got out of the car after long journey via Vietnam. Border area Myong Khen, 7 km from Laos. But today it is too late to pass the border post - 23:40, and I should sleep. In a dark city, among the empty hostels, we chose one of the cheapest.
“Your passport, please,” asks the person at the reception.
My passport, - and then I understand that it is nowhere except in another hotel, 600 km from here, and this entire journey, this entire hitchhiking and tedious path through the mountainous terrain will have to be done again. There are 2 days left until the visa expires. It's midnight. March 8. Happy holiday to you women, don’t lose your passport!
My friends sympathized with me. Vietnam was the fifth country we visited after Nepal, India, Thailand, Cambodia - and all this time I pressed them so that they checked passports and keys. But, in the end, this absurdity happened to me. I remember leaving the hotel in the city of Chinese merchants Hoi An, crossing the road with a backpack and sitting in the cafe opposite for 4 hours, drinking cup after cup of aromatic Vietnamese coffee and planning the route. And then she simply left without picking up her passport from the hotel. I forgot.
It's morning in Myong Hen. I have 600 km of road to Hoi An and back. In this mountain village, monotonous goods are laid out on the counters - mostly cookies from neighboring Thailand, some snacks, glue, ropes from China. At the morning market there are fruits, vegetables, herbs, and rice noodles. Buying food here turned out to be a whole show: they inflate the prices for us by 2-3 times, when you set your own reasonable price, the whole group laughs, then they sell something and then laugh again. Among local residents our appearance caused an unhealthy stir: everyone from their house shouted “Hello!” to us, but the conversation did not develop further, because that was where their knowledge of English ended. Some shouted “Hello!” to be convincing. several times, they pulled my hands. A border village, and the appearance of Europeans is more surprising than in all of Vietnam. It was as if a UFO had arrived. What would aliens do if they really landed here...
I decided to take buses with transfers - hitchhiking was no longer possible due to time constraints. The red bus arrived to Vinh. It’s good that there’s a sign attached to the side with the official price - 120 thousand dong, so you won’t have to haggle endlessly. The driver nodded his head and seemed to indicate that he was leaving in two hours. Sort of. But twenty minutes later, he shamelessly entered our hotel room in his shoes, demanding advance payment for travel. He was showing something on his fingers. My friends and I silently escorted him out and closed the door behind him. Gopnik.
Two hours later, my friends sent me on the bus - they paid the driver 120 thousand dong, but for some reason he already demanded 200 from me. I got on the bus, then another passenger got on. The driver and conductor smiled at me from ear to ear. When we passed several mountain villages, the conductor sat down in the chair in front of mine, turned around and began demanding to pay up to 200 thousand dong. The answer was my “No”. To which he began to fold his fingers into primitive designs, hinting, as he obviously thought, at sex. The behavior of the monkey reminded me even more of the gopniks of provincial Russia in the 90s and caused a fit of rage. Switching to sign language accessible to the “interlocutor,” I showed him a single finger as a solution to the problem, stood up and demanded my money. The bus stopped. The driver and conductor were taken aback. They didn't want to give the money. I went up to the conductor and took out the entire contents of his shirt pocket - my money was not there. The conductor's smile disappeared from his face and he sat rooted to the spot. Yes, socialist Vietnam is not criminal Cambodia, it’s unlikely that I would have done such “bus hijacking” tricks there. She took a mobile phone lying freely nearby from the conductor and began to demand money and open the doors. He didn’t have to make any excuses for long; after a couple of minutes I was tapping my mobile phone on the window of the bus, making it clear that I could break it in response to the gorilla’s antics. The conductor gave me the money and I gave him the phone number. The driver tried to apologize, but then opened the bus doors. I walked out into the bright afternoon. The road to the hotel awaited me on foot through several mountain villages. Maybe this happened because I was wearing shorts, it’s all about them, here no one wears shorts, only pants. Regular denim shorts, never looked at before special attention. No, it’s not about the shorts, it’s about the people. The idea of throwing a stone at the bus came to me too late, they had already driven far away. I just showed them the same “fuck”, but the new villagers were already shouting “Hello!” to me. several times and waved their arms.
Two hours later I boarded a new bus to Vinh. And again she clarified the price for travel. The driver turned out to be a young, pleasant guy. The conductor entered later, along with the passengers, mostly peasants from the village with bags at the ready. The women sat silently in the corners of the salon, the men loudly discussed something with each other. But no one hid their surprise or laughter when they saw me, some even pointed their fingers. We passed through several villages along the Lam River. Here it is narrow, mountainous, but closer to Vinhu it widens and flows into the sea. Several peasant men sat around me, began to examine me without hesitation, one began to pluck the hair on my arms, showing off his almost hairless arms. For them, I still continue to be an unprecedented circus animal. One of the peasants began to loudly prove something to me in Vietnamese. I turned away and looked out the window. An arrogant conductor with a scar near his right eye came up and with a smile that meant nothing but stupidity, showed that I had to pay up to 200 thousand dong. The peasants eagerly looked in our direction, waiting for the show. It became clear that this was not an accident, but ordinary chauvinism. Yes, I have White color skin, I lead a different lifestyle and I even have some funds for free travel. Apathy took over me, I continued to look out the window, not reacting in any way to his growing smile. There are still so many kilometers ahead with them... The bus was barely moving along the dusty road. The conductor shouted and demanded something for a long time, then sat down next to him, explained something to the village public, and when he finished, he threw it away plastic bottle out the window, right in front of my nose. A minute later he leaned on me, slamming me into the glass, taking a demonstratively relaxed pose. Stuff like this makes me angry. I elbowed him in the side and pushed him away from me. Amazed, he did not understand my behavior; he needed a reason. To portray something like this so that the primitive patriarchal society would no longer have any questions for me. She pointed out to him the engagement ring with the most serious look. His face darkened, he sat down, people turned away, no one else tried to sit with me. Heh, the ring purchased for Russian realities works flawlessly here too.
The bus passed more and more new cities, at the stops I tried to buy something to eat and drink, but for me all the prices were immediately multiplied by 2. Having given up trying, I returned to my place now always empty place for two. Among the other passengers, more and more intelligent young people appeared, students, probably. Almost at the door of the bus, the guy dropped a smiling girl off his motorcycle. They had one last laugh and she began to climb the steps. I immediately liked her friendly face, there were almost no seats left on the bus, the girl sat next to me. We drove for a whole hour in silence, it was getting dark, the light fell beautifully on the rice terraces in the mountains. Then the girl offered water and chewing gum. In English? Yes, she speaks English.
Hien took it out of her bag different flowers from big trees, said that she went today specifically to photograph them from Vinkh. She put a transparent one on my knee White flower and congratulated you on March 8th. This holiday is also popular in Vietnam, as in the USSR, as is the history of the USSR, like Lenin, like Ho Chi Minh City.
Hien, showing Ho Chi Minh City's face on a beautiful banknote, invited me to the socialist leader's museum in Vinh. Not knowing Ho Chi Minh City here is the same as not knowing Lenin. I told her a ridiculous story about forgotten passport, about the fact that there is no longer even time to stop - the visa is running out. She had friends in Hoi An who promised to take her passport and take it by bus to Da Nang; in Da Nang, other friends seemed to agree to take it by bus to Vinh. All I had to do was wait a day.
Upon arrival in Vinh, Hien caught a taxi and we went to her house. Before this, during the entire trip I had never been able to get deep into the Vietnamese environment. Unlike the Arabs, the Asians seemed too reserved and even closed.
A small taximeter car drove us along the ornate narrow streets, densely built up with one-story residential buildings with cozy courtyards. People often live in such houses large families, renting such housing for a foreigner is quite problematic - Vietnam populous country, almost 90 million - in a small area along the ocean, the indigenous inhabitants themselves need to be accommodated somewhere. If wealthy townspeople decide to expand their living space, they most often add a floor on top.
In Hien's house, all rooms are united courtyard, where flowers grow all year round and motorcycles park. Vietnam has almost no urban public transport- that's why the majority of the population uses scooters and standard Honda motorcycles. A friendly dog ran out to meet us, followed by Hien’s mother, a good-natured woman of about 60. Despite late time, the baby’s screams could still be heard in the house; his brother Hien and his wife were putting him to bed. None of her family spoke English, but all members greeted me warmly. We dined on steamed rice and herbs, lightly boiled in various sauces, potatoes and steamed turnips served here as an addition to rice, and not as a separate side dish. There was also sesame rice cake, which the Vietnamese eat with salt and sour ginger sauce, vegetable soup, tofu and fried fish. In view of strict vegetarianism, I refused fish, the rest I ate with great pleasure. Her family was a little surprised at my diet of herbs and vegetables; in their opinion, Russians only eat meat and potatoes and don’t get enough of the rest. That the Vietnamese - I, too, am always surprised when I find myself at the same table with some Russians, how much they eat, move little, drink a lot of vodka and explain everything by the cold and the severity of life. Such Russians have everything from somewhere outside, even their own weight. She explained everything simply about herself and the Russians to the Vietnamese family: “I`m another Russian.”
Hien's room is small, somewhat ascetic, with whitewashed walls, a bed with a bamboo mat instead of a mattress. On computer desk- big yellow flower sunflower and a book about a traveler walking through the desert. I laughed: “Nothing is accidental.” Just last year, I was crossing deserts Arab countries. We covered ourselves with light blankets and wished each other good night.
Hien, like me, woke up at 7 am without an alarm clock. She took a shower, offered me coffee, and then said it was time to go to work. Three months ago, a 28-year-old girl left her job as a designer in a tailoring workshop; she didn’t like the boss. And now she has opened and is developing a cafe. He says to formalize own business it was difficult, a lot of bureaucratic red tape, thanks to my friends for helping. The difficulty of opening and doing business in Vietnam is also evidenced by world rankings, where the country with a red flag ranks approximately 90th in terms of business friendliness. Hien said that only by working for herself can she manage her time. We walked to the cafe; it was a couple of streets from her house, also in a quiet side street, not far from the central avenue. There was a lock on the gate of the cafe, through the bars you could see cutlery and napkins scattered on the tables from the evening; it was already 8 o’clock in the morning - the best time for breakfast for the Vietnamese; the staff was not there yet. Hien's motorcycle was also locked in the cafe.
“The cafe should be open by now, but they haven’t arrived yet,” the young owner said calmly and began calling all the workers one by one, without ever raising her voice. After 20 minutes, a guy drove up on a motorcycle with the keys, opened the gate, and after some time another guy brought up a basket of vegetables. The cafe woke up, low Asian tables and plastic chairs with short legs were placed in places, a large menu in Vietnamese was wiped over the display case, used chopsticks, napkins, and cola cans were thrown away, the cook began peeling vegetables and seafood, and lit the stove.
Hien took the motorcycle out and offered to show us the city, but first, have a proper breakfast. Vinh is not often visited by Western tourists, and my blond hair sticking out from under my helmet drew glances from both people passing by and passers-by. Here in Asia, where there are only brunettes, I began to like my own hair color - after all, of the 7 billion people on the planet, blondes are in the minority, especially those with light eyes. We arrived at a street cafe filled exclusively with Vietnamese. Here they sit down at the table without permission. A pregnant woman opposite me was pouring herbal tea into glasses for herself and her son. The rest, as one, ate rice noodle soup from deep bowls. Having finished her tea, the woman with a round belly stood up, pulled her velvet dress down to her knees, and began to start her motorcycle. Her son is probably a schoolboy junior classes, put on a colored helmet, then a large backpack, and began to climb onto the seat. They left. Hien finished her noodles. And we went too.
I was the only European at the Ho Chi Minh City Residence Museum. This place is very popular among the Vietnamese and entry is absolutely free. At the entrance they sell portraits of ideological leaders - Marx, Lenin, Ho Chi Minh City, and in the bookstore - their works. It is strange to observe the flourishing of socialism for a person born during its collapse in another country. People who were born at the same time as me - at the end of the USSR - believe only in themselves or drown in pessimism. Museum visitors, on the contrary, were enthusiastically discussing something in large groups and happily taking pictures against the backdrop of the ascetic home of a childless and ideologically obsessed leader. It seemed to me that each of them had something greater than themselves - and maybe they were united by a common idea.
We drove through endless green rice fields to a hill from which you can see the whole of Vinh. The city is divided into two parts: the urban part, filled with highways, and the rural part, surrounded by greenery. The Lam River divided the city. Here it is completely different from the mountain stream next to which we met Hien. Calm and smooth on its vast shores, Lam Song flowed into the sea beyond the city of Vinh. Since we were close to the sources, we decided to drive all the way to the mouth, along villages with peasants in the fields, fishermen, children collecting crayfish on the shore, dear country residences. The coast was clear and clean. We were silent and looked into the dark turquoise sea, which was only warming up for the season. You don't need to know a language to feel the mood.
Hien returned to her cafe, which was again closed, but this time cleaned up from the inside. She also methodically called the staff. When we went inside, work began to boil. Hien, without any emotion, began sweeping the floor. I kept my eyes on her.
“Are you worried about me?” she asked.
“Yes, I’m still surprised how you can control yourself,” I said, comparing her with myself, with bus stories.
Do not worry everything will be fine.
I started wiping and arranging the tables. An hour later the food and room were ready. Came two later big company The Vietnamese were apparently celebrating some kind of holiday. The couples sat down at the table, Hien smiled and, together with the staff, carried small gas burners, food, and drinks.
It was completely dark, the company was sitting at the table in peace, and a little tired Hien left the cafe. At home, while Hien was looking for her evening wardrobe, her mother called her. The girl returned to the room, grabbed a sunflower from the table and took it to her mother. When she returned, she explained that her mother again asked when Hien would find love, because she is the only one of the 4 children who is not married. The wedding portraits of the others hang in large frames in the hall. To which Hien brought a sunflower and said that this was her love. Not even roses, the mother joked sadly.
Wearing light makeup and light, simple clothes, Hien was meeting friends in what was, judging by the overcrowding, a very popular establishment. 5 guys sat close to each other, like all the other Vietnamese in this noisy cafe, the young guy was a waiter, only just managing to squeeze through the crowd, serving food. As soon as they found out my name, they immediately offered me vodka. Well, a quick but quite expected start. Their branded “Men`s vodka” is 29.5 degrees, they drink it quite a lot, when drunk, they become lazy and cheerful and the whole company goes to sing Karaoke. This is not a joke, but a hit with Vietnamese youth - special booths with gold stucco, red velvet on the walls, waitresses in short skirts, sweet grapes on the tables and endless pop music from microphones. The time paid for singing is strictly controlled by a security guard at each of the building's booths. I can't sing, against a tonal background Vietnamese language My voice turned out to be the lowest of the group, and my language was the most unexpected in the karaoke club. They asked me to sing Katyusha in Russian. One of Hien’s friends sang it to me in Vietnamese, he knew the words better than me, and was happy like a child. Still, such entertainment is not easy for me - spending two hours among kitsch and high-voiced Vietnamese pop music. At the end, one of the guys asked me why I trust them, Hien, because I don’t know anything about them. I was silent for a minute, but even then I couldn’t find anything to answer. Because at first glance, I either trust or not - and this turns out to be the most correct. It also happened when I first saw Hien. They joked that at least they knew my passport details, they had nothing to fear from me. “Yes, but my passport is not all of me.” Your passport will be in two hours with a passing bus, Hien said and suggested that until then we drink coffee in a quiet place. Her face was noticeably tired, but she couldn’t help but finish the passport story, due to the fact that no one spoke English and they wouldn’t understand me, and in the end, she promised. “You are lucky,” said one of them.
In a quiet cafe with wicker chairs, we joined an unfamiliar company to Hien. The guys played guitar and I sang along to “Yesterday.” “Better than the old pop,” I blurted out loud after the song. “It must be,” the guy opposite was either heard or said. Roi studied in Irkutsk to become a construction designer, almost at the same time when on my first trip I was looking for shamans on an island in the middle of Lake Baikal. He speaks Russian well, but now lives in Vietnam, “building” a family instead of buildings. He spoke about the latter, even with some melancholy, characteristic of the people of my region, and asked what songs I knew in Russian. There are no sad ones, only rock and roll. "I'm another Russian". We continued singing the Beatles and remembering the frosts of Siberia.
At 12 at night, at the exit from the city of Vinh, Hien and a friend were waiting with me for a passing bus with a passport. The driver texted Hien that he wanted 100 thousand dong (about 200 rubles) for the service, 10 minutes later he appeared, opened the door as he walked, grabbed the money, issued a passport, without stopping, left for Hanoi. Probably at that time he felt like an action hero during a top-secret operation. My passport, it’s hard to believe, was in my hands again. A loud “Yes” rang out in the night Vinh.
The guys walked me to the night bus Vin Ha - Muen Hoi. While they were figuring out the price, the driver came up from behind and grabbed me by the cheeks; he didn’t find them, he was surprised at my non-round, high-cheekbone face like his. Another circle of hell cannot be avoided, I thought to myself and went. At night, many people from different villages crowded into the bus, I shared a seat with one woman, modest, but quite broad. There was no sleep, they were smoking and spitting nut shells on the floor. The female conductor slapped me on the shoulder from behind and yelled something in Vietnamese, showing that I was charged 200 thousand dong, while everyone else was charged 120 thousand. I gave 120, she stood on the chair with her feet, as if pedestal, threw the money back at me. The third season of the enterprise theater, please! People around me turned around, laughed, and pointed at me. The stylish guy in front could not look at me, at them, suppressed by shame and silence, he buried himself in the glass, behind which deserted night mountains flashed. “120 or I’ll leave here, and tomorrow I’ll call the police,” I said calmly in Russian and began to move towards the exit. Now they will demand 200 thousand dong from me, in an hour they will demand to stand on one leg, in another hour there will be a new chauvist whim of the frantic, undeveloped peasants. The conductor screamed very loudly at my back, then took the money, did not touch me for the next 4 hours, screamed from afar, at times pointing her finger, including at my temple. At dawn I arrived in Muyen Heh and hugged my friends. It was as if not a day lay between us, but half a lifetime. On the way to the border, the locals managed to slap our backpacks and yell after us; at the border itself, an officer with a straight posture and a stern voice organized the entire crowd into a queue, where there was a place for us, according to order, and not by race. Having passed the border and just a couple of meters from it, in calm, sparsely populated Laos, I fell on the grass and fell asleep. And no one looked at me except the sun. Nobody.
This year marks the 47th anniversary of the war crime committed by US Army soldiers in the Vietnamese village of Song My. This event, stunning in its cruelty, largely became a catalyst for anti-war sentiment in American society. Journalist Myron Hersh was one of the first to report on this tragedy. Lenta.ru offers a shortened version of it new article in The New Yorker magazine, in which Hersh talks about both the massacre itself and what happened to its participants.
IN village community My Lai (in Russian historiography the name Songmi is more common - approx. "Tapes.ru") there is a large ditch. On the morning of March 16, 1968, it was filled with dozens of corpses of women, children and old people - all of them were shot by American soldiers. Now the ditch seems even wider to me than in the photographs sent 47 years ago from the crime scene - time and soil erosion have taken their toll. During the Vietnam War, there were rice fields next to the ditch, but now they have been paved with convenient paths to make it easier for tourists to reach these stones and ravines - modest silent witnesses to that terrible massacre. The My Lai massacre was a turning point in this shameful war: a detachment of Americans (Charlie Company) received false intelligence that Viet Cong forces were located in the village. But they only found there civilians. This did not stop the soldiers from opening fire on unarmed people, burning their houses, and raping dozens of women. One of the commanders who led the massacre was Lieutenant William Laws Kelly, who had been expelled from Miami College before the war.
By early 1969, many of the Charlie Company soldiers were sent home. At that time I was a thirty-two-year-old journalist. I couldn’t wrap my head around how these guys - almost boys - could commit such an atrocity. I started looking for them, writing letters to them. Oddly enough, many answered willingly, sharing the details of those events, as well as thoughts about how they should live further - after what they had done.
During the investigation, some soldiers admitted to being at the crime scene, but said they refused to obey Kelly's orders and did not kill innocents. The soldiers also pointed to Private Paul Midlo, who shot villagers almost side by side with Kelly. Whether this is true or not is now difficult to judge, but many of the Charlie Company gave the same testimony: Midlo and the rest of the soldiers, on Kelly’s orders, fired several bursts into the ditch, and then threw grenades into it. A prolonged cry came from the pit, and a boy of two or three years old, covered in blood and dirt, with difficulty climbed up the corpses and ran to rice field. His mother must have covered him with her body and he was not hurt. According to eyewitnesses, Kelly ran after the child, grabbed him, threw the boy back into the ditch and shot him in cold blood.
Photo: Joe Holloway, Jr. /AP/Fotolink/East News
The next morning, while patrolling the area, Midlo stepped on a mine and lost his right leg. One soldier told me that before the helicopter arrived for the wounded private, Midlo cursed his commander and shouted, “You made us do this! The Lord will punish you!”
“Just put him in the damn helicopter!” - Kelly was angry.
But Midlo’s screams did not subside until they were sent to the field hospital.
Private Midlo grew up in western Indiana. After talking to probably every telephone operator in the state and spending a lot of dimes on calls from street phones, I finally found the family of this soldier in the town of New Goshen. Paul's mother, Myrtle, answered the phone. I introduced myself as a reporter covering Vietnam and asked if I could visit her son and ask him a few questions. She said, “Well, try it.”
The Midlo family lived in a small wooden house on a poor poultry farm. When I arrived at their house, Myrtle came out to meet me. She said hello and said Paul was inside. His mother didn't know if he would even talk to me. He told her almost nothing about Vietnam. And then the woman uttered a phrase that very accurately described this war that I hated: “I sent good boy, and they made him a murderer."
Paul Midlo agreed to talk. He was only 22 years old. Before being sent to Vietnam, he managed to get married, and now they already had two children: a two and a half year old son and a newborn daughter. Despite being seriously wounded, Paul had to work at the factory to support his family. I asked him to show me his wound and tell me about the rehabilitation period. Paul took off his prosthetic and began the story. Very soon he reached the events in My Lai. Midlo spoke as if he was trying to regain confidence in himself and his words. He got a little worried when he talked about how Kelly ordered the villagers to open fire. Paul did not try to justify his actions in the My Lai community, only saying that these murders “do not lie like a stone in my soul,” because “a lot of our guys were killed in the war. It was just revenge."
Midlo recalled all his actions in horrifying detail. “We thought there were Viet Cong there and we had to clear the village. When our detachment reached the place, we began to gather people... in large groups. Forty or forty-five local people were standing in the middle of the village... Kelly ordered me and a couple of other guys to guard them, and he left.”
According to Paul, the lieutenant returned ten minutes later and told him: “Get rid of them. I want you to kill them." Kelly, being three or four meters from a group of unarmed Vietnamese, was the first to open fire. “And then he ordered us to shoot too. I started shooting, but the other guys didn't. And the two of us [Midlo and Kelly] killed all those people.”
Midlo admitted that he personally killed fifteen people from that group.
“We were given orders. We thought we were doing the right thing. I didn’t even think about it then.”
There was one witness from Charlie Company who told me that Kelly's order shocked Midlo. When the commander left the soldiers to guard the civilians, Paul Meadlo and his comrade "talked with these people, played with their children and even treated them to candy." When Kelly returned and ordered the people killed, “Midlo looked at him dumbfounded, as if he couldn’t believe his ears. He asked again: “Kill?”
“When Kelly repeated the order,” another soldier recalls, “Midlo opened fire and began firing at the locals along with him. But then Paul started crying."
Mike Wallace of CBS Radio was interested in the interview, and Midlo agreed to tell his story on television. I spent the night at his house, and the next morning I urgently flew to New York with Paul and his wife. I also learned from Paul that he spent several months undergoing treatment and rehabilitation in a military hospital in Japan, and upon arriving home he did not tell anyone about what happened in Vietnam. Shortly after his return, his wife was awakened by loud crying coming from the nursery. She rushed there and saw that her husband had grabbed their son by the arms and was frantically shaking him, holding him in the air.
A young lawyer from Washington, Jeffrey Cowan, told me about the incident in My Lai Village. He had little information, but he said that a certain soldier had gone crazy and started killing Vietnamese civilians. Three years earlier, I had worked at the Pentagon, where I was assigned by the Associated Press, and often interacted with officers returning from the war. They all talked about the murders of innocent local residents.
I took Cowan's lead and one day accidentally met a young colonel. He was wounded in the leg in Vietnam and while undergoing treatment was promoted to the rank of general. After that, he worked in an office, carrying out paperwork for the benefit of the army. When I asked him about it unknown soldier, he glared angrily and pounded his fist hard on his knee, “That Kelly guy has never shot anyone above this place!”
So I found out his name. In the library I managed to unearth a small article in the Times about a certain Lieutenant Kelly, who was accused of murdering an unknown number of civilians in South Vietnam. The search for Kelly was not easy - the US Army was hiding his location, but I was able to find out that he lived in senior apartments officers Fort Benning, in Columbus, Georgia. And then I had access to the sealed indictments in which Kelly was found guilty of premeditated murder of 109 “Asians.”
Kelly didn't look like a bloodthirsty monster at all. He was a thin, nervous young man - he was about twenty-five at that time - with pale, almost transparent skin. He tried his best to seem a stern warrior. After a few beers, Kelly began to tell me how he and his soldiers had become embroiled in a fierce firefight in the village of My Lai. We talked all night. At one point, Kelly excused himself and went to the toilet. Through the slightly open door I saw that he had vomited blood.
In November 1969, I wrote an article about Kelly, Midlo, and the Village Massacre. Life and Look publications were not interested in her, so I turned to the small anti-war publishing house Dispatch News Service. At that time, the situation escalated and the country was rocked by unrest. Richard Nixon won the election in 1968 on a promise to end the war. But in reality he tried to win it with massive attacks and bombings. In 1969, nothing changed - one and a half thousand American soldiers died every month, just like the year before.
War correspondents, through their reports and photographs, made it clear that the Vietnam War was morally unjustified, strategically misguided, and had nothing at all to do with what officials in Saigon and Washington were saying. On November 15, 1969, just two days after I published my first article about the My Lai massacre, more than one and a half million people marched in the streets of Washington, D.C., in an anti-war march. Harry Haldeman right hand Nixon, wrote a couple of notes that were made public only eighteen years later. It said that on December 1, 1969, as the wave of discontent caused by Meadlo's revelations reached its peak, Nixon resorted to "dirty tricks" to discredit the testimony of the main witness of the My Lai massacre. And then in 1971, when the court found Kelly guilty of mass murder innocent civilians and sentenced him to life at hard labor, Nixon intervened in the case, and the sentence was commuted to house arrest. Three months after the resignation of the President, Kelly was released from custody, and for the following years he worked in jewelry store his father-in-law. Kelly also gave paid interviews to journalists who were willing to pay for his revelations. In a 2009 speech to the Kiwanis Club, he said, “Not a day goes by that I don’t regret what I did at My Lai.” But the former lieutenant immediately added that he was just following orders and “probably was stupid.” He is now seventy-one years old. He was the only one of all the officers to be tried for the My Lai massacre.
In March 1970 military commission called to account fourteen more officers, including generals and colonels. Charges were brought against them of murder, dereliction of military duty, and conspiracy to conceal the truth about the massacre. But only one officer, other than Kelly, was tried and found not guilty.
A few months later, at the height of anti-war protests in student campuses I gave a speech at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, calling for an end to the war. Hubert Humphrey, Lyndon Johnson's former vice president, was then a college political science professor. He lost to Nixon in the 1968 election in part because he could not escape the stigma of being a henchman of Lyndon Johnson, who started the Vietnam War. After my speech, Humphrey wanted to talk to me. He said: “I have no complaints about you, Mr. Hersh. You're just doing your job and doing it pretty well, I must admit. But to all these snotty kids who are jumping around and screaming: “Hey, Lyndon Johnson, don’t be shy, how many children have you killed today?”, I want to say ...” Then his face turned red, and his voice became louder with each phrase and almost burst into a cry: “I want to say - go to hell with you all!”
Photo: UIG Art and History/East News
I first visited My Lai (as the village was called by the US military, locally known as My Lai) just a few months ago with my family. Back in the early 70s, I asked the South Vietnamese government for permission to visit the village, but at that time the Pentagon was conducting internal investigations here, so civilians were not allowed. In 1972, as a Times journalist, I visited Hanoi in North Vietnam. In 1980, five years after the “fall of Saigon,” I returned to Vietnam to do more interviews for the book and some reporting for the Times. I thought that I had already collected all the information about the My Lai massacre, that I knew, if not everything, then a lot. I was wrong.
The village of My Lai is located in the center of Vietnam near National Highway No. 1, the road connecting Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon). Pham Thanh Cong, director of the My Lai Museum, is one of the few survivors of the massacre. When we first met, this stern, stocky man, who was already about sixty years old, limited himself to general phrases and did not share his memories and experiences. He said the Vietnamese were “very friendly people,” and there was no hint of sarcasm or accusation in his voice. “We have forgiven, but we have not forgotten,” Kong said. Later, when we were sitting on a bench near a small museum, he began to talk about that terrible massacre. At that time he was only eleven years old. When the American helicopters landed, Kong was hiding in a silo with his mother, brother and sisters. The soldiers first ordered them to leave, and then, pushing them back, opened fire on them and threw a grenade into the pit. Kong was wounded three times - in the head, right side and leg. He lost consciousness and woke up in a mountain of corpses among the bodies of his mother, three sisters and six-year-old brother. The Americans apparently assumed he was dead. As the soldiers flew away from the village, Kong's father, along with several survivors, came to bury the dead and they found a boy who had survived.
A little later at dinner he said: “I will never forget this pain.” And his job will never allow him to do this. Kong said that a few years ago, a veteran named Kenneth Shiel visited this museum - he was the only one from Charlie Company who visited My Lai after those terrible events. Sheel came with Al Jazeera journalists who were filming a documentary to mark the 40th anniversary of the massacre. Sheel was drafted into the army after graduating from high school in a small Michigan town. After an investigation, he was accused of killing nine civilians, but was acquitted.
IN documentary film Kong's conversation with Sheel is captured. Kong was told that an American Vietnam War veteran had arrived and had nothing to do with the massacre in the village. Shiel answered reporters evasively: “Did I shoot? I will say this - I shot until the moment I realized that all this was wrong. So I can’t say for sure whether I opened fire on these people.” When it became clear that Shiel did participate in the mass murder of Kong's fellow citizens, his mood to talk with the Vietnamese waned. Sheel kept repeating that he wanted to “apologize to the people of My Lai,” but did not give any further details. “I keep asking myself - why did this happen? I don't know".
Kong then directly asked, “How did you feel when you killed innocent citizens? That was hard?" Sheel responded that he was not among the soldiers who opened fire on the civilians. To which Kong said: “Then you can be one of those who entered my house and killed my relatives.”
The recording in the museum contains the end of their conversation. Sheel said: "All I can do is apologize." Kong, whose voice was filled with pain, kept asking him questions, asking him for details of the crimes. And Sheel just repeated: “Sorry, sorry.” Kong asked if the piece went down the soldier's throat when he returned to base, and then Sheel began to cry. “Please, no more questions! - he sobbed. “I can’t stand it.” Sheel then asked if Kong would like to join them for a memorial ceremony for the victims of the My Lai Massacre.
Before leaving the museum, I asked Kong why he was so ruthless and adamant with Sheel. My interlocutor frowned and said that he did not want to ease the pain of a participant in those events, who, moreover, refused to take responsibility for what he had done. After the My Lai massacre, Kong lived with his father for a time, but he was a member of the Viet Cong and was killed by American soldiers in 1970. Kong was sheltered by relatives from a nearby village, where he helped them take care of their livestock, and after the war he was able to return to school.
173 children, including 55 infants, were executed. Sixty old people died. The museum has information about another important fact: the massacre took place not only in the My Lai community (also known as My Lai 4), but also in a neighboring settlement called My Khe 4. It was located about a mile east, on the shore South China Sea, and was attacked by another platoon of American soldiers - Bravo Company. The museum has records of 407 victims in My Lai 4 and 97 victims in My Kha 4.
One thing is clear: what happened in My Lai 4 was not an isolated incident or an exception; Bravo Company did the same thing, albeit on a smaller scale. Like Charlie Company, it was part of the Barker group. These attacks were the most significant operation carried out that day by the combat battalions of the American Division, to which the Barker group belonged. At the same time, the division's leadership, including the commander, Major General Samuel Coster, periodically flew into the combat area, monitoring the process during the day.
Lawlessness was happening everywhere. In 1967 there was already terrible war in Quang Ngai, Quang Nam and Quang Tri provinces in South Vietnam; they were known to maintain independence from the government in Saigon, and also supported the Viet Cong and Northern Vietnam. Quang Tri province was heavily bombed. In addition, American warplanes sprayed all three provinces with various defoliants, including Agent Orange.
End of the first part