The Associated Press reported today that the US army officer who became the face of one of the many atrocities that took place during the Vietnam war died in April at the age of 80.
On March 16, 1968, Calley led American soldiers of the Charlie Company on a mission to confront a crack outfit of Vietcong enemies. Instead, over several hours, the soldiers killed 504 unresisting civilians, mostly women, children and elderly men, in My Lai and a neighboring community.
The men were angry: Two days earlier, a booby trap had killed a sergeant, blinded a GI and wounded several others while Charlie Company was on patrol.
Soldiers eventually testified to the U.S. Army investigating commission that the murders began soon after Calley led Charlie Company’s first platoon into My Lai that morning. Some were bayoneted to death. Families were herded into bomb shelters and killed with hand grenades. Other civilians slaughtered in a drainage ditch. Women and girls were gang-raped.
…The U.S. military’s own records, filed away for three decades, described 300 other cases of what could fairly be described as war crimes. My Lai stood out because of the shocking one-day death toll, stomach-churning photographs and gruesome details exposed by a high-level U.S. Army inquiry.
Investigations into the massacre and allegations of a Pentagon coverup were launched after a complaint by a helicopter pilot, Hugh Thompson Jr., who saved 16 Vietnamese children in the village and later testified against Calley.
…“Calley, he didn’t kill the 109 all by himself. There was a company there,” said Herbert Carter, a soldier from Houston. “We went through the village. We didn’t see any VC (Viet Cong). People came out of their hootches (huts) and the guys shot them down and then burned the hootches, or burned the hootches and then shot the people when they came out. … It went on like this all day. Some of the guys seemed to be having a lot of fun doing it.”
Calley was convicted in 1971 for the murders of 22 people during the rampage. He was sentenced to life in prison but served only three days because President Richard Nixon ordered his sentence reduced. He served three years of house arrest.
The courageous actions of helicopter pilot Hugh Thompson stands in sharp contrast to the actions of Calley and his men. I wrote about Thompson back in 2006 I hope readers will follow that link to learn about what Thompson did. For his actions, rather than being hailed for an act of extraordinary courage, Thompson “was shunned for years by fellow soldiers, received death threats, and was once told by a congressman that he was the only American who should be punished over My Lai.”
Such was the madness that engulfed the US during the Vietnam war.
He actually died last April. Anyway, good riddance to bad rubbish.
Dennis K.
Thanks for pointing that out. I have corrected it.
Everybody, someday, dies.
^ This folks is what it looks like when a weeaboo tries to sound wise and inscrutable like Mr Miyagi on Karate Kid.
Wax on! Wax off!
Heh.
You trying to harass chigau, Bobiferator?
(Older lady, Canada, about 10x clueier than you will ever be)
—
Put it this way — she faced me down, easy. And fair enough.
(Because I am not an idiot))
“weeaboo ”
You are an idiot, Bobisculous dude.
(So, so stupid!)
Heym Boobiscolous coprophage:
More than one folk, eh?
Heh.
Anyway.
You are about a thousand times more ‘weeaboo’ than chigau. and that’s on a good century.
(So. Fucking. Clueless. You. Are)
Booby iscolous
—
(You do amuse)
His punishment was a three year term of house arrest. Nowhere near adequate.
I probably should clarify that I don’t doubt for one secend “Everybody, someday, dies.” is the most profound thing the likes of Holms or Morales have ever heard
In fact, that’s part of what makes weeaboo-bois fatuousness so hilarious. 😅
SoiledBlob:
Oh yeah, nobody is down in the depths like you are, SmellyBog.
(So futile, your stupid jabberings! Never on topic, of course)
Silentbob
Consciousness consists of molecular structures of quantum energy. “Quantum” means a refining of the mythic. The world is radiating sub-atomic particles.
Unfortunately, this sort of stuff goes on in every war, is, in fact, inevitable. When you come down to it, the essence of war is two or more groups committing atrocities in the hopes that whoever you think you’re aiming them at will let you do what you want to them. And soldiers are trained to perform these atrocities. If this goes on long enough and intensely enough, any inhibitions they may have initially had go away.
After all, what Charlie company did wasn’t a lot different from what the US military was doing — the US strategy was to kill enough Vietnamese that (hopefully!) some Viet Cong would get killed and that the population would turn against the Viet Cong. The only difference was that Charlie company did the stuff face-to-face, and without the pretense that they were “liberating” anyone. The same thing was going on in the war in Iraq and Afghanistan — the rule was, in effect, when in doubt, kill, and afterwards claim they were the enemy. Think of all the weddings that the US bombed.
Same thing in the current Gaza war.
Believe it or don’t, most people do not come to FreeThoughtBlogs to enjoy the flame wars.
Will you guys please knock it off?
Believe it or don’t, most people do not come to FreeThoughtBlogs to enjoy plaintive whining.
Can you knock it off?
Silentbob@4: Please tell me you didn’t just make a racial slur …
(And why won’t this thing stay logged in? I’m not using a shared device. I don’t benefit from expiring logins on this device.)
Bekenstein Bound @#16,
I am sorry that you keep having to log in each time. I have no idea why that is happening just to you.
One suggestion is to try subscribing to this blog (bottom of the left panel) and see if that gets rid of the problem.
@ 16 Bekenstein Bound
Okay. First you would have to clarify.
Is it “weeaboo” you think is a racial slur? A term for a white person indulging in cultural appropriation like “chigau” or “(違う)”or whatever made up Japanese name this “Orientalist” bigot is going by?
Or is it “Mr Myagi”? An actual character from an actual movie weeaboos like “chigau” consider role models?
You’ll have to explain.
To clarify, we have a white guy making up a pretend “Japanese” name for himself, and then having the nerve to put pretend-Kanji he got from Google translate in parathenses (something obviously no actual Japanese person would do because of the utter cringeworthiness), and we have me expressing my utter disgust at this racist cultural appropriation, and then we have you accusing me of a “racial slur” supposedly for calling this weeaboo a weeaboo.
(?)
@ 15 John Morales
Confident of winning a popularity contest are you Juan Ramón. X-D
(You would be SO fucked.)
Worrying about “winning” a popularity contest is what people with low self-esteem do, SillyBot.
(Posting to be liked would be kinda pathetic)
Chigau is not a white boy. She is a retired lady from Canada who has studied Japanese for years, and has been commenting here for over a decade.
Pipe down bob.
#18 Bob
Your memory is not very good.
I don’t know how the silly idea arrived in your head, but I’ll bet the reasoning involved is personally embarrassing.
Silentbob
Ta mère était un hamster et ton père sentait les sureaux.
I am Damasarenai hito (騙されない人). According to our ancient culture of white men pretending to be vaguely Japanese I have more parenthetical pretend kanji in my made-up name, therefore “chigau” must save face by showing proper respect and bowing before me.
This is totally normal and not obscene cultural appropriation. Just ask 違う.
Silentbob
Consciousness consists of electrical impulses of quantum energy.
“Quantum” means an evolving of the unified.
Long ago, on a thread far, far away, there was an all out flame-war over misogyny that came to be known as Y2K2. It eventually morphed into gamer-gate and the MAGA crowd is its current form.
During said flame war there was a French troll who said some particularly egregious things before offering to mansplain French due to having been mocked with a terrible French translation of the furious Monty Python bit.
This resulted in much hilarity amongst the horde, who promptly adopted titles that were often not in English, and deliberately misspelled for comedic effect.
My title was (calmar garou), which was my response to his offer to correct my French.
It’s ridiculous to claim that a person using a writing system other than the Latin alphabet is somehow racist or cultural appropriation.
The end.
Furious = famous
I haven’t seen any evidence here of cultural appropriation. What I did see was someone with a clearly non-western name being called something unfamiliar that sounded like it might be a caricature of the sounds of their language — decidedly worrisome — and that I sure as hell was not about to paste into a search engine, lest the techbros and data brokers and everything else tick the “racist fuckhead” box in my file in various permanent records for inputting a slur into one of their tech toys. :/
In any event, I doubt this namecalling serves a constructive purpose, no matter what it means.