Randy Roberts

The Official Story

During the years of the Vietnam War, public trust in American politicians reached an all-time low. Journalists coined the term “credibility gap” to describe the chasm between official descriptions of the war and the reality of the conflict. The phrase “credibility gap” was first used by reporter David Wise in a May 23, 1965, article for the New York Herald Tribune. At the time, there were only a few thousand American combat troops stationed in South Vietnam, but the antiwar movement was gaining momentum. Public suspicions about the truthfulness of the Johnson administration escalated as well. Murray Marder, a reporter for the Washington Post, popularized the term “credibility gap” in an article on December 5, 1965, in which he argued that government officials were being disingenuous in painting a rosy picture of a war that was actually going quite badly. The 1971 publication in the New York Times of the so-called Pentagon Papers exposed to the entire world just how disingenuous public officials had been. Four American presidents—Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon—had been guilty of misleading the American people.

‘The Report of My Death Was an Exaggeration’: The Many Sordid Lives of America's Bloodiest ‘Pastime’

Pastimes are played. No one plays boxing. But for centuries Americans from diverse ethnic, racial and class origins have gathered to watch the spectacle of prize fights, and they have rewarded the best brawlers handsomely. For as long as it has been a spectator sport, boxing has weathered attacks by politicians, ministers, journalists, medical professionals, and a host of other critics. And it has survived largely unchanged, loosely regulated and baldly dangerous. The history of boxing is a history of tradition and persistence. But it is also a history of adaptation, technological changes and changing public tastes. Promoters have been some of the quickest to adopt new technology that can help build the drama and ultimately sell tickets to prize fights. Particularly when those bouts involve a popular and dominant heavyweight champion, throngs of fans have paid good money to consume this legacy of another era via the most current media innovations of the day. Few, if any, would call it their national pastime, but many will pass their time watching a blood sport of pre-modern origins

The Manly Art: Bare-Knuckle Prize Fighting in America, Elliott J. Gorn

Bond, D. ‘London’s Olympic Legacy Not Yet Assured’. 2012. http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/davi dbond/2012/03/londons_olympic_legacy_not_yet.html#more (accessed 16 May 2012). Cashman, R. The Bitter-Sweet Awakening: The Legacy of the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games. Sydney: Walla Walla Press, 2006. Cashman, R. and Darcy, S., eds. Benchmark Games: The Sydney 2000 Paralympic Games. Sydney: Walla Walla Press, 2008. MacAloon, J.J. ‘“Legacy” as Managerial/Magical Discourse in Contemporary Olympic Affairs’. International Journal of the History of Sport 25, no. 14 (2008): 2060–71.

The Cover-Up

When they completed their investigation of the My Lai massacre, the Peers Commission concluded that a systematic cover-up of the incident had occurred at every level of command in the Americal Division. Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson, the helicopter pilot who had rescued some of the villagers, had reported the incident to his chaplain, Captain Carl Creswell, and to Colonel Oran K. Henderson, commander of the 11th Infantry Brigade, but a thorough investigation of the allegations never took place. It was not until Ronald Ridenhour’s letter of March 29, 1969, more than a year after the massacre, that the army launched a formal investigation.

Experience in War

The 23rd Infantry Division, also known as the Americal Division, had been deactivated in April 1956 after several years of service in the Panama Canal Zone. General William Westmoreland reassembled and reactivated the unit on September 25, 1967. He assigned Americal troops to I Corps in Vietnam, where the unit was to work cooperatively with the 1st Marine Division. Charlie Company, part of Americal’s 11th Infantry Brigade, was deployed to Quang Ngai province in I Corps in December 1967. For the next three months, the troops participated in search and destroy missions, trying to locate the notorious Vietcong 48th Local Force Battalion, which operated regularly in the region.

Exposure and Investigation

On March 29, 1969, Ronald Ridenhour, a Vietnam War veteran, wrote a letter to American political leaders outlining what he had heard about the events at My Lai and calling for a thorough investigation. The letter triggered formal inquiries in Congress and in the U.S. army. More than seven months later, on November 13, 1969, Seymour Hersh’s investigative articles about My Lai appeared in newspapers around the country, as did a piece by Robert M. Smith in the New York Times. Early in December 1969, Life magazine published Ronald Haeberle’s graphic color photographs of the massacre. The cover-up of the incident, which had been systematic at all levels of command in the Americal Division, was finally over. The entire world now knew about My Lai.

The Assault on My Lai

In the following selections, American and South Vietnamese participants and witnesses describe what happened on the morning of March 16, 1968, in My Lai village. Their testimony raises a number of compelling moral and psychological issues. As you read the documents, you will discover that some of the troops, without question, obeyed Lieutenant William Calley’s order to kill civilians. There is little doubt about the reality of such orders, but in your opinion, are the troops who obeyed guilty of murder and war crimes? Other members of Calley’s platoon knew immediately that such orders were illegal, and they refused to obey. But even those who disobeyed Calley’s orders did not actively engage in stopping the killing. They simply refused to participate. To what extent might they be accomplices to the slaughter? Also, they did not report the alleged war crimes to higher authorities as required by the Geneva conventions. Did such behavior render them guilty of participating in the cover-up of the massacre? Only Hugh Thompson, a helicopter pilot, actively worked to protect Vietnamese civilians from the American troops. He even threatened to fire on his own men if they continued the slaughter. Was he right or wrong in his actions? In addition, Thompson was the only American at My Lai that day to report the massacre to superior officers.

The Official Rules of Modern Warfare

In 1863, at the height of the Civil War and at the behest of the War Department, the distinguished political scientist Francis Lieber undertook a codification of existing international law on the rules of land warfare. The War Department published Lieber’s work as A Code for the Government of Armies in the Field and instructed Union soldiers to conduct themselves according to its conclusions. The code’s guiding principle was as follows: “Men who take up arms against one another in public war do not cease on this account to be moral beings, responsible to one another and to God.”