My Lai massacre triggered Vietnam's ‘class' war accusations

By Bruce Kauffmann, Appeal-Democrat

This week in 1968, with America's involvement in the Vietnam War increasing every month, several platoons of American soldiers from Charlie Company were ordered to attack the tiny hamlet of My Lai in South Vietnam's Quang Ngai Province. The GIs were charged with destroying any Vietcong (North Vietnam's guerrilla army) they could find, and angered by both the casualties they had suffered at the hands of the Vietcong and their inability to catch this elusive quarry, when these GIs charged this hamlet they were in a "take no prisoners" mood. The result was a village destroyed and some 350 people dead.

Tragically, none of the dead was an armed Vietcong combatant. Rather, they were unarmed villagers who had been murdered in cold blood, prompting many to call My Lai — when (after a massive coverup) it was discovered a year later — the worst atrocity of the Vietnam War. Several soldiers were charged with war crimes, including a platoon commander — and college dropout — named William Calley, who was later convicted of murder, but eventually paroled.

Also in My Lai's aftermath was a vigorous debate about its causes, and although the anti-war movement had a field day with My Lai, many military officials traced a cause of the massacre right back to the student anti-war protesters themselves.

Noting that these students had done all they could (both legally and illegally) to avoid serving in the army, military brass pointed out that this had made Vietnam America's first "class" war, in which most fighting was done by poorer, less educated, lower-class citizens. By undermining the fighting instead of joining it, the educated middle class ("the Harvards," as soldiers called them) so diluted the military's talent pool that misfits like Calley could achieve command rank.

What's more, as many historians have shown, Vietnam was the first American war in which there were no clear objectives or measurements. Unlike, say, World War II, in which major battles resulted in strategic territorial advantages (ports to establish bases, islands to launch raids, liberated countries to gain resources), in Vietnam's jungles the only way to measure who was "winning" or "losing" was body counts. This resulted in intense pressure to produce high enemy casualty figures and as time went by and morale sank, the distinction between civilians and guerrilla soldiers (often dressed alike) blurred.

To conclude then, if one accepts these arguments — that Vietnam was a "class" war fought mostly by America's poorly educated and disadvantaged, that body counts became the only measure of success, that civilians were often indistinguishable from guerrillas and so on — then the astonishing thing about My Lai is not that it happened, but that it didn't happen more often.

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