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IPFS News Link • United States

Is the U.S. Military the Lord's Army?

• https://www.lewrockwell.com

Although the whole Vietnam War was a crime from start to finish, one particular event that occurred on March 16, 1968, has always been remembered as particularly horrific: the My Lai Massacre.

On that day U.S. soldiers from Charlie Company of the 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry Regiment, 11th Brigade, 23rd Infantry Division, visited the village of My Lai and killed everything that moved, including chickens, pigs, cows, water buffalo, and hundreds of unarmed civilians. As described by Nick Turse in his book Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam:

They gunned down old men sitting in their homes and children as they ran for cover. They tossed grenades into homes without even bothering to look inside. An officer grabbed a woman by the hair and shot her point-blank with a pistol. A woman who came out of her home with a baby in her arms was shot down on the spot. As the tiny child hit the ground, another GI opened up on the infant with his M-16 automatic rifle.

Over four hours, members of Charlie Company methodically slaughtered more than five hundred unarmed victims, killing some in ones and twos, others in small groups, and collecting many more in a drainage ditch that would become an infamous killing ground. They faced no opposition. They even took a quiet break to eat lunch in the midst of the carnage. Along the way, they also raped women and young girls, mutilated the dead, systematically burned homes, and fouled the area's drinking water.

Defenders of the Vietnam War (has there been any war more undefendable than Vietnam?) maintain to this day that the My Lai massacre was just an isolated incident. In his book, Turse shows that the whole war was a series of My Lais. See my review of the book here.


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