U.S. troops were on a typical search-and-destroy mission that day in the Son My hamlet. They arrived to find, with few exceptions, a village of women, children, and old men. Much of the killing was carried out by members of the 1st Platoon, commanded by Lieutenant William Calley. The slaughter was finally halted when Hugh Thompson landed his helicopter between rampaging soldiers and fleeing Vietnamese who were about to be slaughtered. Thompson ordered his crewmates Larry Colburn and Glenn Andreotta to open fire on U.S. troops if they tried to harm the Vietnamese he was rescuing from the bunker. Colburn recalled, “These were elders, mothers, children, and babies…. They come into a town and rape the women, kill the babies, kill everyone…. And it wasn’t just murdering civilians. They were butchering people. The only thing they didn’t do is cook ’em and eat ’em. How do you get that far over the edge?”46
The appalling incident had been covered up for more than a year. The truth might never have surfaced if it hadn’t been for the persistence of Vietnam veteran Ron Ridenhour, who was so troubled by what he had heard about the massacre that when he returned to the United States, he wrote a two-thousand-word letter, which he sent to thirty members of Congress and executive branch and military officials.
Before Ridenhour sent his letter, the army had managed to suppress the story despite the fact that at least fifty officers, including generals, had knowledge of the massacre and the cover-up. The mainstream media ignored the story until it was finally broken by Hersh through the alternative Dispatch News Service, after the major publications rejected his stories.
Americans were shocked by the news and outraged by the grotesque and increasingly undeniable inhumanity of the war. The mother of one of the My Lai participants, an Indiana farmworker, told a reporter, “I gave them a good boy and they sent me back a murderer.”47
Nixon complained about the negative publicity resulting from the news of the massacre, repeatedly saying to his deputy assistant, Alexander Butterfield, “It’s those dirty rotten Jews from New York who are behind it.”48
My Lai was extreme, but indiscriminate killing of civilians was an everyday occurrence. Specialist Fourth Class Tom Glen, who had served in a mortar platoon, described the routine brutality in a letter to General Creighton Abrams, the commander of all U.S. forces in Vietnam:
The average GI’s attitude toward and treatment of the Vietnamese people all too often is a complete denial of all our country is attempting to accomplish… [and] discount[s] their very humanity….
[Americans,] for mere pleasure, fire indiscriminately into Vietnamese homes and without provocation or justification shoot at the people themselves…. Fired with an emotionalism that belies unconscionable hatred, and armed with a vocabulary consisting of “You VC,” soldiers commonly “interrogate” by means of… [s]evere beatings and torture at knife point.
Glen’s letter was forwarded to Major Colin Powell in Chu Lai, who discounted Glen’s complaints. “In direct refutation of this portrayal,” Powell concluded, “is the fact that relations between American [Division] soldiers and the Vietnamese people are excellent.”49
The antiwar movement continued to grow. As many as three quarters of a million protesters flocked to Washington, D.C., for the November 1969 march; 150,000 more demonstrated in San Francisco. Despite the size of the protests, the war’s dehumanizing effects spread beyond the battlefield, hardening the hearts of the populace as a whole. Sixty-five percent of Americans told pollsters that they weren’t bothered by the My Lai massacre. The steady inuring against human sympathy that Dwight Macdonald had so eloquently described as resulting from the terror bombing of Japanese cities had again infected much of the nation.
News of My Lai opened the door to a steady spate of horror stories. The public learned of “free-fire zones,” where anything that moved would be shot. It learned of the tens of thousands killed by the CIA as part of the “Phoenix Program” and the “tiger cages” in which political prisoners were incarcerated and brutalized. It learned of the displacement of more than 5 million Vietnamese peasants, who were relocated to wire-enclosed refugee camps. It learned of widespread and wanton torture and many other crimes that outraged the sensibilities of at least some Americans and brought forth calls for war-crimes trials.
Exploding antiwar sentiment may have forced Nixon to cancel Duck Hook, but on April 30, 1970, he announced a joint U.S.–South Vietnamese ground invasion of Cambodia to destroy North Vietnamese bases along the border, insisting that the United States would not act “like a pitiful, helpless giant.”50
Nixon steeled himself for the decision by drinking heavily and watching the movie Patton over and over again. He seemed particularly agitated when he went to the Pentagon the next morning for a briefing. First he called protesting students “bums… blowing up the campuses… burning up the books.”51 Then he cut short the briefing by the Joint Chiefs and repeatedly declared he was going to “take out all those sanctuaries.” He proclaimed, “You have to electrify people with bold decisions. Bold decisions make history. Like Teddy Roosevelt charging up San Juan Hill—a small event but traumatic, and people took notice.” He concluded his expletive-laden diatribe with “Let’s go blow the hell out of them,” as the Joint Chiefs, Laird, and Kissinger looked on in stunned disbelief.52
The campuses erupted. Students and professors went on strike. More than one-third of colleges and universities suspended classes. Violence flared. Ohio National Guardsmen opened fire on protesters at Kent State University, killing four and wounding nine. Mississippi state police shot into a crowd of protesters at Jackson State College, killing two and wounding twelve.
Protests and violent confrontations spread to more than seven hundred campuses. The Washington Post reported, “The overflow of emotion seemed barely containable. The nation was witnessing what amounted to a virtual general and uncoordinated strike by its college youth.”53 Scores of thousands of protesters descended on Washington. Kissinger described the capital as “a besieged city” with the “very fabric of government… falling apart.”54 Secretary of the Interior Warren Hickel urged Nixon to heed the protesters. When his letter leaked to the press, Nixon fired him.
More than two hundred Foreign Service officers signed a petition protesting the invasion of Cambodia. Nixon ordered an undersecretary to “Fire them all!” Four of Kissinger’s top aides resigned in protest, as did NSC consultant Morton Halperin. Morris regretted not having gone to the press with documents because he believed that Kissinger was a restraining influence. He told Daniel Ellsberg, “We should have thrown open the safes and screamed bloody murder, because that’s exactly what it was.”55 He later concluded that there were no limits to Kissinger’s ruthlessness.