At a 1994 symposium on the My Lai massacre, the well-known Vietnam War veteran and novelist Tim O’Brien gave a talk called “The Mystery at My Lai.” O’Brien served in Quang Ngai Province, Vietnam, in the Pinkville area where the My Lai massacre occurred; he experienced the same frustrations, fears, and hardships that the My Lai perpetrators had. Yet, he told the audience, he could not understand what they had done, not at all. He had not murdered countless civilians and, apparently, neither had hundreds of thousands of other GIs in similar situations.
This article is adapted from The Reality of the My Lai Massacre and the Myth of the Vietnam War (Cambria Press, 426 pp., $39.99, October 2023).
O’Brien raised a good point—My Lai was extraordinarily unusual. According to one calculation, there were approximately 900 American infantry platoons like the one led by Lt. William Calley in Vietnam at the high point of the war. These 900 platoons spent 729,000 platoon-days in the field. They mounted an unknown but doubtless very large number of operations—certainly in the thousands—very much like the assault on My Lai (4) that occurred on March 16, 1968. (There were several hamlets in the My Lai area, given numeric designations by American forces.)
What number of these platoon-days and operations occurred in Quang Ngai is not known, but the number was certainly large, as the U.S. Army was very active in the area over a seven-year period. That the soldiers in these operations faced conditions exactly like the ones that Calley’s men faced on the day of the My Lai assault is suggested by O’Brien’s own experience in Pinkville itself. Yet only one unit on one mission—Task Force Barker in My Lai (4) on March 16, 1968—committed mass murder.
Why did Task Force Barker, uniquely among all American units across all actions in Vietnam, commit such an atrocity? The answer has much less to do with the nature of the fighting in Vietnam (which psychologist Robert Lifton dubbed “atrocity-producing situations”) and much more to do with the nature of the army in Vietnam itself.
Lt. Col. Frank Barker, the leader of Task Force Barker, was an ambitious career officer among ambitious career officers. Barker badly wanted to command a “real” battalion and thought of Task Force Barker—battalion-sized but not a “line” unit—as a stepping stone to it. The competition for such commands was fierce. He therefore needed to show his superiors, Gen. Samuel W. Koster and Brig. Gen. Andy Lipscomb, that he was worthy of a “real” battalion command. This is why he moved so aggressively against the Vietnamese Communists, or Viet Cong (VC), in Pinkville in February 1968, mounting two large and mostly successful operations.
These operations were so successful—at least according to him; he reported killing 155 VC while losing only six men and capturing only six guns—that they seemed suspicious. Barker’s superiors and peers wanted to know what really happened in these to assaults. Had they been the huge triumphs Barker reported, or had something else happened? Did Barker radically inflate the body count? Where were the weapons? Or, even more insidiously, had his men killed Vietnamese civilians (people Barker certainly would have thought of as “VC sympathizers”) and counted them as VC?
This talk frustrated Barker, so he decided to mount a third and even more aggressive assault in Pinkville. It is important to bear in mind that the third assault was entirely Barker’s idea; it was not an order given to him by Koster or Lipscomb, and there is no evidence they were pressuring him to mount it. It was his operation alone, and he had every intention of completely obliterating Task Force Barker’s bête noire, the 48th VC, a particularly effective local Viet Cong unit, “once and for all.”
The problem was that he didn’t know where the 48th VC was; nobody did. Thus, to mount his face-saving operation, he needed two things: the 48th VC in Pinkville, and more specifically My Lai (4); and the civilians, who had caused such problems and raised so much suspicion after the first two operations, out of it. He needed the enemy in his sights and a free hand to destroy them. So, when Capt. Eugene Kotouc brought him “intelligence” that suggested exactly such conditions, he was ready to accept it. As army investigators later discovered (and Kotouc perhaps knew), the intelligence was entirely inaccurate and could not be traced to any known intelligence shop. The 48th VC was not in My Lai (4) and, despite what Kotouc said, the civilians would be there and not “at market” on March 16, 1968.
Everything Barker did following the receipt of this intelligence suggests that he believed My Lai (4) was a kind of VC fortress with a VC battalion in it. He put the artillery prep on the village. He landed the troops right outside it. And, most importantly, he told his company commanders— Capts. Earl R. Michles, attacking nearby My Lai (1) and My Khe (4), and Ernest L. Medina attacking My Lai (4) itself—that they were to kill everyone they encountered and destroy everything they found. No provisions were made for civilians because there would be none there.
Though Michles and Medina received the same orders from Barker, they passed them on and implemented them in different ways. Michles was anxious about the implications of Barker’s characterization of the situation in Pinkville. He seems to have been genuinely concerned about the possibility that his men might kill Vietnamese civilians.
He offered a watered-down version of what Barker had said to his platoon leaders. He told B Company there would be a strong VC force in My Lai (1) and My Khe (4), but he did not say that there would be no civilians in either place. He did say that the civilians had been warned to leave but did not say they all had. It is notable that on March 16, 1968, Michles’s men did not kill any civilians in My Lai (1) and perhaps a dozen inadvertently in My Khe (4). Michles ordered an immediate cease-fire when he suspected the troops outside My Khe (4) might be killing civilians.
Medina took a very different tactic. He did not share Michles’s apprehension about Barker’s characterization of the actual conditions in Pinkville and My Lai (4) in particular. Neither does he seem to have been worried that Barker’s characterization might result in the death of Vietnamese civilians. Medina showed no hesitancy in telling his men that My Lai (4) was occupied by a powerful VC force and that there would be no civilians present. He went so far as to make explicit what Barker had only implied, namely, that anybody the soldiers saw would be a legitimate target and should be taken under fire. Everyone, he said, was to be killed.
Whether they were VC or “VC sympathizers” did not seem to matter to him. Only after he realized that his men were killing civilians did he issue an order to begin gathering people into groups and removing them from the village. He probably knew that these orders were not being followed—he heard all the firing from his command post outside My Lai (4)—but did nothing.
Incredibly, he did not issue a blanket cease-fire until his men had killed dozens and perhaps hundreds of villagers at My Lai (4) and nearby Binh Tay, and then only at the insistence of Barker. The ambitions of a single officer, and the command structure around him, produced an atrocity remembered for generations.