“Barker’s report on the March 16 My Lai operation registered 128 VC killed against three U.S. KIAs. This, of course, was a lie, and many, many people knew it at the time.”
By Marshall Poe
AT A conference held at Tulane University in 1994 entitled My Lai 25 Years Later, celebrated author and Vietnam veteran Tim O’Brien gave a talk called “The Mystery at My Lai.”
O’Brien was well equipped to discuss My Lai, the infamous Vietnam War atrocity that saw U.S. Army troops slaughter as many as 500 unarmed Vietnamese civilians. He served in Quang Ngai Province, where the massacre occurred, and he experienced the same frustrations, fears and hardships as the My Lai perpetrators. Yet, he told the audience, he could not understand what they had done, not at all. He had not done anything like what the My Lai perpetrators had and neither, apparently, had hundreds of thousands of other GIs in Vietnam.
O’Brien had, thereby, brought attention to a little recognized fact about My Lai, namely, that we do not have a very good understanding of exactly why the massacre occurred. The basic facts are clear and have been since Seymour Hersh (among others) broke the story in November 1969: A company of U.S. Army troops under the command of Captain Ernest Medina assaulted the village of My Lai (4) (one of several numbered villages named “My Lai” on U.S. Army maps) on the morning of March 16, 1968; they murdered somewhere between 100 to 500 Vietnamese civilians and committed several rapes. Most infamously, Second Lieutenant William Calley rounded up groups of civilians and executed them in cold blood. But to O’Brien and other vets, not to mention many scholars of the Vietnam war, My Lai was bizarre. Over the course of the war, the U.S. Army conducted thousands of operations nearly identical to the one prosecuted on March 16, 1968 and no massacres occurred. This is not to say that civilians were not killed in these operations; they were. But nothing on the scale of My Lai has ever been found in the records of the army or reported in the press.
Why did this happen? The most widely held explanation was first proposed by the psychologist and anti-war activist Professor Robert Lifton. He explained in The New York Times on Aug. 1, 1972 that his “studies of Mylai <sic>…revealed that advanced numbing and brutalization on the part of American GIs occurred in response to what I have called an ‘atrocity-producing situation’ and enabled them to carry out their tragic slaughter of the Vietnamese.” For a whole variety of reasons—the inability to clearly distinguish combatants from non-combatants, the use of body count as a measure of military progress, the liberal employment of overwhelming firepower—Lifton and many after him have argued that the particular nature of fighting in Vietnam “produced” atrocities in a way that previous conflicts had not. There had been, he said, many “My Lais.”
But O’Brien might well have asked, if the “atrocity producing situation” in Vietnam had indeed generated “many My Lais,” where were they? It’s not as if the press and army hadn’t looked for them. In the wake of the revelation of My Lai, the press went on what one commentator called “The Great Atrocity Hunt.” Hundreds of reporters were “in country,” and were keen to break a career-making story of My Lai magnitude. They found nothing on the scale of the massacre or even approaching it. Similarly, the army mounted an extraordinary investigation of My Lai under Lieutenant General William R. Peers. He and his team were given carte blanche to talk to anyone and everyone and look at any document they desired. The Peers Commission interviewed over 400 people at length up and down the chain of command and produced a report that included 18,000 pages of testimony and 5,000 pages of official documents. They found no other “My Lais.” Not satisfied, the army set up the Vietnam War Crimes Working Group to gather and investigate atrocities committed by U.S. troops. They found evidence of atrocities, but nothing, again, on the scale of My Lai.
Thus, the idea that the particular nature of fighting in Vietnam—or at least Quang Ngai province—“produced” My Lai is not tenable. If it had, there would have been (as is often said) many similar atrocities. But there were not.
So why did the My Lai massacre occur? The answer, of course, is complex, but we might well begin with the man who was most responsible for the tragedy (and who is almost unknown in the literature on it), Lieutenant Colonel Frank Barker.
At the time of the massacre, Barker was a seasoned veteran and a highly respected career officer. He had fought in Korea, become a Green Beret, served as an advisor to the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN), and held high staff positions. But what he really wanted was a combat command, specifically of a “line” battalion. He knew—as did thousands of other ambitious career officers in the army—the surest way to “make rank” was to successfully command troops in the field. Competition for these spots was ferocious.
In the fall of 1967, Brigadier General Andy Lipscomb, CO of the Americal Division’s 11th Brigade, gave Barker the 4/3 Infantry battalion. But then, for unexplained reasons, Lipscomb took the command away and made Barker a staff officer in the 11th Brigade. This, Barker knew, was a sort of demotion. It was harder to “make rank” as a staff officer than it was as a field commander.
But Lipscomb soon found a way to give Barker part of what he wanted. To secure a particularly endangered area in Quang Ngai province, Lipscomb formed an ad-hoc unit called a “battalion-sized task force” in January 1968. It was not a real battalion per se, but it had three infantry companies (reportedly some of the best in the business) and the request support units. For Barker, it was an important step toward a real battalion. And he planned to take full advantage of the opportunity Lipscomb had given him. He did this by being very aggressive.
“Task Force Barker” (TFB) as the unit came to be known, operated in “Muscatine AO” north of the Diem Diem River. But, according to Barker, that’s not where the VC—or, more particularly, 48th VC Local Force Battalion—were; they were south of the Diem Diem in a relatively densely populated area called “Pinkville” because of the color identifying it on army maps. This was a notoriously “bad place,” and everyone knew it. It was (as the GIs said) “Indian Country.” The VC were very active and the population was uniformly hostile to American and ARVN forces, so much so that South Vietnamese officials (who nominally governed the area) would not even go there.
Barker, however, would and did on Feb. 13 and Feb. 23, 1968. On these occasions, Barker ordered his task force to attack Pinkville, an area that included My Lai (4). Neither operation achieved much, but Barker reported both as major successes. During the Feb. 13 assault, Barker reported killing 80 VC and on Feb. 23 he claimed 75 VC killed for only six American KIAs in both. By the standards of battalion-level operations, these were huge “kills.” The press wrote approvingly.
But there were questions. The VC body counts were too large to be credible for two reasons. First, the KIA ratio was too lopsided. How could Baker’s task force kill 155 VC while sustaining only six KIAs? It didn’t make sense, and people in the chain of command noted this. Second, Baker’s men retrieved only six guns over two operations. If TFB had dispatched the equivalent of an entire VC company, where were the recovered weapons? Later, during the My Lai investigation, army investigators asked TFB officers about these earlier operations. Various excuses were given, particularly that the VC were very good at retrieving weapons off the dead and the locals had hidden some too. But even at the time, the ratio of weapons to bodies raised concerns. What had Barker done?
There were two obvious answers: either he radically inflated the body-count, or he had killed a huge number of civilians (whom, of course, would have been unarmed) and counted them as dead VC. The preponderance of evidence suggests the former: Body-count inflation was rampant in the U.S. Army. Had TFB murdered 155 civilians, the North Vietnamese would have known and used it as propaganda. They did not.
Given all these questions about the Feb. 13 and Feb. 23, operations in Pinkville, Barker’s plan to get a “real” battalion was not going well. As such he felt he needed a big, decisive win, one that would destroy the 48th VC Battalion, produce enemy bodies, and a stockpile of recovered weapons. The trouble was he didn’t know where the 48th VC Battalion was. Nobody did.
And then a remarkable thing happened: Barker’s intelligence officer, Captain Eugene Kotouc, reported that the entire 48th VC was in Pinkville, more specifically in My Lai (4). Army investigators were, of course, very interested to learn where the captain had come up with this remarkable information, which would turn out to be false. Kotouc cited various sources. The investigators interviewed the sources; they could not confirm having told Kotouc anything about the whereabouts of 48th VC. More generally, the investigators discovered that none of the other U.S. and South Vietnamese “intelligence shops” put the 48th VC in Pinkville at the time. But Kotouc had solved one of Barker’s problems: Barker “knew” where the 48th VC was.
That, however, was not all Kotouc told Barker. The intelligence officer also reported that the entire civilian population of My Lai (4) would be away from the village at market at 7 a.m. on March 16. This, of course, was ridiculous. As one of the army investigators put it: “As far as civilians going to market, you know, as every private knows, that there’s no village in Vietnam [where] everybody goes to market. Some people go to market; not every old man, woman, and kid goes to market.”
But in relating this absurdity, Kotouc had solved another of Barker’s problems: civilians. Ever since the Feb. 13 and Feb. 23 operations, Barker was growing concerned about the optics of civilians getting in the way of his task force. He approached the South Vietnamese authorities to have all non-combatants removed from Pinkville. The South Vietnamese said they couldn’t do so because there were far too many villagers in it, thereby hampering Barker’s plans for the area. Kotouc’s intelligence report had magically removed all civilians from the region.
Armed with this convenient intel, Barker prepped his troops to assault Pinkville on the morning of March 16. He told his officers (one of whom was Medina, in charge of C Company) that My Lai (4) was a kind of fortress. They were to prepare for a big and bloody “stand up” fight with the enemy. The entire VC 48th was in and around My Lai (4) and, significantly, there would be no civilians present at the time of the assault. Since the village was essentially a military strong point, it was to be totally destroyed and everyone in it killed or captured. No plans were made for dealing with civilians because no civilians would be there.
When Medina’s company landed near My Lai (4) in the morning, it instantly became clear that the enemy was largely absent. There was no fusillade of VC fire from the village. A few armed VC were identified and taken under fire by gunships, but that was it. This was a shock for all the Americans involved. They had prepared themselves for a major engagement, one that might cost them their lives. But what they saw, from a distance, was a village—one that had been shelled in preparation for an assault, but also one with civilians still in it. Were the VC hiding in the village?
Medina gave the order to advance according to plan, as if My Lai (4) were still the VC fortress Barker had described. What followed over the next hour or so is hard to reconstruct and even harder to explain.
The soldiers, as ordered, destroyed everything. They burnt civilian hooches and killed animals. Some of the soldiers shot civilians—the village was populated by older men, women, and children—while others refused to fire at all. Medina saw that the village’s inhabitants were being murdered, and he methodically began to radio false reports of VC kills. Hoping to withdraw from the area fast— perhaps to avoid more carnage (and damage to his career)—he ordered Calley, leader of the First Platoon, to round the Vietnamese up and move them out of the village. The soldiers soon had several groups of villagers in custody. For reasons that are still unclear, Calley ordered his troops to murder them. Perhaps he viewed them as “VC sympathizers,” a term GIs in Quang Ngai commonly used for locals. Perhaps he felt pressure from Medina to “take care of them” so the unit could move out of the village to the north.
Some soldiers willingly executed the captives; others refused to open fire. Most of the killing was over in under an hour. This, however, was not the end of the brutality.
The second platoon, under Second Lieutenant Stephen Brooks, was ordered to the small settlement of Bihn Tay. There the men raped several Vietnamese women and murdered a small number of Vietnamese peasants.
Barker’s report on the March 16 My Lai operation registered 128 VC killed against three U.S. KIAs. This, of course, was a lie, and many, many people knew it at the time. Barker knew it, Medina knew it, Calley knew it, and so did all the officers and GIs who had participated in the assault. With the exception of the justly praised Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson, a helicopter pilot who reported the massacre over the radio as it was unfolding and who even used his chopper to shield civilians, none spoke up at the time. And even Thompson’s complaint was buried by the cover up Barker orchestrated and his confederates. That, however, is another sad story.
So, what is the solution to O’Brien’s “Mystery at My Lai?” It’s a tale of ambition, corruption, credulousness, cruelty, deception, and young men who were told that they might, at any moment, die at the hands of an unseen, unknown enemy.
Marshall Poe is the author of The Reality of the My Lai Massacre and the Myth of the Vietnam War (Cambria Press, 2023). He is the founder and editor of the New Books Network (NBN), a podcast network that publishes interviews with authors of academic books. Readers of Military History Now might be interested in New Books in Military History, one of the more than 120 subject-specific channels on the NBN.
