PROJECTS — An Oral History of the My Lai Massacre

The Oral History Panel from the 1994 Tulane University conference, "My Lai 25 Years After: Facing the Darkness, Healing the Wounds," is here offered for purchase. Proceeds will support the documentary project, "Crossing the Line: My Lai and the American Conscience."

The Tulane conference assembled many respected civilian and military authorities to discuss the most infamous atrocity of the Vietnam War. Garnering attention both in print and electronic media (including C-SPAN), the conference made a significant addition to the oral history of the My Lai incident in particular and the Vietnam war in general. At the heart of the conference was the oral history panel itself.

The panel was moderated by Kevin Sim, who co-wrote Four Hours in My Lai and directed the documentary of the same name for the BBC and WGBH:

Anybody who's attended the conference over the last day or so would recognize that without individual voices, there would be no conference and there would be, in fact, no history of My Lai at all. The Czech novelist Milan Kundera has said that the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting, and each of the three people on the panel here are in important ways champions of this struggle of memory against forgetting.

Here, from the panel, Hugh Thompson - the helicopter pilot who tried to stop the massacre- reflects on his first realization of what was happening:

The thought was going through my mind and my crew's mind, how these people got in that ditch and after coming up with about three scenarios, one of them being an artillery hit them, you wipe that out of your mind 'cause every house in Vietnam, I think, has a bunker underneath it. If artillery was coming there, they would go to the bunker, they wouldn't go outside in the open area. Then I said, well, when artillery was coming, they were trying to leave and a round caught them in the ditch while they were going for cover. I threw that one out of my mind. Then something just sunk into me that these people were marched into that ditch and murdered. That was the only explanation that I could come up with

Here Ron Ridenhour - whose letter to Congress and the Pentagon prevented the cover-up - relates his first blooding in-country:

On our first combat mission - our first alleged combat mission - we went out to fly around in this village and to protect the infantry soldiers from an ambush. And out of the back end of the village here came a young man, military age, running, fleeing out of the village. We fly down alongside him and we're trying to get him to stop, and he's like, "not me, man, I'm getting out of here," he's steady trucking on. And so, after a few minutes of this, the pilot said, "Slow him down - fire a burst in front of him. Let him know we're serious." So the doorman fired first and, instead of firing in front of him, he hit him in the hips. And the man went down in a heap and lay there in his own blood. And we were totally freaked out, because this was our first mission, we never fired at anybody in anger before or under combat conditions or anything else. And we shot this guy and didn't intend to. So we were pretty upset. The pilot was especially upset, and he began to get on the radio and to call to the officers in the ground company to come help this guy. And he was pretty frantic, and it took him about twenty minutes to get there and the pilot is steadily on the radio saying, "Come on! Come on, hurry, this man needs help! This man needs help!" And you could hear the infantry officer getting more and more frustrated as he ran. You could hear him moaning, you could hear him, "(pant, pant) I'm coming! I'm coming! (pant, pant)" over the radio. Finally they break out on the same trail and run down the trail to the guy. The officer gets there, runs up to him, stops, leans down, looks at him, stands up, pulls out his .45, cocks it, BOOM! Shoots the guy in the head. Looks up at us, he gets on his radio and says, "This man no longer needs any help." Well, that was my introduction to the reality of Vietnam as I saw it. (edited for space requirements - do not quote)

Here William Eckhardt - chief prosecutor of the My Lai cases - urges the importance of keeping My Lai before the American public:

The important thing is, in my judgment, is that this is labeled as wrong, it has been used to teach as wrong, It has been used to teach the consequences of ill-discipline on the battlefield, that you lose wars because of it. It's just that simple. That's what this has been used for. Some days I wondered whether we did more harm than good. The prosecutorial record is absolutely abysmal. Thing that amazes me is we got so far. . . . The function of the law, it seems to me, is to be deterrence. This is not an exercise in self-flagellation, if that's why we were here, then we shouldn't be here. We're using history like it needs to be used. You learn from the past to prevent in the future. That's what My Lai needs to be used for. And at least in the Gulf War, I'm told, and in others too, but at least this is my first-hand knowledge, two division commanders had their brigade commanders around them and the last thing that they said as they went off to do battle - "No My Lai's in this division, you hear me?" We worked long and hard in the military of the United States for those type of statements.