On 16 March 1968, 504 people were killed by American soldiers in Son My, a collection of hamlets nestled between the central Vietnamese coast and a ridge of misty mountains, in what became known in the West as the My Lai Massacre.

In the morning American troops entered the village and rounded up every living thing: old men and women, infants in their mothers' arms, pigs, chickens and water buffalo.

Then the Americans proceeded to kill them all, slowly, carefully, methodically.

It took four hours (this was no sudden outburst of passion) for all 504 people and all the animals to be massacred.

Fifty-six of those killed were under the age of seven; some of the infants were bayoneted to death. The women were raped before being shot.

"Vo Cao Loi was 16 when he saw American helicopters buzz low over his family's house on the clear, sunny morning of the massacre.
That was not unusual, Loi said. American troops often passed through the area in then U.S.-backed South Vietnam.
"We were used to it," said Loi. "But we didn't expect them to kill everybody."

Loi's mother gave him a bag filled with rice and spare clothes and told him to hide.
He hid beneath coconut trees by a river as U.S. troops dragged women and children out of their houses and shot them.

"I could usually see my house from where I was hiding, but there was smoke everywhere. All I could hear were explosions, and the ground was shaking," said Loi, who worried that U.S. soldiers were throwing grenades into village shelters.
"I was hoping I was wrong, but it turned out I was right".
Loi's mother, older sister and her five-month-old son were killed by a grenade tossed into their shelter.

It was not until 3 p.m. that day that the shooting stopped.
"Only then did the survivors start crying and wailing," said Loi, who lost 18 relatives in the massacre.
There were not enough people left to take the dead to the cemetery, Loi said, so Vietnamese guerrillas helped him bury his family in the grounds of their home."

“The point I made then, which was ignored then, is that this behavior by American GIs happened all the time. I had friends who survived and were killed in subsequent massacres in the same area.

There were many massacres [...] I hold a contrarian view about [these] tourist sites [memorials] because they lift up one incident (or one individual) as if this were an aberration, when, at least to my observation, the truth is quite the opposite.” - Lady Borton

"One leading scholarly account of the massacre describes Charlie Company, which carried out the atrocity, as “very average” for American forces.¹ Of Lieutenant William Calley, the only American convicted of the crime, Bilton and Sim say that he was “a bland young man burdened with as much ordinariness as any single individual could bear [...] conventional and commonplace.” Another scholarly account of the massacre says: “There was simply nothing unusual about Charley Company.”³"

"[...]the My Lai massacre was not an aberration. It was an exemplar of what American troops did in Vietnam. The issue that Lady raises is an important one, and it is part of a wider debate that has been going on for decades."

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¹ Four Hours in My Lai, by Michael Bilton and Kevin Sim, pages 50-51.

² (Id., at page 49.)

³ My Lai: A Brief History With Documents, by James S. Olson and Randy Roberts, page 10.

On the fiftieth anniversary of the My Lai massacre – Uprise RI
https://upriseri.com/2018-03-16-jerry-elmer-my-lai/

Survivors of Vietnam's My Lai massacre remember 'darkness and silence' | Reuters
https://www.reuters.com/article/world/survivors-of-vietnams-my-lai-massacre-remember-darkness-and-silence-idUSKCN1GR12V/