The Massacre at My Lai | Interview | Rules of Engagement: How My Lai Changed the US Military | 5

0:11From Wondery, I'm Lindsey Graham, and this is American Scandal.

0:33On March 16, 1968, American soldiers entered the Vietnamese hamlet of My Lai. What followed was one of the most horrifying war crimes in U.S. history. Hundreds of unarmed civilians, men, women, and children were gunned down in cold blood. Some were raped. But instead of confronting this atrocity, military leaders tried to bury it. And for more than a year, they succeeded. When the truth finally came to light, it shocked the world and raised a disturbing question, how could the United States Army allow something like this to happen? And yet, despite the fallout, only one man was convicted of a crime, while dozens more went free.

1:11My guest today is Fred Bork, a retired Army lawyer and regimental historian of the Judge Advocate General Corps. He's written extensively about how My Lai shaped military justice, and today we'll explore how the U.S. military confronted the legacy of this massacre and whether the lessons it claimed to learn still hold up more than 50 years later. Our conversation is next.

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2:55Fred Bork, welcome to American Scandal. Happy to be here. So you have said that My Lai nearly wrecked the U.S. Army. What did you mean by that? Well, I think if you put it in the context of the time, the country was increasingly opposed to the war in Vietnam. And if you remember your history, the Tet Offensive of January 1968 was a real shock to Americans. Walter Cronkite on CBS News was telling Americans that 500 soldiers had been killed in that week alone in the Vietnam War. And Americans had been told by Lyndon Bates Johnson and the Pentagon that we were winning the war. But it looked as if we were, in fact, losing the war.

3:46So by the time the American people learn about what happened at My Lai, this horrendous war crime, there was so much anti-war feeling, which it translated into anti-Army feeling, that morale in the Army just hit rock bottom. particularly after photographs in color of the murders at My Lai were published in Life Magazine. This was an unbelievable shock to Americans. They'd never seen anything like this before. And in those days, as you probably know, or your listeners know, Life Magazine was in everybody's household. So when I say My Lai nearly wrecked the army, I'm saying that the war crime was so shocking that it really hurt the reputation of the army among the American people.

4:37So we know that there were many failures that led to the My Lai Massacre, poor training and leadership, low morale, flawed intelligence, and of course, racism. What would you say are the most critical of these factors? Well, certainly the number one factor is poor leadership, as epitomized by William Calley, who was a substandard leader, should have never been commissioned as an officer. But again, at the time, we were so short of smart young men, in this case, to be leaders, that Kali was commissioned. And I think that the real failure at My Lai, sure, there were many, was leadership. A better leader would have made sure that this war crime had not occurred, because you cannot, you may not, you should not kill unarmed and unresisting civilians.

5:33But Kali was the one who ordered his men to open fire and to kill them. So I suppose we have to delve into what the rules of engagement are, what orders are legal to follow or not. At the time of My Lai, what were the frameworks that governed how U.S. soldiers were supposed to behave in combat situations? And I guess, how did the Army distinguish between a war crime and a lawful order? Well, during the Vietnam War, the law that applied was the Geneva Conventions of 1949. And those had been in effect since after World War II. And certainly, we taught soldiers that they needed to make sure they only targeted the enemy.

6:17Don't harm civilians. if you have to launch an attack, try to reduce collateral damage, that is injury to unarmed civilians. But that was pretty much all there was. Today, we have what we call rules of engagement, and those are the commander's rules for how force may be used. We didn't have that back during the Vietnam era. And consequently, I think one of the problems at My Lai is that soldiers really weren't sure how they should use force. Now, if we're talking about war crimes, some war crimes are pretty easy to figure out. You can't kill prisoners of war. You shouldn't be shooting at unarmed or unresisting civilians.

7:06And then if we're lawful orders. Well, if a lieutenant ordered a soldier to kill a prisoner of war, every soldier should know that that's an illegal order. But what about an order to shoot at a Vietnamese civilian who's taken off running as soon as she sees you in a rice paddy? Is that a lawful order? Is that person running away an enemy or a civilian? So I think these are more complicated issues, particularly in Vietnam. And let me also add that during this era, we also had what we called free fire zones. And the idea was that you would clear a particular geographic area of the enemy, or so you said, and then you told your soldiers, you may fire on anyone who's in that area, because it's a free fire zone.

8:03You can assume that anyone who's there is in fact the enemy. This was a big mistake because often you'd end up killing civilians who either didn't realize they were in a free fire zone or simply had bad luck to be there. But the bottom line is we did have the Geneva Conventions, but other than some rudimentary classes, we didn't do much in the way of training or education on obeying only lawful orders. And of course, in Vietnam, as you hint, the situation was difficult. The Viet Cong, they often blended in with the civilian population. They didn't wear uniforms. You mentioned these free fire zones.

8:43But how else did the U.S. Army prepare for the reality of guerrilla warfare? The answer is not very well at all. And in fact, this is a very frustrating situation for any American soldier, because unlike World War II, where the enemy wore a uniform, or the Korean War, as you say, there's no way to really tell who the enemy is, at least when you're talking about the Viet Cong. The North Vietnamese, a professional armed force, they wore uniforms. But if you're talking about combatants in South Vietnam, the Viet Cong are wearing black pajamas and their farmers by day and their guerrillas by night.

9:25So it's almost impossible for a soldier to know, an American soldier to know, if this military-age Vietnamese man is actually Viet Cong. And I think as a general rule, although we didn't talk about it at the time, the issue would be, is the person demonstrating some hostile intent? If you saw a farmer carrying a weapon, an AK-47, well, you might assume that that person is the enemy. But I've seen more than a few cases where a young Vietnamese male would simply start running away. And the conclusion by the Americans was, well, only the enemy would run away, so let's open fire. And the result was, of course, not good because you're not really sure that you're engaging the enemy.

10:19So to go back to this free fire zone, this was one of the solutions they came up with. They said, well, it's too hard to identify whether or not someone's the enemy. So let's just say we're going to have this geographic area and we're going to tell the Vietnamese stay out of here or don't be out after a particular curfew. And then if we see somebody, we can assume that's the enemy. So that was one way to fix it, which I think in retrospect was a big mistake. In thinking about conflicts subsequent to Vietnam, they often resemble Vietnam more than they do World War II. I'm thinking of our engagements in the Middle East and Afghanistan.

10:58Has the military gotten any better at distinguishing between civilians and the enemy? Well, of course, you are exactly right. We have not had this sort of nation-on-nation conflict really since the Korean War. All right, you could certainly include the North Vietnamese. But in Afghanistan, for example, how were you able to distinguish between an Afghan civilian who's simply going about his or her business and the Taliban or Al-Qaeda? And so what the American military has done is said, okay, we're going to have rules of engagement. And one of the rules would be that you may not engage, say in this case, an Afghan, unless that Afghan shows some sort of hostile intent.

11:47And the hostile intent would be carrying a weapon, aiming that weapon at you, or otherwise indicating that he was a combatant. So the answer is, yes, we are doing better, but it's still difficult if you're in that situation where the enemy, if you want to call him that, doesn't follow the same rules that we do, which means doesn't wear a uniform or have insignia of rank or any of these sort of things. So we are doing better, but it's still very difficult. And like anything, Lindsay, war is messy. People make mistakes. Accidents happen. And so even if you think someone's showing hostile intent and you engage them, well, maybe you make a mistake.

12:37It's just hard to know. So it sounds like these rules of engagement are there to assist the Army and the individual soldiers to decide what is proper conduct in a conflict zone. And this is probably one of the central questions. What orders can soldiers disobey. What does military law say about that? In general, military law or the law of armed conflict says that you can only use force if it's required by military necessity, which means that you need to take the action to defeat the enemy quickly and efficiently. That's the first principle. And then the second principle we talk about, and this is what we tell soldiers is distinction.

13:21And that is, you're always allowed to move precisely, if you want to say, against enemy elements, but you can't harm the innocent. You can't harm civilians. Now, we know that sometimes in attacking the enemy, civilians are harmed. And so the third principle that we tell soldiers is, whatever you're doing, it has to be proportional. So civilians lawfully may be killed or injured, but the injury has to be proportional to the need to destroy the enemy. Now, this, of course, is a very sticky wicket because what I may think is proportional may not be what someone else thinks is proportional. And then the last principle we always talk about is you can't use a weapon or do something that causes unnecessary suffering.

14:14So, for example, that's why we don't allow the use of poison or chemical weapons. And so those are the four things that we tell soldiers. And these rules of engagement are all built around that, with the key one being you distinguish between the enemy and civilians by looking for hostile intent. That is, assuming the enemy is not wearing a uniform. So would you run down these rules then in Kali's case? So in Kali's case, the intelligence that they got on March 16th, 1968, was that they were going into the village of My Lai to clear out a very, very sophisticated Viet Cong battalion that had been there for years and years.

15:02So at least based on the intelligence, it was militarily necessary for Kali's platoon to go into My Lai. The problem was, as probably your listeners know, is the military intelligence was just bad. There were no Viet Cong in the village. The only people who were at My Lai were unarmed and unresisting civilians. And so Kali and his men violated the principle of distinction because there were no enemy there to engage, because they were unarmed and unresisting. There were no military age males. They were just innocent civilians. And then, of course, certainly wasn't proportional because you had no military reason to be in the village once you found out the enemy wasn't there.

15:53Unnecessary suffering doesn't really apply because they weren't using an illegal weapon of any way. But I would say the big problem is they violated the principle of distinction, which is you can only attack enemy elements, but you can't harm the innocent. So if one of these soldiers, and I feel for them greatly, it's a horrible situation and very stressful all around, but what if they were cognizant of these principles, realized that war crimes were happening around them, and then decided to act? What could they have done? How do you report a war crime in 1968 U.S. Army? Well, in fact, the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam, published regulations that that required all American soldiers to report war crimes that they saw committed by an enemy, and also to report war crimes that they saw committed by Americans.

16:51Now, just because there's a regulation out there and a requirement to do this doesn't mean it's going to be easy to do. And I think that part of the problem is that it's very, very difficult for a soldier to decide to disobey an order. As a general rule, we want unquestioning and immediate obedience to orders. We cannot have soldiers questioning the officer's orders or a non-commissioned officer's orders. because you can't fight a war and win a war if there's a discussion about whether or not I'm going to follow your order. The problem, of course, is that what do you do when you get a clearly illegal order?

17:37So we tell soldiers that if you get an illegal order, you must not follow it. But we also tell soldiers you disobey an order at your own risk. and if it turns out that you were wrong in refusing to follow this order, well, then maybe you will have to pay some sort of a price. So I think the problem here is that sometimes determining what's unlawful is difficult.

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20:08One of the people who in the moment did decide that something untoward or worse was going on was Hugh Thompson, but he was vilified for speaking out. Talk about the backlash that he and others who thought about speaking out faced. Well, I think Hugh Thompson is the real hero of My Lai. In fact, some credit Hugh and Hugh's actions as the helicopter pilot that day for really stopping the massacre, although by that time, as many as 500 had been killed, 350 to 500. But yes, Hugh Thompson, who was flying in a helicopter over My Lai, began to see bodies, dead bodies of civilians on the ground. And he said, whoa, what's going on here?

20:53This looks like some killing is out of control. He lands his helicopter. He actually has a discussion with Callie, who says, mind your own business, get out of here. And at one point, he actually tells his gun crew in the helicopter, if you see Cali's platoon or second platoon, if they start pursuing some of these civilians, I'm telling you to open fire. I mean, this was shocking that an American pilot would tell his crew to open fire on other Americans. But you're exactly right. he reports it to his chain of command, the brigade commander, Colonel Henderson. And he also tells other people what he's seen and nothing is done because there's a coverup.

21:40And you're right. He is vilified. He gets death threats. He suffers a lot. And this is really not that unusual. Sometimes you make a hard decision. It's the right decision and others don't like it. There were many people who, after Callie was convicted, insisted that Callie really was a hero and that we should never have prosecuted him. So I think this is just the flip side of what Hugh Thompson faced. Yeah, I think it was a backlash. It was wrong. But sometimes this happens if you are a whistleblower, if you want to call it like that. Now, at the time, there's not really we're not talking about whistleblowing here because this is the Army.

22:22But I think, you know, Thompson was willing to stand up for the courage of his convictions. And he did save many lives, but he did pay for it personally because of people who criticized him for what he did. If I can dig in a little there, you say it's not whistleblowing because this is the Army. Does the Army not have any whistleblower protections in place? Well, we certainly do now. But at the time, in 1968, I don't think there really was any sort of whistleblower kind of protection. I mean, certainly, Thompson spoke up. I think he notified the chaplain. He notified the chain of command. But he didn't really get any sort of protection.

23:05So it's not the sophisticated sort of whistleblower protections that we have in the government today. Now, as you dig into this story a bit, something might occur to you that it's almost remarkable that we know about this story, given that the backlash of potential witnesses, given the code of silence within the army, the incentives to keep the truth hidden. Should we be surprised that this incident ultimately came out at all? Well, I think so, because the other hero is a guy by the name of Ron Reidenhour. The murders at My Lai happened in March of 1968. And about a year later, Ron Ridenour, who was not at My Lai and was not with Cali's unit, Ron Ridenour began to hear people who had been there talking about this.

23:57and Ridenour was shocked. He couldn't believe that this sort of thing had happened. Now, this is all back in the U.S. now. These guys are all out of Vietnam. They've all been discharged. And Ridenour decides that he's going to write some letters. So you got to think back to the 60s, 1969. If you wanted to let the government know about something bad, about all you could do is, well, you could send a telegram or you could write a letter. No one's going to answer your phone call. So Ridenour began to write letters and he wrote at least 25 letters in which he explained that he'd heard about this massacre at My Lai, these killings at My Lai.

24:38And one of Ridenour's letters reached General Wes Moreland, who was then the chief of staff of the army. And Wes Moreland turned over the letter to the army IG who began investigating it. So yes, Yes, there had been a very sophisticated cover-up for more than a year at the highest levels, including the entire division staff. And yeah, I think you can say if it hadn't been for Ron Ridenhauer's letter writing, we might never known about this. Certainly the South Vietnamese were not going to do anything about it because their view was that probably the people at My Lai were Viet Cong sympathizers anyway, and why do we want to do anything about this?

25:28So yeah, I think if it hadn't been for Ron Ridenour, we wouldn't know about it. After World War II, we saw increasing interest in psychology to try to discover why ordinary people can commit or allow terrible acts, probably in a response to the Holocaust in Nazi Germany. The Milgram experiment is one of the most famous. What role do you think this bystander effect or the groupthink that these experiments pointed to played in what happened at Miele? There's a very famous series of articles or a book by Hannah Arendt who talks about the banality of evil and how people who ordinarily were just normal men and women ended up doing really evil things.

26:09And maybe that's a product of groupthink. I think that there are a couple of explanations here about what happened at My Lai. The first one would be, I think most of the soldiers kept quiet maybe because they were ashamed of what they did. Or maybe they kept quiet because they didn't want to incriminate themselves. Or maybe they kept quiet because they thought they did nothing wrong. And one of the big problems, I think, is that, and we've done this in every single war and every single army does this, and that is you tend to dehumanize the enemy. And you look at the enemy and you talk about the enemy as not being like you.

26:59and consequently then it's easier to attack the enemy and kill the enemy. And so I think part of the problem at My Lai is that at least for some of these soldiers, okay, well, maybe some civilians were killed, but they're sort of all bad. They're not like us. They don't look like us. And so that makes the behavior easier. Has the military looked into this? Sure. And how do we prevent it? Well, Well, again, one of the reasons, and we'll talk about this later, is we have decided that one way to prevent these war crimes is to put lawyers actually in combat operations so they can be eyes and ears and make sure that people are obeying the law.

27:42But I think to your original question about how people can commit and allow terrible acts, I think these are probably the best explanations. You mentioned the dehumanization of the Vietnamese as a factor here, and it's been pointed to over and over again by historians and investigators, including in the Peers Commission. How has the military perhaps reckoned with this aspect of its history and the necessity of making the enemy the enemy? Well, I think this is certainly a key problem. Dehumanization is always part of war. In World War II, we called the Germans the Krauts. We called the Japanese the Nips or the Japs.

28:21In Vietnam, we called the enemy the Gooks. All this is racism. It's dehumanization. But you can easily see that this dehumanization also makes it easier for someone to commit a war crime because you end up not treating people, the enemy, the way really you should be treated. So I think that, yes, dehumanization is always part of the war and you are never going to see it disappear, I think. At least where you're talking about someone actually has to close with the enemy in combat and take the person out. So example, one other thing, you know, we don't talk about in the army about killing people.