Nick Turse

The public response generally followed the official one. Twenty-five years later, Ridenhour would sum it up this way.

At the end of it, if you ask people what happened at My Lai, they would say: “Oh yeah, isn’t that where Lieutenant Calley went crazy and killed all those people?” No, that was not what happened. Lieutenant Calley was one of the people who went crazy and killed a lot of people at My Lai, but this was an operation, not an aberration.

In 1964, an American officer remarked, “We must terrorize the villagers even more, so they see that their real self-interest lies with us. We’ve got to start bombing and strafing the villages that aren’t friendly to the Government.”113 One reporter recalled an army captain in a heavily populated Mekong Delta province sweeping his hand across a couple dozen hamlets on a map and remarking that refugees were streaming out of the area. The reporter asked why. “Because it’s not healthy out there,” the captain replied. “We’re shelling the hell out of them.”

Third World people, even with Soviet and Chinese support, could stand up to the mightiest nation on Earth as it unleashed firepower well beyond levels that had brought great powers like Germany and Japan to their knees. (The amount of ammunition fired per soldier was twenty-six times greater in Vietnam than during World War II.) Overkill was supposed to solve all American problems, and the answer to any setbacks was just more overkill. At its peak, the U.S. effort in Vietnam was soaking up 37 percent of all American military spending and required the fighting strength of more than 50 percent of all Marine Corps divisions, 40 percent of all combat-ready army divisions, and 33 percent of the navy. Overall, estimates of the U.S. expenditure on the war range from $700 billion to more than $1 trillion in 2012 dollars.