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.

In the end, of course, this tremendous and profligate investment in war making failed to achieve its objective. The Vietnamese revolutionary forces never yielded to American firepower. But overkill did succeed in producing misery on an epic scale, especially for Vietnamese civilians.

In June 1966, just a few weeks after the market day massacre in My Luoc, an elderly man named Tran Lanh was walking to the refugee camp at Ai My when marines shot and killed him along with several other civilians. The next day, Lanh’s son Tran Cau, a high school student, received permission from the local district chief to travel along with three men to retrieve his father’s body. On the instructions of the official, who had cleared the plan with a local U.S. Marine commander, the men wore white clothes, carried a white flag with a red cross, and brought a letter of introduction written in English. Nevertheless, marines seized and blindfolded the four Vietnamese, tore up their letter and the flag, and marched them a long distance away. Eventually, the Americans removed their blindfolds and told them to go. When the Vietnamese had walked about 130 feet, however, the marines opened fire on them, killing Cau and one of his companions and wounding another.

The following month, U.S. Marines conducted a search-and-destroy operation in and around heavily populated villages on the Van Tuong Peninsula, which resulted in 688 enemy troops reportedly killed but only 109 weapons captured.

In 1968, the going rate for adult lives was thirty-three dollars, while children merited just half that

Fancy new military technologies also encouraged GIs to fire their weapons for the simple thrill of it—what the historian Christian Appy calls the “hedonism of destruction … attested to by countless veterans.”

“All of these efforts jelled in the winter and spring of 1968–1969, greatly increasing the combat power and flexibility of the division,” Ewell and Hunt later wrote in their history of the 9th Division’s operations in the delta.76 The statistics bear this out. During the first month of Speedy Express, the 9th Infantry Division logged a 24:1 kill ratio. It would jump to an astounding 68:1 in March and an eye-popping 134:1 in April.77 For the first quarter of 1969, the 9th Division had double the kill ratio of the next most prolific U.S. division. By April 1969, the Pentagon noted that of eight U.S. divisions then being tracked for statistical analysis, the 9th Infantry Division accounted for fully one-third of the enemy KIAs.