EYE-OPENERS: FROM VIETNAM TO GAZA, WAYS TO HOLD POWER TO ACCOUNT

Writers chronicle stories from preventable wars and horrors in the hope that some lessons will be learnt for the future. Even if sincere warnings and fervent appeals don’t work, civil society and the press must continue to write and document atrocities and excesses

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On April 30, Vietnam celebrated 50 years of the reunification of the North and South after the decades-long Vietnam War ended with the government of Saigon surrendering to the North Vietnamese forces in 1975. The American entanglement in the South East Asian country began in November 1955, with the U.S. fearing a communist takeover of the South by North Vietnam. After U.S. Army troops landed in South Vietnam in 1965, it dragged on for 10 more years.

By the mid and late 1960s, however, there was growing disenchantment with the war effort and the rising numbers of the dead. Stories were emanating about atrocities committed by the U.S. troops in Vietnam and anti-war protests began to grow across campuses and in cities including in the capital Washington D.C.

In 1969, journalist Seymour Hersh’s attention was drawn to a small news item that a certain Lieutenant William Calley had been charged with the “murder of 102 ‘Oriental human beings” in the hamlet of My Lai in Vietnam.

Hersh tracked Calley and other members of the ‘Charlie Company’ who had led the assault on March 16, 1968, and reconstructed the story of the atrocity.

His book, My Lai 4: A Report on the Massacre and its Aftermath, is a chilling read about over-reach, and how the killing began without warning, with even women and babies not being spared. The purpose of American troops to be at My Lai that day — to stop the Vietcong troops in their tracks — wasn’t served either.