American Experience

MICHAEL BILTON

If you take the total number of people who died at My Lai, which was 507, and put that alongside the two million civilians who died, it doesn't seem very much. But in terms of impact on America and on the rest of the world about how they conducted that war, clearly it changed people's opinions towards the war.

It was too big a price to pay

that if you were going to have to win this war by this kind of conduct, then it wasn't a price worth paying.

JONATHAN SCHELL

People had been saying to themselves, "Well, what are we doing to these people? What are we doing to them?" And then with My Lai, people began to say, "What is it doing to us?"

JOHN SMAIL

Oh, it hurts me thinking about the innocent people that got killed. It hurts me now. It hurts me now more than it did then, because then, you're thinking about living. You get out and you're a civilian, you think about dying.

PHAM THI THUAN (translated)

It's been awhile. Now I can sleep, but every once in a while, I dream again about how my father died, how my sister died, how they died next to me. I saw it all. I remember all the time. I can go back and remember all those sleepless nights that we had, everything that went on. My Lai, all the people who were killed there. Every day, I try to make it easy. I thought that by drinking that I could make it easy and make it go away. I'd lay down at night, and still the same thing whether I drank, whether I didn't drink. Still the same thing. It's the memories-- they kept coming back, kept coming back.

TRAN NAM (translated)

I will never forget. When I'm reminded, I suddenly remember the pain. A chapter in the book opens. There is no way I will ever forget. As far as living with the shame of My Lai, I have no shame. I did what I was supposed to be doing. The shame rests with the politicians and the military. Not with me, the other members of Charlie Company, Lieutenant Calley, or Captain Medina. The shame lays with them. It's a national shame.