Manufacturing Consent_ The Political Economy of the Mass Media - Edward S. Herman [147]
While the nation agonized about the sentencing of Lieutenant William Calley for his part in the My Lai massacre, a new ground sweep in the same area drove some 16,000 peasants from their homes, and a year later the camp where the My Lai remnants were relocated in this operation was largely destroyed by air and artillery bombardment, the destruction attributed to the Viet Cong.81 These events too passed with little notice, and no calls for an inquiry—reasonably enough, since these too were normal and routine operations.
Medical workers at the nearby Canadian-run hospital reported that they knew of the My Lai massacre at once but gave it little attention because it was not out of the ordinary in a province (Quang Ngai) that had been virtually destroyed by U.S. military operations. The highest-ranking officer to have faced court-martial charges for the massacre, Colonel Oran Henderson, stated that “every unit of brigade size has its Mylai hidden some place,” although “every unit doesn’t have a Ridenhour” to expose what had happened.82 Knowledgeable elements of the peace movement also gave the My Lai massacre no special notice, for the same reasons.
The reasons why this particular massacre became a cause célèbre were explained by Newsweek’s Saigon bureau chief Kevin Buckley, referring to Operation Wheeler Wallawa, with 10,000 enemy reported killed, including the victims of My Lai, who were listed in the official body count:
An examination of that whole operation would have revealed the incident at My Lai to be a particularly gruesome application of a wider policy which had the same effect in many places at many times. Of course, the blame for that could not have been dumped on a stumblebum lieutenant. Calley was an aberration, but “Wheeler Wallawa” was not.
The real issue concerning this operation, Buckley cabled to the U.S. office of Newsweek, was not the “indiscriminate use of firepower,” as is often alleged. Rather, “it is charges of quite discriminating use—as a matter of policy, in populated areas,” as in this operation or many others, among them Operation Speedy Express, with thousands of civilians murdered and many others driven to refugee and prison camps by such devices as B-52 raids targeted specifically on villages.
An experienced U.S. official, cited by Buckley, compared My Lai to the exploits of the U.S. Ninth Infantry Division in a range of similar operations:
The actions of the 9th Division in inflicting civilian casualties were worse. The sum total of what the 9th did was overwhelming. In sum, the horror was worse than My Lai. But with the 9th, the civilian casualties came in dribbles and were pieced out over a long time. And most of them were inflicted from the air and at night. Also, they were sanctioned by the command’s insistence on high body counts . . . The result was an inevitable outcome of the unit’s command policy.83
In short, the My Lai massacre was ignored when it occurred, and the substantial attention given to it later is a more subtle form of cover-up of atrocities. An honest accounting, inconceivable in the media or “the culture” generally, would have placed the responsibility far higher than Lieutenant Calley, but it was more convenient to focus attention on the actions of semi-crazed GI’s in a gruesome combat situation with every Vietnamese civilian a threatening enemy. My Lai did not prompt the media generally—there were some individual exceptions—to take a deeper look at