- Top Features:
- War Room
- Glenn Greenwald
- Broadsheet
- Joan Walsh
- Camille Paglia
- Since You Asked
- Follow Salon:
Read other letters about this article
The Army photographer, Ronald Haeberle, assigned to Charlie Company on March 16th, 1968 had two cameras. One was an Army standard; one was his personal camera. The film on the Army owned camera, i.e., the official camera of the State, showed standard operations that is “authorized” and “official” operations including interrogating villagers and burning “insurgent” huts.
What the film on the personal camera showed, however, was different. When turned over to the press and Government by the photographer, those “unofficial” photographs provided the grounds for a court martial. Haeberle’s personal images (owned by himself and not the US Government) showed hundreds of villagers who had been killed by U.S. troops. More significantly, they showed that the dead were primarily women and children, including infants. These photographs exposed the fact that the “insurgents” in popular discourse about Vietnam were actually unarmed civilians. The photos made visible to viewers that the “enemy” in Vietnam was actually the indigenous Vietnamese population. (Camilla Benolirao Griggers, “War and the Politics of Perception,” chapter 1 from the essay Visualizing War.)
http://www.learnnc.org/lp/multimedia/3290
Life magazine, calling My Lai "a story of indisputable horror," published ten pages of gut-wrenching photographs of the massacre in process.
Although it had taken over a year and a half, the massacre of My Lai, in all its graphic detail, had become a household topic of conversation. Never before had ordinary Americans directly confronted the brutality of their own soldiers. For some, My Lai con-firmed their worst fears about America's war in Vietnam. For others, My Lai contradicted not just their vision of the war in Vietnam, but also a longstanding American tradition of depicting the enemy, whether Indians, Nazis, Japanese, or Vietnamese, as the perpetrators of heinous atrocities—not typical American "boys."
http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0193-11081_ITM
It's also the reason the photos need to be released now. There are a few new generations who need to see the truth about what their government is capable of.
