Vietnam Research Paper
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The country of Vietnam has a long and interesting history. Numerous rulers have controlled the country at various time periods, but the Vietnamese people have always fought for independence and for the freedom to choose the way they wanted to be governed. In Vietnam’s early history, China controlled its region for over 1,000 years. It wasn’t until the late 1800s that France found the country appealing and decided to establish a colony there. They ruled until the early 1900s when a feeling of independence became more apparent among the Vietnamese people. They simply wanted to govern their own country.
A young Vietnamese scholar named Ho Chi Minh began organizing and talking to his people about freedom, and many of …show more content…
Calley led Charlie Company. He ordered his men to go into the village firing their weapons at the people there. When they entered the village, they didn’t find any Viet Cong, but they still murdered 504 innocent children, women, and elderly over the course of 3 hours. The civilians were executed very brutally. Women were raped, and some people had “C Company” carved into their chest. “I cut their throats, cut off their hands, cut out their tongues, scalped them. I did it,” a soldier testified, “A lot of people were doing it and I just followed. I lost all sense of direction." Lieutenant Calley dragged dozens of innocent civilians, children included, into a ditch and shot at them with a machine gun, killing them all. When one soldier refused to fire his weapon at people in a ditch. His superior threatened to shoot him. Fifty children ages three or younger, sixty-nine between four and seven, and twenty-seven in their seventies and eighties were killed that day. Only one soldier was injured, and it was when he accidentally shot himself in the foot. Not one bullet was shot at the soldiers by the civilians at My …show more content…
The brigade claimed to have killed 128 Viet Cong which would’ve been the most VC killed in the span of 24 hours by them. They reported that only three weapons were captured which was strange compared to the number of VC they claimed to have killed. When Warrant Officer Thompson said that many civilians had been murdered, Ernest Medina the commanding officer of Charlie Company stated that only 20 or 28 had been killed accidentally. In actuality, he had personally seen over 100 dead bodies. When Colonel Oran K. Henderson sent in a report later, he said the same thing.
The truth came out when a helicopter gunner by the name of Ron Ridenhour told the story to investigative journalist, Seymour Hersh, which became public in November 1969. He was a soldier in the 11th Brigade who hadn’t participated in the massacre and had only heard reports of it. He wrote letters to 30 congressional and military leaders about massacre. He wrote to the Pentagon, State Department, Joint Chiefs of Staff, and even President Richard Nixon. He received no response from them which led him to give the
The country of Vietnam has a long and interesting history. Numerous rulers have controlled the country at various time periods, but the Vietnamese people have always fought for independence and for the freedom to choose the way they wanted to be governed. In Vietnam’s early history, China controlled its region for over 1,000 years. It wasn’t until the late 1800s that France found the country appealing and decided to establish a colony there. They ruled until the early 1900s when a feeling of independence became more apparent among the Vietnamese people. They simply wanted to govern their own country.
A young Vietnamese scholar named Ho Chi Minh began organizing and talking to his people about freedom, and many of …show more content…
Calley led Charlie Company. He ordered his men to go into the village firing their weapons at the people there. When they entered the village, they didn’t find any Viet Cong, but they still murdered 504 innocent children, women, and elderly over the course of 3 hours. The civilians were executed very brutally. Women were raped, and some people had “C Company” carved into their chest. “I cut their throats, cut off their hands, cut out their tongues, scalped them. I did it,” a soldier testified, “A lot of people were doing it and I just followed. I lost all sense of direction." Lieutenant Calley dragged dozens of innocent civilians, children included, into a ditch and shot at them with a machine gun, killing them all. When one soldier refused to fire his weapon at people in a ditch. His superior threatened to shoot him. Fifty children ages three or younger, sixty-nine between four and seven, and twenty-seven in their seventies and eighties were killed that day. Only one soldier was injured, and it was when he accidentally shot himself in the foot. Not one bullet was shot at the soldiers by the civilians at My …show more content…
The brigade claimed to have killed 128 Viet Cong which would’ve been the most VC killed in the span of 24 hours by them. They reported that only three weapons were captured which was strange compared to the number of VC they claimed to have killed. When Warrant Officer Thompson said that many civilians had been murdered, Ernest Medina the commanding officer of Charlie Company stated that only 20 or 28 had been killed accidentally. In actuality, he had personally seen over 100 dead bodies. When Colonel Oran K. Henderson sent in a report later, he said the same thing.
The truth came out when a helicopter gunner by the name of Ron Ridenhour told the story to investigative journalist, Seymour Hersh, which became public in November 1969. He was a soldier in the 11th Brigade who hadn’t participated in the massacre and had only heard reports of it. He wrote letters to 30 congressional and military leaders about massacre. He wrote to the Pentagon, State Department, Joint Chiefs of Staff, and even President Richard Nixon. He received no response from them which led him to give the