My Lai: 45 years later

The Vietnam War was a horrific period in world history. Many people have heard of the My Lai massacre of vietnamese villagers by U.S. soldiers - but how many know that the massacre was a cover-up by those soldiers for mass rape of women and children as young as 10 years old? Horrific. History forgotten is history repeated...



My Lai, Sexual Assault and the Black Blouse Girl: Forty-Five Years Later, One of America’s Most Iconic Photos Hides Truth in Plain Sight

Quote:

Looking back at the Vietnam war and the iconic photographs that mark that era, how is it that the American public knows about the “Napalm Girl” but no one knows or speaks of the My Lai “Black Blouse Girl?” And what does it mean that, forty-five years later, even though her experience was publicized by investigative reports and Congressional testimony, what happened to her – reflected in this famous photo – remains hidden in plain sight? The My Lai Massacre captured public awareness largely due to the 1969 public release of graphic photographs taken by Army Photographer Ronald Haeberle. Since the release, viewers have been captivated by the visceral emotion expressed on the face of the woman in the foreground of the photo below (published in 1969 by Life magazine). According to Life’s caption of the photograph, these villagers were “huddle[ed] in terror moments before being killed by American troops at My Lai.”

Quote:

By reading the image closely, you can see that the teenager in the right background is buttoning up her blouse. It’s a curious action. Why would she be preoccupied with a button while the other people in the photograph were terrified of being killed? Why was the button undone to begin with? Testimony from the 1969-1979 Peers Inquiry solves the mystery of the button: the image actually captures these women and children in the moments between a sexual assault and mass murder.

Quote:

...the older woman, who he presumed to be the girl’s mother, had been “biting and kicking and scratching and fighting off” the group of soldiers. The emotion on the face of the older woman in the foreground is not one of passive terror. Once the soldiers noticed the photographer and journalist, they ceased the assault. Haeberle later recalled that after walking away, “I heard an M-60 [machine gun] go off, and when we turned back around, all of [the women] and the kids with them were dead.”

(BagNewsNotes)

via ehMac.ca http://www.ehmac.ca/showthread.php?t=112553&goto=newpost