The My Lai Massacre and Operation Speedy Express: The History of the U.S. Army's Most Controversial Operations during the Vietnam War

Before the Vietnam War, most Americans would have been hard pressed to locate Vietnam on a map. South Vietnamese President Diem's regime was extremely unpopular, and war broke out between Communist North Vietnam and South Vietnam around the end of the 1950s. Kennedy's administration tried to prop up the South Vietnamese with training and assistance, but the South Vietnamese military was feeble. A month before his death, Kennedy signed a presidential directive withdrawing 1,000 American personnel, and shortly after Kennedy's assassination, new President Lyndon B. Johnson reversed course, instead opting to expand American assistance to South Vietnam.

The Vietnam War remains one of the most controversial events in American history, and it bitterly divided the nation in 1968, but it could have been far worse. That's because, unbeknownst to most Americans that year, American forces had carried out the most notorious mass killing of the war that March. On March 16, perhaps as many as 500 Vietnamese villagers in the Son My village complex - men, women, and children - were killed by American soldiers in Task Force Barker. The worst of the violence, carried out by members of Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 11th Infantry, occurred in a small village known locally as Xom Lang. On American maps, the location was marked as My Lai (4), and when news of the killings leaked into the American press over a year and a half later in November 1969, it was under that name that the incident became infamous as the "My Lai Massacre."

The My Lai Massacre was possibly the single worst atrocity committed by American forces during the long and sometimes brutal Vietnam War, and it has been called "the most shocking episode of the Vietnam War." It became a touchstone not only for the controversial conflict but for the manner in which the American government had covered up the truth, which many felt was emblematic of the government's behavior throughout much of the war itself. Moreover, it damaged the nation's credibility, as well as the military's.

Operation Speedy Express was a highly controversial military operation carried out by the U.S. Army supported by the Army of South Vietnam (ARVN) as well as regional and popular forces during the Vietnam War. It lasted from December 1968 until May 1969 and took place in the Mekong Delta's Kien Hoa and Vinh Binh provinces. The operation was a part of U.S. Army "pacification" efforts toward the Viet Cong, as American forces sought to interdict Viet Cong supply and communication lines from Cambodia and deny them the use of operational bases. Formally, the operation involved 8,000 U.S. soldiers and resulted in 242 American lives lost compared to 10,899 Viet Cong and People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN) killed, according to Department of Defense records. Operation Speedy Express was considered successful by U.S. standards, as determined by the primary metric of body counts. However, while the number of Vietnamese dead, including civilians, is unknown, it is assumed to surpass 5,000, and the high number of casualties was attributed to the indiscriminate use of firepower.

The controversy surrounding Operation Speedy Express led to an investigation by the U.S. Army and the House Armed Services Committee. The Army was ultimately cleared of wrongdoing, but in the nearly 60 years since, modern historians have tried to uncover more.