The My Lai Tapes
A few weeks ago I listened to the second part of a two-part radio documentary about the massacre that occurred on the 16th of March 16, 1968 in the Vietnamese villages of Mỹ Lai and My Khe. The documentary was originally broadcast by the BBC World Service, and MP3s of both parts can be downloaded from this page. The documentary mentions photographs taken by Ronald Haerberle, and talks about how important these photographs were in the investigation of the massacre. Some of the photographs (they’re quite disturbing, so view them at your own discretion) can be found in the Wikipedia article about the event. The caption page for one of the photographs quotes from ‘War and the Politics of Perception’, the first chapter of Visualizing War, an essay by Camilla Benolirao Griggers (the link to the essay isn’t working for me, but if you can get to it, I’d really like to see a copy). Here is part of that passage:
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.
There is a short Wikipedia article on Ronald Haerberle, here. In the photograph below (captioned “Unidentified body in well. My Lai, Vietnam. March 16, 1968.”) he can be seen reflected in the water.
