For decades, it has been generally accepted that the My Lai massacre of as many as 400 Vietnamese civilians by US Army troops on Mar. 16, 1968 was a violation of official policy directives on the treatment of civilians in South Vietnam. That was the conclusion reached in the most definitive official account of why My Lai happened — the final report by Gen William Peers, who investigated the question of responsibility for the massacre in late 1969 and early 1970 for the Department of the Army and the Army Chief of Staff.

Documentary evidence from US army archives shows, however, that the Peers report misrepresented a key directive from the top commander in Vietnam, Gen William C Westmoreland, describing it as calling for a blanket policy of humane treatment of civilians in villages controlled by the Communist movement.

The directive in question makes it clear that the policy of humane treatment did not extend to civilians in areas which had been under long-term Communist rule, as was the case with My Lai. That revelation would have placed the responsibility for the orders on the My Lai operation squarely on Westmoreland’s shoulders. The Peers report found that the troops who entered My Lai and three other hamlets of the village of Son My had been led to believe that everyone in the village should be killed.

The report concluded that the Task Force commander responsible for the operation, Col Frank Barker, had failed to “make clear any distinctions between combatants and non-combatants in their orders and instructions.” The result, it stated, was that he had “conveyed an understanding that only the enemy remained” in My Lai. The report asserted, however, that there was no higher command responsibility for what happened in My Lai.

It concluded that the policy guidance from Gen William Westmoreland, the commander of all US forces in Vietnam, was “consistent in adhering to the humane standard of protecting the civilians within the combat zone”.

The most important document cited by the Peers report in support of that conclusion was Directive 525-3 from the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV), called “Combat Operations: Minimising Noncombatant Battle Casualties”. The Peers report said that one of the “significant points” of the directive was that “Specified strike zones should be configured to exclude populated areas.”

The Peers report recommended disciplinary action against 30 Army officers, including two generals and four colonels. But when it came to his treatment of Westmoreland’s policy directives, Gen Peers had a strong incentive to absolve him of any responsibility for My Lai. James K Walsh, Jr., who was Special Counsel to the Peers investigation, recalled in an interview that Peers had hoped to become commander of the 8th Army in South Korea after his service in Vietnam.

That meant that he had to have the support of the Gen Westmoreland, who had become the Army Chief of Staff in 1968 and thus was in a position to determine whether he would get the choice assignment he wanted. Unfortunately for Peers, Westmoreland was replaced as Chief of Staff by Creighton B Abrams in June 1972, and Abrams was openly hostile to the whole Peers investigation, according to Walsh. Peers never got the 8th Army command and chose early retirement. — IPS