Ronald L. Haeberle (born ) is a former United States Army combat photographer best known for the photographs he took of the My Lai massacre on March 16, 1968. The photographs were definitive evidence of a massacre, making it impossible for the U.S. Army or government to ignore or cover up. On November 21, 1969, the day after the photographs were first published in Haeberle's hometown newspaper, The Cleveland Plain Dealer, Melvin Laird, the Secretary of Defense, discussed them with Henry Kissinger who was at the time National Security Advisor to President Richard Nixon. Laird was recorded as saying that while he would like "to sweep it under the rug", the photographs prevented it.
At the time of the massacre, Haeberle was a sergeant assigned as public information photographer to Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry Regiment. With him were three cameras: two Army issued black and white cameras for official photos and his own personal camera containing color slide film. It was the color photographs he took that day that provided evidence of the massacre and elevated the story of My Lai to world-wide prominence. A year after Haeberle returned to his hometown of Cleveland, Ohio with an honorable discharge, he offered them to The Cleveland Plain Dealer, which published a number of them along with his personal account on November 20, 1969. He then sold the photos to LIFE magazine, which published them in the December 5, 1969, issue.
One of Haeberle's photos became an important symbol of the massacre, in large part because of its use in the And babies poster, which was distributed around the world, reproduced in newspapers, and used in protest marches. Even though there were many other massacres by U.S. forces during the war, this image and My Lai itself came to represent them all.
Background Haeberle was born and raised in a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio. In high school he played football and ran track, graduating in the spring of 1960. In 1962, he began attending Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, where he majored in photography.
During his senior year in 1966 he reduced his classes to part-time not realizing this made him eligible for the draft. At that time the U.S. military was drafting large numbers of young men to expand the war in Vietnam. In fact, 1966 was the high water mark for the number of men who were inducted into the military through the Selective Service System, with over 380,000 drafted that year. He requested a delay to finish his degree, but was denied. In April 1966, he was sent to Fort Benning, Georgia, for Army Basic Training.
After basic training, he was trained as a mortarman and was then given orders to report to the 11th Infantry Brigade at Schofield Barracks in Honolulu, Hawaii. When the brigade commander found out he had majored in photography, he was reassigned to a newly formed public information office for the brigade. Here he took pictures of training exercises, award ceremonies and other facets of daily Army life which were published in the brigade newsletter. He also sent official photos and news releases about the brigade's soldiers to hometown newspapers. In late 1967 his brigade was sent to Vietnam. Haeberle only had a little over four months left on his two year draft obligation, and could have stayed in Hawaii, but volunteered to go to Vietnam with the brigade. While in Vietnam, he continued his public information duties recording routine official events.
Years later Haeberle recalled that his unit received only a one-hour briefing on the people and situation in Vietnam. It focused on the dangers they would face and warned of Viet Cong (VC) guerillas and booby traps. Viet Cong was the pejorative name used by the South Vietnamese and American GIs for the military arm of the National Front for the Liberation of the South (NLF). He recalled nothing being said about how to interact with the Vietnamese people, the people they were supposedly helping. In fact, as Time magazine described it quoting him:
On March 15, 1968, he was briefed about Charlie Company's planned operation the next day in the area near a small hamlet called My Lai. As a "short-timer" with just over a week to go, he could have opted out of the mission, but again volunteered to go. Early the next morning a helicopter dropped him and his three cameras into some rice paddies near a village. He had no idea anything unusual would be happening that day – a day that was later called "the most shocking episode of the Vietnam War".
Eleven days later, Haeberle left Vietnam for the United States and life as a civilian. With him were his undeveloped color photos of the My Lai massacre.
My Lai massacre
On November 20, 1969, when The Plain Dealer published his color photos and eye-witness account of what he had seen, the public in the United States and around the world was able to see and learn the shocking details of the massacre for the first time.
My Lai was actually the name of only one of two hamlets in the village of Sơn Mỹ in Quảng Ngãi Province.Department of the Army. Report of the Department of the Army Review of the Preliminary Investigations into the My Lai Incident, Volumes I–III (1970). Currently, the event is referred to as the My Lai massacre in the United States and the Sơn Mỹ Massacre in Vietnam (see Sơn Mỹ Memorial)." VOV News, 16 March 2012. The U.S. military was aggressively trying to regain the initiative in South Vietnam after the January 1968 Vietnamese Tet Offensive. U.S. military intelligence was under the impression that a NLF battalion had taken refuge in Sơn Mỹ. Charlie Company was sent to the village with orders to burn the houses, kill the livestock, destroy food supplies, and destroy or poison the wells. Soldiers testified that their orders, as they understood them, were to kill all VC combatants and "suspects", including women and children, as well as all animals. When Charlie Company was briefed the night before, their commanding officer, Captain Ernest Medina was asked "Are we supposed to kill women and children?" Medina's reply was, "Kill everything that moves."
Haeberle's photos When Haeberle arrived in the area by helicopter he began moving forward with Charlie Company and was soon witnessing scenes he has "never been able to forget". He told The Plain Dealer that "He couldn't stand what was going on". He personally witnessed U.S. soldiers mechanically kill as many as 100 Vietnamese civilians, "many of them women and babies, many left in lifeless clumps." The photos he took provided "horrifying images of piled dead bodies and frightened Vietnamese villagers." In all, a little over 500 unarmed people were killed, including men, women, children, and infants. Some of the women were gang-raped and their bodies mutilated, and some soldiers mutilated and raped children who were as young as 10.Murder in the name of war: My Lai, BBC News, 20 July 1998.
He partially recorded one of these incidents in one of his most dramatic photographs, which was taken just before the women and children in the photo were killed.
As Haeberle described it to The Plain Dealer:
When he testified before Congress in April 1970 he added additional information about what he had seen:
The Army Journalist, Specialist 5th Class Jay Roberts, who was with Haeberle that day, recalled the same scene and "stated that 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."
Perhaps Time magazine described the impact of this photo best: "Haeberle’s picture of terror and distress on these faces, young and old, in the midst of slaughter remains one of the 20th century’s most powerful photographs. When the Plain Dealer (and later, LIFE magazine) published it, along with a half-dozen others, the images graphically undercut much of what the U.S. had been claiming for years about the conduct and aims of the conflict. Anti-war protesters needed no persuading, but 'average' Americans were suddenly asking, What are we doing in Vietnam?" On December 5, 1969, Walter Cronkite, on the CBS Evening News, issued a warning about disturbing images Haeberle's photos were broadcast. According to PBS, "The horrific images immediately cause a country-wide uproar."
Other photos
Some photos destroyed
Years later, Haeberle admitted that he had destroyed a few of the photographs he took during the massacre. Unlike the photographs of the dead bodies, the destroyed photographs depicted American soldiers in the process of murdering Vietnamese civilians. "I destroyed two images. They were of a couple of GIs, where you could identify them doing the killing. I figured, why should I implicate themwe're all guiltythere were one hundred-plus of us there."
Haeberle's eyewitness account
Haeberle's verbal account to The Plain Dealer was published as follows.
During his Congressional testimony he described additional incidents he had witnessed:
In an interview years later, Haeberle commented:
"No Viet Cong" The official Army press dispatch on the operation said the VC body count was 128 and there was no mention of civilian casualties. "US TROOPS SURROUND REDS, KILL 128," was the headline in the American military newspaper Stars and Stripes. Haeberle told The Plain Dealer, "There were no Viet Cong... they were just poor, innocent illiterate peasants." He reiterated this before Congress when Congressman William L. Dickinson asked him if he ever heard anything that he could identify as enemy fire. Haeberle responded, "No.... the only American casualty I believe that I witnessed, is that person [U.S. soldier] who...shot [himself] in the foot. Seymour Hersh, who wrote the first news stories about the massacre, described the enemy as "nonexistent". After all the eventual investigations it became clear there wasn't a single VC in the village. Private First Class Michael Bernhardt, who was there that day, would later testify, "I don't remember seeing one military-age male in the entire place, dead or alive."
Motivation Haeberle waited more than a year before he approached The Plain Dealer with his photos and story. During this time, he created a slideshow and gave talks about his experiences to civic groups and a high school. "The first slides he showed were innocuous: troops with smiling Vietnamese kids; medics helping villagers. Then images of dead and mutilated women and children filled the screen. 'There was just disbelief,' Haeberle said of the reaction. 'People said, "No, no, no. This cannot have happened."'" "One woman said it was a staged production. No one wanted to accept it."
In mid-August 1969, the Army's Criminal Investigation Division (CID) questioned Haeberle. The Army was facing mounting pressure caused by letters written to thirty members of Congress, plus the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the President by Ronald Ridenhour, a former Army door gunner who was convinced that something "rather dark and bloody" had happened at My Lai. CID had begun an internal investigation of the massacre. The lead investigator told Haeberle details he didn't know: "babies, women, teens raped and mutilated." "It bothered me," Haeberle wrote later, "I thought to myself, You know, maybe the public ought to know what is going on in Vietnam." "I didn't believe in the antiwar protests and the violence, but as soon as I knew it was women and girlsand what age they wereI couldn't accept it."