# The Massacre At Son My

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/disturbing-history-7341005/the-massacre-at-son-my
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/disturbing-history-7341005/the-massacre-at-son-my.md
Podcast: [Disturbing History](https://stenobird.com/podcast/disturbing-history-7341005)
Published: 2026-08-14T18:45:02+00:00
Episode link: https://www.spreaker.com/episode/the-massacre-at-son-my--74003040
Audio file: https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/api.spreaker.com/download/episode/74003040/dh_viet_final.mp3
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JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/disturbing-history-7341005/episodes/the-massacre-at-son-my
Duration seconds: 4100

## Resource

On the morning of March 16, 1968, an American helicopter pilot named Hugh Thompson dropped a smoke grenade to mark a wounded Vietnamese woman so a medic could reach her. He flew a circuit and came back a few minutes later. She was dead, and an American officer was standing over her. Within the hour, Thompson would land his helicopter between armed American infantry and a bunker full of civilians and tell his own door gunner to open fire on Americans if they opened fire on the villagers.Almost everyone has heard of My Lai. Almost everything most people believe about it is wrong or badly incomplete. It wasn't one village. It was a village complex called Son My made up of four hamlets, and the place we call My Lai 4 was actually a sub-hamlet named Xom Lang that American mapmakers mislabeled. It wasn't one company, because two separate American infantry units killed civilians in Son My that morning, several kilometers apart, under the same task force headquarters. And it wasn't one man, because the Army's own inquiry identified roughly 30 officers and enlisted men who either committed crimes or helped bury them afterward, up to and including a major general commanding a division.This episode walks the whole operation from the beginning. The attrition strategy and the body-count culture that made dead Vietnamese the measure of a good officer. Quang Ngai Province, the free-fire zones, and why American troops called the area Pinkville. Task Force Barker, an ad hoc unit thrown together from three companies that had never worked with each other, under a colonel who had commanded the brigade for exactly one day when the massacre happened. Charlie Company's three months of losing men to mines and booby traps without ever getting a fight, including the February 25 minefield and th…

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## Transcript

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