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

The Vietnam War could have been called a comedy of errors if the consequences weren’t so deadly and tragic. In 1951, while war was raging in Korea, the United States began signing defense pacts with nations in the Pacific, intending to create alliances that would contain the spread of Communism. As the Korean War was winding down, America joined the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization, pledging to defend several nations in the region from Communist aggression. One of those nations was 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 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 resistance to U.S. involvement in Vietnam continued to grow, and in the nearly 60 years since, modern historians have tried to uncover more about the controversial Speedy Express and whether it represented a massive war crime. Thus, even though it remains less well known than My Lai, the operation’s notoriety has started to grow in its own right recently.