We’re going in there, we’re killing everything that’s alive.

It’s not like a firefight where you get to shoot back.

(This article is a selection from the January/February issue of Smithsonian magazine They’re not quite human.By the late morning of March 16, bodies were scattered everywhere in My Lai.

They never let me believe it was just a philosophy in a man’s mind.

Several witnesses revealed the names of other soldiers who, they said, had massacred women and babies alike. Haeberle told me that he saw an old man with two small children walking toward U.S. troops, their belongings in a basket. A karaoke machine was set up on a motorbike, and the loudspeakers were placed next to a blink-and-you-miss-it plaque with an arrow pointing to a “Mass Grave of 75 Victims.”Tran Nam was 6 years old when he heard gunshots from inside his mud and straw home in Son My.

A present-day photo of the fields and water buffalo surrounding My Lai, collaged with a photo of a U.S. soldier firing an M-16 during the 1968 massacre.

He told Fleming that Charlie Company had been sent to My Lai to “scorch the earth,” and that even years after his conviction, he still felt he’d done what he’d been ordered to do.After our dinner, Fleming gave me a tour in his tiny red Fiat, pausing to point out the house where Calley lived for nearly 30 years.

So the family kept on eating. ... Why are photos like this, and those above, powerful? In the 1980s, he applied for a real estate license and was initially denied because of his criminal record. Jimmy Carter, the future president, urged his fellow Georgians to “honor the flag as Rusty had done.” Local leaders across the country demanded that President Nixon pardon Calley.Nixon fell short of a pardon, but he ordered that Calley remain under house arrest in his apartment at Fort Benning, where he could play badminton in the backyard and hang out with his girlfriend. Ronald L. Haeberle (born circa 1940) is a former United States Army photographer best known for the photographs he took of the My Lai Massacre on March 16, 1968.. At first, newspapers were reporting that 128 Viet Cong had been tracked down and killed in My Lai. In front of each is a plaque with the name of the family that lived there and a list of the members of that family who were killed.Inside the museum, items that once belonged to the people of Son My sit in glass cases: the rosary beads and Buddhist prayer book of the 65-year-old monk Do Ngo, the round-bellied fish sauce pot of 40-year-old Nguyen Thi Chac, the iron sickle of 29-year-old Phung Thi Muong, a single slipper of 6-year-old Truong Thi Khai and the stone marbles of two young brothers. It was trying to survive,” said Lawrence La Croix of Utah, who was only 18 when he went into Son My as a Second Platoon squad leader. According to Haeberle, the soldier shot himself in the foot with his own gun.

In 1976, he married Penny Vick, whose family owned a jewelry shop frequented by members of Columbus’ elite. American helicopters in flight during the My Lai massacre.Ronald S. Haeberle/The LIFE Images Collection/Getty ImagesPrivate Herbert Carter, the only American soldier who was injured in the massacre. And only one of the men behind this atrocity, the My Lai Massacre, was ever punished.In the months before the massacre, the American soldiers at fault had been repeatedly attacked by Viet Cong troops.

Lt. William Calley arrives at a pre-trial hearing prior to his court martial for his involvement in the My Lai massacre.Captain Ernest Medina (center), his wife, and his attorney share a laugh during a recess in Medina's court-martial.

When I asked him if the publication of his pictures from My Lai changed the course of his own life, his response was characteristically muted.