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. 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.
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.
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 was actually the name of only one of two hamlets in the village of Sơn Mỹ in Quảng Ngãi Province. 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). 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." 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.
thumb|upright=1.0|Women and children before being killed by American GIs. Photo by Ronald L. Haeberle.
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:
"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. 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."'"
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." The congressional subcommittee "subjected Haeberle to exhaustive questioning" about why he failed to report what he had seen to his command, and they "badgered him about why he had been carrying" a personal camera and what he "intended to do with the pictures". It was confirmed in the U.S. Army's own investigation that Haeberle had, in fact, been reprimanded for taking pictures which "were detrimental to the United States Army." Fear was on his mind as well; as he explained to a reporter, he feared the troops "might have shot him, too, had he stood in their way." And he wasn't just worried about himself. "We had other servicemen in the Public Information Office and Jay [Roberts] still had a year to go. Something could have happened to one of the people in our office. Their lives would be in danger, easily disposed of, it's called 'fragging'. I had only a couple of weeks to go but something could have happened to one of them if they went on another mission with a camera. Everyone was afraid to tell the truth, including us. Look at what happened, it was covered up all the way from the top down. We definitely had a part in the cover-up, it's something we should have reported." The massacre has "been etched in his mind", and every time he returns to the My Lai area he "feels emotional." He goes there "out of respect for the survivors and those who lost their lives during the four hours I was in Sơn Mỹ". He has also met with survivors of the massacre. In 2011 he met Duc Tran Van"Duc was 8 years old in March 1968, and as Haeberle spoke with him, through an interpreter, he realized with a jolt that the woman he had photographed dead [next to her bamboo hat] years earlier was Duc's mother, Nguyen Thi Tau."
Humanitarian work
Haeberle has helped raise money for several humanitarian efforts in Vietnam, including for the relief of flood and typhoon victims, and for Project RENEW, which works to make Vietnam safe from unexploded American bombs and mines that still remain in the country. In 2021 he led an effort to raise $28,000 after a series of storms and tropical depressions devastated areas of central Vietnam. Haeberle said, "I have been committed to doing all I can to help the people of Vietnam ever since I personally witnessed American war crimes at My Lai." The RENEW project works to remove and destroy unexploded bombs remaining from the war, teaches children to avoid contact with cluster bombs and other dangerous explosives, and assists the innocent victims still suffering from the war. In March 2023, Haeberle visited a secondary school in Quang Ngai City, near where the massacre occurred, and gave 100 Project RENEW "gift sets to the students, each containing a school bag, pen pouch, and a raincoat." Haeberle was also honored in March 2023 by the leaders of Quang Ngai province who presented him with a gift and framed thank you letter in appreciation for the photos of the massacre he took in their province in 1968, as well as for his efforts towards peace.
Photos displayed
In Vietnam
thumb|upright=1.0|Visitors to the War Remnants Museum view enlarged photos of the massacre by Ronald Haeberle.
Ho Chi Minh City
Currently Haeberle's photos are on display in two prominent museums in Vietnam. The first is in Ho Chi Minh City at the War Remnants Museum, which contains exhibits relating to the First Indochina War and the Second Indochina War (the Vietnam War in the United States). This museum is the most popular museum in the city, attracting approximately half a million visitors every year.
Sơn Mỹ
thumb|left|upright=1.0|Monument of the My Lai massacre in Sơn Mỹ, Vietnam
The second is the Sơn Mỹ Memorial Museum which is located at the site of the massacre and includes the remains of the village of Sơn Mỹ in Quảng Ngãi Province. A large black marble plaque just inside the entrance to the museum lists the names of all 504 civilians killed by the American troops, including "17 pregnant women and 210 children under the age of 13." A number of enlarged versions of Haeberle's photos are shown inside the museum. The museum also celebrates American heroes, including Ronald Ridenhour who first exposed the killings, as well as Hugh Thompson and Lawrence Colburn who intervened to save a number of villagers.
In the United States
Haeberle's photos have been exhibited as a part of two of the most recent university stops on the Waging Peace in Vietnam book tour and exhibit ("U.S. Soldiers and Veterans Who Opposed the War") which has visited colleges and universities around the United States. Haeberle wrote the section of the book on the My Lai massacre. His photos are shown in a separate display due to their graphic nature"My Lai: A Massacre That Took 504 Souls, And Shook the World." The display includes, for the first time anywhere, all 18 of his color photos from the massacre. The first showing, at the University of San Diego, was in March 2022. The second was at the University of Alaska Southeast in Juneau during the months of November and December 2022.
Conclusion
In 2018, for the 50th anniversary of the massacre, Time magazine revisited the publication of Haeberle's photos. My Lai, they observed, was "hardly the only instance of rape or murder by U.S. troops in Vietnam." In fact, as Nick Turse summarized in Kill Anything That Moves, his encyclopedic examination of U.S. atrocities during the Vietnam War, "the stunning scale of civilian suffering in Vietnam is far beyond anything that can be explained as merely the work of some 'bad apples,' however numerous. Murder, torture, rape, abuse, forced displacement, home burnings, specious arrests, imprisonment without due process — such occurrences were virtually a daily fact of life throughout the years of the American presence in Vietnam. And..., they were no aberration. Rather, they were the inevitable outcome of deliberate policies, dictated at the highest levels of the military."