Ronald L. Haeberle - Background

Background

As the Charlie Company's 3rd platoon moved into the hamlet of My Lai, it was followed by Ronald Haeberle, there to document what was supposed to be a significant encounter with a crack Viet Cong battalion.

According to Camilla Griggers, professor of Visual Communication and Linguistics at California State University:

The Army photographer, Ronald Haeberle, assigned to Charlie Company on March 16, 1968 had two cameras. One was an Army standard; one was his personal camera. The film on the Army-owned camera, i.e., the official camera of the State, showed standard operations ­ that is “authorized” and “official” operations including interrogating villagers and burning “insurgent” huts. What the film on the personal camera showed, however, was different. When turned over to the press and Government by the photographer, those “unofficial” photographs provided the grounds for a court martial. Haeberle's personal images (owned by himself and not the US Government) showed hundreds of villagers who had been killed by U.S. troops. More significantly, they showed that the dead were primarily women and children, including infants.

As is evident from comments made in a 1969 telephone conversation between United States National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger and Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird, revealed recently by the National Security Archive, the photos of the war crime were too shocking for senior officials to stage an effective cover-up. Secretary of Defense Laird is heard to say, "There are so many kids just lying there; these pictures are authentic."

Haeberle later testified that he personally saw about 30 different American soldiers kill about 100 civilians.

According to the investigation, Haeberle previously "withheld and suppressed from proper authorities the photographic evidence of atrocities he had obtained" despite "having a particular duty to report any knowledge of suspected or apparent war crimes".

However Haeberle had claimed in his testimony that he did not turn in his photographic film of the atrocities to the brigade information office, because "if you take a photograph of a general smiling wrong in the photograph, you destroyed that photograph", therefore Haeberle felt his photographs would have been destroyed if he had turned them in as was standard practice.