On March 16 , 1968 , a company of Americal Division troops led by Captain Ernest Medina and Lieutenant William Calley slaughtered hundreds of civilians in a South Vietnamese hamlet known as My Lai ( referred to as " Pinkville " by the troops ) . While no official count was made , soldiers and investigators later estimated that 350 to 500 women , children and old men were killed with grenades , rifles , bayonets , and machine guns ; some were burned to death in their huts . Corpses were piled in ditches that became mass graves . No Viet Cong were ever discovered in the village and no shots were fired in opposition . To many Americans at home , the massacre marked the moral nadir of the war in Southeast Asia and became a pivotal event in the conflict
massacre
My Lai Massacre
Samuel W. Koster