Nation: MY LAI: AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY

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military activities. Although no one can be sure, the chances are that no other atrocity of comparable scope has taken place in Viet Nam. But inevitably, the My Lai revelation has started a flood of other horror stories. Dozens of journalists, soldiers and visitors to Viet Nam have begun to recall other incidents of U.S. brutality. Individual acts of senseless —sometimes gleeful—killing of civilians by U.S. troops apparently happened often enough to be deeply disturbing.

Terry Reid, 22, a former infantryman in the same Americal Division, claimed last week that he counted "60 dead bodies—women, children and maybe a few old and decrepit men" after U.S. troops had shot up a village 130 miles south of My Lai in early 1968. A Viet Nam veteran at Fort Benning, Ga., who would not give his name said he and other G.I.s had taken three Viet Cong prisoners up in a helicopter. "We told them to talk or we'd throw them out. The first guy wouldn't talk, so we tossed him out. The second wouldn't say anything, so we dumped him. The third one talked."

TIME Correspondent Frank McCulloch, who spent 31 years covering the war, recalls: "I have seen men pushed out of airplanes, shot with their hands tied behind their backs, drowned because they refused to answer questions. I have also seen the bodies of women and children disemboweled by the Viet Cong." He recalls a young Marine who flung a Vietnamese woman to the ground and robbed her at knife-point of all her money because she failed to produce 15 piastres in change for some cookies he had bought from her. He saw Americal Division troops pound sand into the mouth of an old man suspected of being a V.C. They poured water down his throat until he nearly drowned. When he still would not talk, they unleashed a Doberman war dog —and watched the dog tear the man from head to belly. Then they left.

TIME Correspondent Burt Pines relates the case of a sergeant on patrol who suddenly shouted: "A three-day pass for whoever gets that gook." After a moment's hesitation, most of the patrol opened up with their M16s, ripping an old man, as well as the child he carried, into pieces.

It is important to remember that the U.S. in Viet Nam faces an unusually brutal enemy who uses terror deliberately (see box, page 29). But that certainly is no excuse for American behavior at My Lai. It is also small comfort to the U.S. that other Western nations have been guilty of wartime atrocities. The French executed some 15,000 Moslems in the long Algerian war of the 1950s. At Amritsar in India's Punjab, British Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer marched 50 of his soldiers toward a menacing mob of Indians in 1919 and, without warning, they killed 379 people with rifle fire. The Germans bombed and machine-gunned to death 1,600 people of the tiny town of Guernica, Spain, in 1937, rounded up and shot 200,000 Jews at Babi Yar in 1941. And there was Auschwitz, Buchenwald and Dachau.

The desire to equate all such savagery is tempting to some. Moscow's Trud compared My Lai "to the destruction by the Hitlerites of the Czechoslovak village of Lidice, the French town of Oradour-sur-Glane, and to the Nazi atrocities on Soviet soil." A baker in Bonn was overheard telling a customer who asked about the massacre: "What else can you expect—they're just doing the same