Found The monster of the My Lai massacre. The sun had just risen over a tranquil Vietnamese hamlet, nestling in a steamy green valley of rice fields close to the South China Sea. Hundreds of villagers were about to enjoy a simple breakfast outside their bamboo huts when a flotilla of U. S. helicopters came whirring low overhead, the draught from their giant propellers flattening the tall, yellow grass. Old men and women, young mothers tending their children, most didnt bother to run away they thought they had nothing to fear as the Americans routinely swept the countryside hunting the communist Viet Cong guerillas, the VC in U. S. military parlance. Ahead of this weeks Gamescom, Microsoft is holding a news event at 300PM EDT today where the company will reveal new information about the Xbox One X like pre. How could a huddle of defenceless farming people pose any threat Moments after the soldiers had landed, however, it became clear that the villagers had made a terrible miscalculation. Scroll down for more. With bayonet fixed, the young platoon leader instructed his men to round up everyone, regardless of their age or sex, and herd them into a partially filled, 5ft deep irrigation ditch. Watch Zeitgeist: Moving Forward Online Forbes'>Watch Zeitgeist: Moving Forward Online Forbes. Take care of these people he barked. Those five words lit the fuse for a massacre. If there was any ambiguity in their meaning, the platoon leader removed it by bludgeoning an old man into the ditch with his rifle butt, then machine gunning him and at least 2. Over the next five hours babies were bayonetted, teenage girls were raped or forced to their knees to perform sex acts before being mutilated and killed and their watching parents and grandparents were summarily shot as they begged for mercy. When the bloodbath was over, the hamlet was torched. The number of villagers who were butchered is still a matter for debate. If we believe some of the soldiers, the so called body count totalled just over a hundred. According to records in the grim museum which the victorious Vietnamese communists have built at My Lai, however, 5. The youngest was just one year old and the oldest 8. One thing, however, is certain. March 1. 6, 1. 96. U. S. military history a day that far overshadows the brutality at Abu Ghraib prison and the killing of 2. U. S. Marines in Haditha in western Iraq. With lasting shame, it is remembered as the My Lai Massacre. Of course, many Americans would prefer not to remember My Lai at all. They want to draw a veil over this most shocking episode in the humiliating, decade long fiasco that was the Vietnam War. WashingtonPost/2013/03/07/Outlook/Images/50537994.jpg?uuid=8UJ3eId1EeKYo7Pba5rFhg' alt='Watch My Lai Four Online (2017)' title='Watch My Lai Four Online (2017)' />Watch FRONTLINE videos online. Stream full episodes of PBSs documentary series for free. Watch My Lai Four Online (2017)' title='Watch My Lai Four Online (2017)' />Their collective amnesia was never stronger than it is today, when young servicemen are once again dying on foreign soil, for a similarly ill defined and seemingly unwinnable cause. But arch liberal film maker Oliver Stone is determined that the savagery to which some American soldiers lowered themselves in Vietnam must never be forgotten. He believes that now, more than ever, the White House hawks need to learn from the past. Having made his name with a trilogy of controversial films about Vietnam Platoon, Born On The Fourth Of July and Heaven Earth Stone is working on a fourth, about My Lai. Scroll down for moreWhy now Because of Iraq. Thats a major reason, the controversial director said, during a preliminary research trip to Vietnam. It seems to me there are so many similarities between the wars in the Gulf and South East Asia. Sometimes you can tell more about a war now by paralleling a previous war. Im not seeking to denigrate the average soldier, but I think the time has come to remember events like My Lai. Predicted to be the strongest indictment of war yet, Stones movie will be called Pinkville, the name the GIs gave to the benighted village, and other surrounding settlements, because they were supposedly a communist stronghold. He has already cast the hero. Bruce Willis will play General William R. Peers, the U. S. Army officer who presided over the official inquiry into the mass slaughter, and whose determination to uncover the truth blighted his career. But, as yet, there is no word on who will portray the pivotal character in the My Lai story the man who led the platoon by brutal example and would later be branded Americas worst war criminal Second Lieutenant William Laws Calley. Whoever lands the part, it will certainly require a bravura performance. For, as the Daily Mail discovered this week, when we tracked down the elusive Calley now aged 6. Atlanta, Georgia this comical looking figure, standing just 5ft 3in tall and sporting a white Colonel Sanders goatee, jam jar spectacles and a Stetson, makes a most unlikely mass murderer. William Calley has been called the Everyman of the Vietnam War. A college drop out from a white collar Miami family, he drifted between jobs on the railroad and investigating insurance claims before joining the army as a trainee clerk. Though he showed not the slightest aptitude for leadership, he was accepted into officer training school, where he is remembered for his passion for pizza, and little else. It was during the Vietnam War that President Lyndon Johnson first popularised the phrase hearts and minds. In a now wearily familiar refrain, he said winning them was imperative if the Viet Cong were ever to be defeated. Rookie officers underwent a course designed to improve their respect and understanding of the distant strangers in whose land they would be fighting, entitled Vietnam Our Host. Calley would later claim to remember little about these lessons in winning over the locals. What he did seem to learn, however, was that everyone old and young, male and female was a potential enemy, capable of tripping a mine fuse, hurling a grenade or signalling to a VC sniper. As such, even civilians were not to be trusted. It was with this dubious preparation that 2nd Lt Calley was airlifted into South Vietnam. Watch Very Good Girls Online (2017) more. By early 1. 96. 8, soon after his arrival, the country was in the grip of the Tet Offensive a massive push for victory which brought 8. North Vietnamese troops driving southwards, striking with unprecedented ferocity. Calley was deployed to the scene of the fiercest fighting, in Quang Ngai Province, and placed in charge of a platoon of some 5. Charlie Company, part of the proud 2. Infantry Americal Division. While most of his charges despised the country and its people, Calley found he loved his new life in Vietnam. Scroll down for more. Rarely able to get a date with women in Miami, where he was regarded as a nonentity and a drifter, he found he had the pick of the prettiest boom boom girls cheap local prostitutes who touted for business around the U.