U.S. troops in the "Charlie Company" massacre 400-500 civilians at the village of My Lai, South Vietnam. One of the soldiers later says he does not participate until he sees his Mormon buddy, recently returned missionary, shooting Vietnamese women and children. Two days earlier, the other Mormon in the "Charlie Company wrote a letter about an unrelated incident in which his "friends" shot a woman working in a rice field, "kicked her to death," and then "emptied" their weapons into her head. "It was murder [and] I've seen it many times before," Greg Olsen wrote his father. "My faith in my fellow men is shot all to hell." After the remorseful participants and news media unravel the military's cover-up, the officer-in-charge is court-martialed and imprisoned for giving his troops a direct order to kill everyone in My Lai on suspicion that they are Communist sympathizers. Most published accounts emphasize the religious background of the two Mormons at My Lai but say nothing about the religion of the other soldiers involved in the massacre.
[Source: The Mormon Hierarchy - Extensions of Power by D. Michael Quinn, [New Mormon History database ( http://bit.ly/NMHdatabase )]]
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