The sun had barely cleared the tree line over the Mekong Delta when the first shots cracked across the hamlet—and American soldiers began killing the very people they had come to protect.

The Echo Company Massacre: When American Rifles Turned on Vietnamese Allies

A forgotten atrocity in the Mekong Delta that the Pentagon buried for decades

Four months after My Lai, another American company massacred Vietnamese civilians—and the Pentagon buried it for decades.

The sun had barely cleared the tree line over the Mekong Delta on August 12, 1968, when the first shots cracked across the hamlet of My Khe. Staff Sergeant James Hodge would later testify that he heard screaming before he understood what was happening—American soldiers from Echo Company, 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry Regiment, were firing into clusters of unarmed civilians.

This was not My Lai. That massacre had occurred four months earlier, just eleven miles away. But the killing at My Khe—sometimes called 'My Lai 2'—would remain buried far deeper, its victims uncounted, its perpetrators unprosecuted.

The soldiers of Echo Company had been briefed the night before: the hamlet was a Viet Cong stronghold. Intelligence suggested enemy fighters were embedded among the villagers. What happened next followed a pattern that would become grimly familiar—a company of frustrated, frightened young men, their nerves frayed by months of unseen enemies and booby-trapped trails, entered a village where they saw threats in every face.

Private First Class Clarence Wood, in a deposition years later, described watching a sergeant shoot an elderly man who had emerged from his home with raised hands.…

💡 The Army's own investigators found evidence of the My Khe massacre in 1970 but recommended no prosecutions, citing 'insufficient evidence'—despite possessing sworn statements from participants.