Ronald L. Haeberle is a manufacturing supervisor and former United States Army

United States Army

The United States Army is the main branch of the United States Armed Forces responsible for land-based military operations. It is the largest and oldest established branch of the U.S. military, and is one of seven U.S. uniformed services...

 photographer who is most widely known for the photographs he took of the aftermath following the My Lai Massacre

My Lai Massacre

The My Lai Massacre was the Vietnam War mass murder of 347–504 unarmed civilians in South Vietnam on March 16, 1968, by United States Army soldiers of "Charlie" Company of 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry Regiment, 11th Brigade of the Americal Division. Most of the victims were women, children , and...

 in March 1968. Some of the (black and white) photographs he took were made using an Army camera and were either subject to censorship or did not depict any Vietnamese casualties when published in an Army newspaper. On the other hand, Haeberle took color photographs with his own camera while on duty the same day, which he kept and later sold to the media. The then-Sgt. Haeberle, having returned to his hometown of Cleveland, Ohio

Cleveland, Ohio

Cleveland is a city in the U.S. state of Ohio and is the county seat of Cuyahoga County, the most populous county in the state. The city is located in northeastern Ohio on the southern shore of Lake Erie, approximately west of the Pennsylvania border...

 after an honorable discharge, offered them to The Plain Dealer; the newspaper published some of them on November 20, 1969. Haeberle soon after sold the photos to Life

Life (magazine)

Life generally refers to three American magazines:*A humor and general interest magazine published from 1883 to 1936. Time founder Henry Luce bought the magazine in 1936 solely so that he could acquire the rights to its name....

magazine, which were published in the December 1, 1969 issue. One of the photos in particular became iconic of the massacre, in large part because of its use in the And babies

And babies

And babies is an iconic anti-Vietnam War poster. It is a famous example of "propaganda art" from the Vietnam conflict that uses the now infamous color photograph of the My Lai Massacre taken by U.S. combat photographer Ronald L. Haeberle in March 1968...

poster, which was distributed around the world used in protest marches where it was televised and reproduced in newspapers.

Background

As the Charlie Company's 3rd platoon moved into the hamlet of My Lai, it was followed by Ronald Haeberle, there to document what was supposed to be a significant encounter with a crack Viet Cong battalion.

According to Camilla Griggers, professor of Visual Communication and Linguistics at California State University

California State University

The California State University is a public university system in the state of California. It is one of three public higher education systems in the state, the other two being the University of California system and the California Community College system. It is incorporated as The Trustees of the...

:

The Army photographer, Ronald Haeberle, assigned to Charlie Company on March 16, 1968 had two cameras. One was an Army standard; one was his personal camera. The film on the Army-owned camera, i.e., the official camera of the State, showed standard operations ­ that is “authorized” and “official” operations including interrogating villagers and burning “insurgent” huts. What the film on the personal camera showed, however, was different. When turned over to the press

News media

The news media are those elements of the mass media that focus on delivering news to the general public or a target public.These include print media , broadcast news , and more recently the Internet .-Etymology:A medium is a carrier of something...

 and Government by the photographer, those “unofficial” photographs provided the grounds for a court martial. Haeberle's personal images (owned by himself and not the US Government) showed hundreds of villagers who had been killed by U.S. troops. More significantly, they showed that the dead were primarily women and children, including infants.

As is evident from comments made in a 1969 telephone conversation between United States National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger

Henry Kissinger

Heinz Alfred "Henry" Kissinger is a German-born American academic, political scientist, diplomat, and businessman. He is a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. He served as National Security Advisor and later concurrently as Secretary of State in the administrations of Presidents Richard Nixon and...

 and Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird, revealed recently by the National Security Archive

National Security Archive

The National Security Archive is a 501 non-governmental, non-profit research and archival institution located in the George Washington University in Washington, D.C.. Founded in 1985 by Scott Armstrong, it archives and publishes declassified U.S. government files concerning selected topics of US...

, the photos of the war crime were too shocking for senior officials to stage an effective cover-up

Cover-up

A cover-up is an attempt, whether successful or not, to conceal evidence of wrong-doing, error, incompetence or other embarrassing information...

. Secretary of Defense Laird is heard to say, "There are so many kids just lying there; these pictures are authentic."

Haeberle later testified that he personally saw about 30 different American soldiers kill about 100 civilians.
According to the investigation, Haeberle previously "withheld and suppressed from proper authorities the photographic evidence of atrocities he had obtained" despite "having a particular duty to report any knowledge of suspected or apparent war crimes".

However Haeberle had claimed in his testimony that he did not turn in his photographic film of the atrocities to the brigade information office, because "if you take a photograph of a general smiling wrong in the photograph, you destroyed that photograph", therefore Haeberle felt his photographs would have been destroyed if he had turned them in as was standard practice.

External links

• Plain Dealer exclusive in 1969: My Lai massacre photos by Ronald Haeberle from The Plain Dealer
• Testimony of Ronald Haeberle, Witness for the Prosecution from the website of the UMKC School of Law