With regard to My Lai Cases, please recognize that my memory is a little foggy after some 40 years.
As others have noted, the platoon leader involved in the atrocity at MyLai Village was tried before a general court martial for (I think) some 140 counts of murder. He was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment, but because of a political furor that I never fully understood, the sentence was never carried out. The lieutenant spent several years under arrest in quarters before the case faded away. The company commander was also tried but was acquitted on the principal charges of murder. The battalion commander was also tried and acquitted. As I recall, both the company and battalion commanders used the “fog of war” defense. Charitably, neither may have actually known what was going on at the time it happened but they surely actively concealed what had happened.
One problem with the prosecutions was that there was a sympathetic jury that understood that in a situation as confused and frustrating as Vietnam a commander on the scene might well, with the best intentions in the world, lose control of his unit. Under the situation as it was in 1971 when the cases were tried that defense was accepted by a jury composed of officers many of whom had been in Vietnam and knew what a hell hole it was.
Aubry Daniels, who as a JAGC Captain prosecuted the case against Lieutenant Calley, was not at all happy with the political manipulation of the case and President Nixon’s involvement. He took the highly unusual step of writing directly to the President, much to the embarrassment of the Army higher-ups who just wanted the whole thing to go away. Here is CPT Daniels’ letter to the President. For what it is worth, I agreed with him then and I agree with him now.
The soldiers in Europe knew almost nothing about the MyLai incident until it broke in the papers. To its credit, Stars and Stripes, the house organ for US Forces in Europe, covered the thing throughly. Army lawyers had a little advanced warning of the prosecution. Just before the whole thing broke with the of filing charges against the platoon leader, the company commander, the battalion commander and various others, all the Judge Advocate officers in Europe were called to a special meeting on an unknown subject in Frankfurt at the big headquarters complex at the I.G. Farbin Building. My office got about three hours notice of the meeting, none too soon since it took two hours to go from downtown Kaiserslautern to downtown Frankfurt. The notice was not an invitation, it was an order–everybody report to Frankfurt. When we got there we were all put in a conference room with MPs guarding the door and checking people in by name. Once inside we found The Deputy The Judge Advocate General of the Army, a senor officer that almost all of us had met at one time or another. He proceeded to brief us on the whole thing, the charges, the defendants, the evidence, the prosecution team and the appointed defense team and that the whole thing would be made public the next day. Until then we were to keep our mouths shut. After the matter became public, he said, there was no official position and we were free to discuss the cases. The point of the briefing, he said, was to make sure that we were getting our information from a reliable source. With that we were dismissed.