“Q: And babies? A: And babies.” (December 26, 1969) is a poster featuring a photograph of dead victims of the warfare (mostly women and children) lying together. This photograph is now very well known; it shows part of the aftermath of the My Lai Massacre. It was taken by U.S. combat photographer Ronald L. Haeberle on March 16, 1968. This poster was created by the Art Workers Coalition in 1969. They added the quote from a CBS television interview of Paul Meadlo, a soldier present at the massacre. Below is the transcript:
Q. So you fired something like sixty-seven shots?
A. Right.
Q. And you killed how many? At that time?
A. Well, I fired them automatic, so you can’t. You just spray the area on them and so you can’t know how many you killed ‘cause they were going fast. So I might have killed ten or fifteen of them.
Q. Men, women, and children?
A. Men, women, and children.
Q. And babies?
A. And babies.
The Museum of Modern Art promised to fund and publicize the poster, but after viewing it, the museum pulled out of the deal at the last minute. The emotional impact of this poster most likely influenced the decision of the museum. The poster reveals that even babies were treated as enemy combatants. The term “baby killers” was allegedly used unfairly by anti-war activists to refer to U.S. soldiers. However, it seems that the term is semi-correct in that soldiers would sometimes kill any Vietnamese they encountered. Of course, many Americans were not aware of this or did not want to acknowledge the war’s hypocrises, but this poster successfully illuminates the fact that soldiers killed Vietnamese women, children, and men. A Laotian survivor of the bombings of the Plain of Jars in Laos said “our lives became like those of animals trying to escape their hunters…”
Jean-Paul Sartre described the realities of torture and how grotesque war truly was in his article, “Genocide”: “Young American men use torture (even including the ‘field telephone treatment’ which is where the portable generator for a field telephone is used as an instrument for interrogation by hitching the two lead wires to the victim’s genitals and turning the handle), they shoot unarmed women or nothing more than target practice, they kick wounded Vietnamese in the genitals, they cut ears off dead mean to take home for trophies.”
Additionally, the Winter Soldier Investigation revealed many of the atrocities committed by American soldiers. Click here to be directed to more information.
Vietnam Anti-War Poster Project 