Ronald L. Ridenhour, the Vietnam veteran who in 1969 first disclosed the My Lai massacre of Vietnamese civilians by United States Army troops, died yesterday in Metairie, La. He was 52.
Mr. Ridenhour, who first heard about the massacre from other soldiers about a month after it happened, investigated it on his own. Home from his tour as a helicopter gunner in Vietnam, he wrote a 1,500-word letter to President Richard M. Nixon, Defense Secretary Melvin R. Laird, and members of Congress, including his Congressman, Congressman Morris K. Udall, Democrat of Arizona.
Mr. Ridenhour remained bitter and disillusioned, considering it a whitewash. In an interview in 1972, he said that ''the whole thing has been handled in a cynical, Machiavellian way".
In an article published in The New York Times in 1973, Mr. Ridenhour said that he had written the letters disclosing the massacres hoping that ''it would show the American people and their Government that the policies of force abroad and deception at home were not only antithetical to the principles of a democratic society but low, mean, stupid, brutal and self-destructive as well.
''The question most often put to me was not why they had done it, but why I had done it,'' he wrote. ''In a word, justice. It was a simple appeal to justice. I was younger and more foolish then.''
In 1988, Mr. Ridenhour won a Polk Award for journalism for a yearlong investigation of a New Orleans tax scandal published in City Business, a biweekly newspaper there.
Ridenhour was born in Oakland, Calif., and grew up in Phoenix. He was drafted in March 1967 when his course load at Phoenix Junior College dropped below the requirement for an educational deferment.
Mr. Ridenhour was in a helicopter that flew over My Lai a few days after the massacre. He said he waited until he was out of the service to blow the whistle because he feared for his life.
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I have written at length about what happened to Laos on which 2.5 million pounds of cluster bombs were dropped during the Vietnam War, and will do so again at OpEdNews, noting that USA Congress allocated $12 million for bomb removal and allocated $143 million to build an elaborate USA Embassy in Vientiane, the capitol of the Lao People's Democratic Republic.
Lao Buddhism is a unique version of Theravada Buddhism and is at the basis of ethnic Lao culture. Buddhism in Laos is tied to animist beliefs and belief in ancestral spirits, in rural areas.
Again: Theravada (from Pali, literally "School of the Elders") is Buddhism's oldest extant school. The school's adherents, termed theravadins, have preserved their version of the Gautama Buddha's teaching in the Pali Canon.
64.7% of the Lao population are Buddhist.
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Final note about Irma Lee Udall, from Time Magazine, October 12, 1970!
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