March 16 Birthday
March 16, 1968: Soldiers of Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry Regiment, entered the village of My Lai in the Son My area of South Vietnam. Over the next four hours, they killed between 347 and 504 unarmed civilians — old men, women, children, infants. Women were raped. Bodies were mutilated. The massacre was ordered by Captain Ernest Medina and executed by Lieutenant William Calley, who told his men to "waste them." The cover-up began immediately. The Army investigated only after a soldier named Ron Ridenhour wrote letters to thirty government officials describing what he had heard. The story broke in November 1969. Calley was the only person convicted — he was sentenced to life imprisonment, served three and a half years of house arrest, and was paroled by President Nixon. My Lai turned American opinion decisively against the war. Robert Goddard launched the first liquid-fueled rocket on March 16, 1926, from his aunt Effie's farm in Auburn, Massachusetts. The rocket was ten feet tall, weighed six pounds, and flew 41 feet in two and a half seconds. Goddard had calculated that solid propellants were too inefficient for spaceflight and that liquid propellants — gasoline and liquid oxygen — could achieve the thrust needed to escape Earth's gravity. The New York Times published an editorial in 1920 mocking Goddard's assertion that rockets could work in a vacuum: "That Professor Goddard... does not know of the relation of action to reaction, and of the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react." The Times issued a correction in 1969, the day after Apollo 11 launched. Nathaniel Hawthorne published The Scarlet Letter on this day in 1850. He had been fired from his job at the Salem Custom House, which gave him the time — and the anger — to write. The novel, set in Puritan Boston, tells the story of Hester Prynne, who is condemned to wear a scarlet "A" for adultery. Hawthorne's ancestor, John Hathorne, had been a judge in the Salem witch trials — he was the only judge who never repented. Hawthorne added the "w" to his name to distance himself. The novel was an instant success — it sold 5,000 copies in ten days, a remarkable figure for the era. It established the American tradition of using fiction to confront the nation's moral history. Jerry Lewis, born this day in 1926, was a comedian so popular in France that he was awarded the Legion of Honor. His partnership with Dean Martin produced sixteen films in eight years. The Telethon, which raised $2.6 billion for muscular dystrophy research over forty-five years, was both his greatest achievement and his most criticized — the telethon was accused of patronizing disabled people by presenting them as objects of pity. People born on March 16 fall under the zodiac sign of Pisces. The birthstone is Aquamarine and the birth flower is Daffodil. Historical events on March 16 include 1850: Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter published, 1926: Robert Goddard launches first liquid-fueled rocket, 1968: My Lai massacre — American soldiers kill hundreds of Vietnamese civilians. Famous people born on March 16 include Jerry Lewis (1926), Bernardo Bertolucci (1941), Victor Garber (1949).