Even in the ragtag Americal Division, Charlie Company stood out as notably undisciplined. “When I was assigned to Charlie Company, I knew there was something wrong,” said Michael Bernhardt. “You could smell it and feel it. . . . They were just a bunch of street thugs doing whatever they wanted to do. It was a group that was leaderless, directionless, armed to the teeth, and making up their own rules out there.” Army investigators later would determine that, even before My Lai, rapes of Vietnamese women and girls were often committed by members of the company.
The crime at My Lai began the night before the massacre, when Charlie Company’s commander, Capt. Ernest Medina, briefed the next day’s mission. He would later testify that he had said not to kill women and children, and would pass a lie detector test about that issue, but twenty-one soldiers would testify that he had been clear that the plan was to kill all enemies in the village—and that anybody in the village was considered to be an enemy. “When we left the briefing we felt we were going to have a lot of resistance and we knew we were supposed to kill everyone in the village,” one Charlie soldier, William Lloyd, told Army investigators. Most significantly, Lt. William Calley, the leader of Charlie’s 1st Platoon, believed, according to his subsequent testimony, that the order of the day was, simply, “Waste them.” He elaborated, “I was ordered to go in there and destroy the enemy. That was my job on that day. That was the mission I was given. I did not sit down and think in terms of men, women, and children. They were just all classified the same, and that was the classification that we dealt with, just as enemy soldiers.” Robert Jay Lifton, a Harvard psychiatrist specializing in how war affects people, probably got it right when he summarized, “There are many versions of what happened at the briefing, but it was kind of a license to kill.”
At around eight the following morning, Charlie Company’s 1st Platoon began walking into the western end of the village. They were led by Lt. Calley, a short, pudgy 1963 dropout from Palm Beach Junior College who had drifted into the Army while down on his luck in Albuquerque and had somehow been selected to become an officer. The killing began then, according to the Army’s official report:
As the 1st Platoon moved into the hamlet, its soldiers began placing heavy fire on fleeing Vietnamese, throwing hand grenades into houses and bunkers, slaughtering livestock, and destroying foodstuffs. Several witnesses testified to having observed an old Vietnamese man being bayoneted to death by a member of the platoon and to having seen another man thrown alive into a well and subsequently killed with a hand grenade.
The unit encountered fifteen villagers huddled together. “Kill everybody, leave no one standing,” Capt. Medina ordered, according to Herbert Carter, who would become the sole American casualty of the day when he shot himself in the foot and was helicoptered out. At around nine o’clock, about sixty villagers who had been rounded up and herded into a ditch were shot by members of the 1st Platoon. “I walked over to the ditch,” Dennis Conti later testified. “As I walked up to it, Lieutenant Calley and Sergeant Mitchell were firing into the ditch. I looked into the ditch, and I saw women, children, and a couple of old men, just regular civilians. I saw a woman get up, and Calley shot her in the head.”
Meanwhile, in the nearby sub-hamlet of Binh Tay, Charlie’s 2nd Platoon, which had stood out in the company for its proclivity for rape, rounded up a group of ten to twenty villagers, made them squat in a circle, and fired several 40-millimeter rounds from an M79 grenade launcher into their midst. The wounded were then finished off with small-arms fire. This platoon also engaged in “at least one gang-rape of a young Vietnamese girl, an act of sodomy, and several other rape/killings.”
Charlie’s 3rd Platoon also was busy. One of its members, Varnado Simpson, later testified, “I killed about eight people that day.” He also watched as five members of his platoon raped a girl. “When they all got done, they all took their weapons, M-60, M-16s, and caliber .45 pistols and fired into the girl until she was dead. Her face was just blown away and her brains were just everywhere.”
During much of the bloodbath, Lt. Col. Frank Barker, commander of the provisional battalion of which Charlie Company was part, was circling overhead in one helicopter, and the brigade commander to whom he reported, Col. Oran Henderson, was in another. This was not the action of one or two platoons or even one company gone berserk. “This was an operation, not an aberration,” said Ron Ridenhour, a soldier who later would play a key role in disclosing the atrocity. “What happened at My Lai was a plan. . . . We have officers, lieutenant colonels, a task force commander, a brigade commander, and the division commander in the air over those villages for significant periods of time, all morning long.”
Larry Colburn, a door gunner on an arriving helicopter, watched in astonishment as Medina kicked a woman, stepped back, and shot her. It was only then that Colburn realized, “It was our guys doing all the killing.” Colburn’s pilot, Hugh Thompson, landed his aircraft between one remaining group of civilians and the soldiers and ordered Colburn to open fire on the soldiers if they tried to fire into the group—or tried to shoot Thompson for intervening. Asked years later why he had acted to stop the killings when no one else did, Thompson said, “I was brought up in the country. My mother and father probably would be called abusive now by today’s standards. . . . But they always taught me to help the underdog. Don’t be a bully and live by the golden rule. . . . They taught me right from wrong.”
When the soldiers of Charlie Company finished committing mass murder, they sat down at the eastern end of the village and ate lunch. The nearby dead totaled 400 or more. Of them, some 120 were children aged five or less. Of about twenty females raped, the youngest was eleven years old and the oldest about forty-five.
Thompson flew back to his base, landed, and flung his flight helmet to the ground. He angrily reported what he had seen to his company commander, Maj. Frederic Watke. “There’s a ditch full of dead women and children over there,” Thompson said. “We saw one armed VC all day. We never captured one damn weapon. They’re killing women and children!” Watke went to Lt. Col. Barker, the battalion commander, who said he would look into Thompson’s allegations. That afternoon Barker encountered Watke and told him not to worry, that he had determined that Thompson was incorrect. Rather, Barker said, he had found that a small number of civilians had been killed in the village but that their deaths were “a result of justifiable situations.” What Thompson and his company commander did not know was that Barker was complicit in the massacre, which was the act not just of one company but of the three companies operating under his command. While Charlie was butchering the people of My Lai, the other two companies in the battalion had sealed off the village, and in the process, one of them, Bravo Company, carried out a smaller slaughter in an adjacent hamlet, probably killing ninety civilians. Even so, Thompson’s intervention had had an effect: Shortly after he made the allegation, word went out over the radio telling Bravo and Charlie companies to “stop the killing.”
So began the second major crime committed by Army officers in connection with My Lai. The first was the killing itself; the second was how the chain of command in the Americal Division handled the incident. That afternoon, Gen. Koster, the division commander, took the next significant step in the cover-up. He was flying near My Lai and overheard an order from Col. Oran Henderson, the brigade commander, who requested that soldiers return to the village to tally the dead by gender and approximate age. “Negative,” Koster countermanded, according to subsequent testimony by Medina and Henderson. Koster would tell investigators that he did not remember the conversation that way, but his testimony would prove to be unreliable. At any rate, he said, there was no specific need to return to the village, because “there was no set requirement for reporting civilian casualties or injuries and this type of thing.”
Two days later, Col. Henderson was told to determine what had happened at My Lai, but his actions in fact appeared to have had “as th
eir goal the suppression of the true facts concerning the events of 16 March,” the Army subsequently concluded. Henderson gathered a group of Charlie soldiers and asked them all if they had seen a massacre. Most replied in the negative, but one said he had no comment. Henderson did not pursue that interesting response. Rather, he seemed mainly out to discredit Thompson, the helicopter pilot. He reported on March 19 that there was no basis to the allegations. As Koster recalled much later, when he was under investigation, “he felt the pilot had been confused and that he was a young man who had become overly excited and had probably imagined some things that hadn’t really taken place.”
By this point the cover-up was well under way. On March 28, Lt. Col. Barker submitted a routine “Combat Action Report” that offered his summary of events in My Lai twelve days earlier:
This operation was well planned, well executed, and successful. Friendly casualties were light and the enemy suffered heavily. On this operation the civilian population supporting the VC in the area numbered approximately 200. This created a problem in population control and medical care of those civilians in fires of the opposing forces. However the infantry unit on the ground and helicopters were able to assist civilians in leaving the area and in caring for and/or evacuating the wounded.
The next month, Vietnamese on both sides of the war began talking about something terrible happening at the village. In response, Col. Henderson wrote a document he titled “Report of Investigation.” It began with a lie: “An investigation has been conducted of the allegations.” Under questioning, Henderson eventually would concede that this was not the case and that in fact he had not conducted a series of interviews or taken signed statements from participants. His “report” also falsely stated that 128 Viet Cong soldiers had been killed in the My Lai operations, as well as “20 noncombatants caught in the battle area.” But, he emphasized, “at no time were any civilians gathered together and killed by U.S. soldiers.” He concluded on a note of moral indignation. Such allegations, he wrote, were “obviously a Viet Cong propaganda move.”
The cover-up, which also included destruction of documents, was so extensive that it held for about a year. Then Ron Ridenhour sent a letter to his congressman and to various other officials in Washington that alleged that something awful had happened in the Vietnamese village the troops called “Pinkville.” With clarity and precision, he related how he had been told that a “Lieutenant Kally (this spelling may be incorrect)” had played a central role in it.
Col. William Wilson, a World War II veteran who had been wounded in Normandy while a member of the 101st Airborne, was given the task of investigating Ridenhour’s allegations. He went into it skeptical about the charges. “But if the Pinkville incident was true, it was cold-blooded murder,” he continued. “I hoped to God it was false, but if it wasn’t, I wanted the bastards exposed for what they’d done.” In the late spring and summer of 1969, as Wilson quietly traveled around the country interviewing former members of Charlie Company, “a repugnant picture was forming in my mind.”
The clincher came late on the afternoon of July 16, 1969, when Wilson interviewed Paul Meadlo, a former Charlie Company soldier who had lost a foot to a mine the day after the killings and had been working at a gas station since coming home from the Army and Vietnam. Meadlo began the interview, held in a room in a Holiday Inn in Terre Haute, Indiana, by almost immediately confessing to having committed murder at My Lai. “We just moved on in and we just started wiping out the whole village. That is it. We burnt the village and killed all the people and just one mass slaughter, just like you do a bunch of cows, you know, just killed them all.” He added a key detail, telling Wilson that he had been one of those who pulled the trigger when about fifty villagers had been rounded up: “Lieutenant Calley opened up on them first and then I joined in.”
Wilson interrupted Meadlo’s extraordinary confession to advise him of his right to remain silent. When the interview resumed, Meadlo expressed puzzlement: “Can you really get me for anything like that or for killing people when I was just following orders?”
That night, Wilson wrote, “Something in me died. . . . I had prayed to God that this thing was fiction, and I knew now it was fact.”
One of the few senior Army officers who looked better because of his handling of My Lai was William Westmoreland, who insisted that the investigation be wide-ranging, looking at not just what had happened but how and why it happened, and what was done about it. “We investigated this thing fully and let the chips fall as the evidence was produced,” he recalled, correctly. The Nixon White House seemed intent on politicizing the investigation, which Westmoreland strived to resist. At one point he asked Alexander Haig, then an Army officer detached to work for National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger, to stop by his house for a drink. After some preliminary chatting, Westmoreland delivered a message. “I have been getting pressure not to push the My Lai investigation, and I want you to understand, and I hope the president will understand, that if these pressures don’t cease and desist immediately, I am going to exercise my prerogative and I am going straight to the president.” Haig seemed upset for a moment, but he got the message, Westmoreland recalled. After that conversation, he said, the pressure ceased.
In November 1969, after news of the massacre and the Army’s investigation broke, the Army appointed Lt. Gen. William Peers, who had commanded the 4th Infantry Division in Vietnam, to investigate the larger aspects of the incident—how and why the massacre had happened, and how it was covered up. To his credit—and the Army’s—Peers did the right thing, conducting an exhaustive investigation in which more than four hundred witnesses were interviewed, some repeatedly. He was operating under an extreme time limit of less than four months, because on March 16, 1970, the two-year statute of limitations would expire on many crimes short of murder. Like Wilson, Peers initially doubted Ridenhour’s allegations, but he concluded that the situation was even worse than the Ridenhour letter had depicted. One day, Peers and his investigators asked the chief of staff of the Americal Division why he had not pursued what he had heard about the incident. “There was no use in me taking this up with General Koster,” the officer replied. “The generals were handling the situation.” It was a damning statement.
One of the most striking moments in the entire sprawling investigation came when Gen. Koster, who by this point was the superintendent of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, was called back for a second round of questioning. The general had repeatedly insisted that he had carried out his duty and ensured in the days after the My Lai incident that a formal investigation had been conducted. In fact, he said, he remembered that a sheaf of written, sworn statements had been attached to that report. This was the essence of his defense. If that internal inquiry had erred, or if Peers’s investigators could not locate the report, he implied, that was certainly not his fault. He probably knew that almost every single document relating to My Lai had disappeared, somewhat mysteriously, from the division’s files. As one frustrated investigator told Koster, “We have not only searched everything in Vietnam, but all the file retentions from Okinawa and over here. And there isn’t any trace of any papers from the division. . . . There are no logs. These are supposed to be retained for two years, the classified documents. There are no documents. There are no destruction certificates. There is no nothing.”
Peers had known Koster for decades, admired him, and considered him a close friend. Yet he found Koster’s initial round of testimony “almost unbelievable.” In a second round of testimony, in February 1970, Peers challenged Koster’s account. Peers and his staff informed Koster that they had traveled to Vietnam and had talked to dozens of people, including the involved company commanders, and found not a single person who had given a sworn statement. In fact, they had concluded, the testimony about the statements was a lie. The statements simply had never been given. “They made no statements, and to further compound the problem, there is no r
ecord of such a report ever having arrived at headquarters, Americal Division,” one Peers investigator said to Koster. “There is no copy of the report available. There is no information whatsoever [that such a report ever had been done] aside from that which you and Colonel Henderson have indicated.”
“Yes, sir,” Koster responded. “I can’t explain that.” But the investigators had developed an explanation: The absence of evidence was so total as to be dispositive. The complete absence of evidence was evidence of a cover-up.
Peers’s report made it clear that he was shocked by the behavior not only of the soldiers who pulled the triggers, threw the grenades, thrust the bayonets, and committed the rapes at My Lai but also of the chain of command above them. “Efforts were made at every level of command from company to division to withhold and suppress information,” he wrote in March 1970. “Efforts initiated in 1968 to deliberately withhold information continue to this day. Six officers who occupied key positions at the time of the incident exercised their right to remain silent before this Inquiry, others gave false or misleading testimony or withheld information, and key documents relating to this incident have not been found in U.S. files.”
The Generals Page 29
