So I called George Latimer and I said, “Here’s what I’m writing.” He said Calley’s comments conflicted with his sworn testimony and if I published the interview this way, I would possibly be denying Calley his constitutional right to a fair trial. He offered me a deal: If I would avoid saying outright that Calley’s comments were made directly to me in an interview and be ambiguous enough to leave open the possibility that I had heard them secondhand, he would go over my story, line for line, and correct any factual mistakes he could. I said, “Fine. That’s a deal.” And I said, “If I do these changes and editors want to know if the story’s correct, will you talk to them?” He said, “Yes. I’ll tell them I read the story and it’s correct.” And that’s what did it.
WAYNE SMITH
We had one guy, his name was Jordan, and he was nicknamed “Jungle Jordan.” This son of a bitch was one of these kill-happy people. He just wanted to kill anything. It’s hard to even understand that, but there were people like him who were willing to do anything just to kill. It was the objective, not that we were advancing a cause. We didn’t necessarily know if they were enemy or not.
In the summer of ’69 our division received the Presidential Unit Citation because we killed so many Vietnamese. Operation Speedy Express*3 had ended just shortly after I came to Vietnam. But this was another one of these big campaigns that was totally dedicated to killing anything that moved. We had free-fire zones; these areas were assumed to be enemy, day or night, and subject to being fired on and asked questions later. When you go into combat, you think, Well, it’s going to be pretty clear that there’s us, and then there’s them. But they had no uniforms. They had no real, formal lines. So it was an atmosphere of wanton killing.
We killed an awful lot of people, in all kinds of ways. I didn’t see it, but it was accepted that some of the Vietnamese were taken up in planes and thrown out. Some would drown. Some didn’t take prisoners. There were all kinds of snipers; we just killed huge numbers of people in ways that were largely by design. The Vietnam War was all about body count. That’s how we measured success. When one of my men had a confirmed kill he would get a three-day pass to an in-country R-and-R center like Vung Tau, where this gorgeous beach was. It was a so-called war of containment—we would contain the enemy in certain areas, free-fire zones. So it was very depersonalized. It wasn’t people that we were killing—they were gooks and dinks. The way to progress and win the war was by killing more of them than they killed us. Hence the daily body counts. “Last night, American forces killed a hundred and ninety-nine NVA regulars, and only thirteen Americans were killed.” I’m not going to hold us [soldiers] harmless. We have personal responsibility.
SEYMOUR HERSH
David Obst, my twenty-three-year-old neighbor who ran Dispatch News Service, gets on the phone and starts talking to managing editors of major daily newspapers saying, “I have a great story by Seymour Hersh.” He called editor after editor. Obst had the gift of gab; he had incredible charm. On the night of November 12 we sent the story by telex to fifty papers. This is right before the November 15 Moratorium. The next day we didn’t hear anything. Communications were different then. The AP and UPI wires didn’t touch it. They didn’t know what to do with it. I had an office in the National Press Building on the eighth floor next to Ralph Nader, and Obst and I waited in the library for the regional papers to come in at 3 A.M. Everybody paid a hundred bucks for the first story. The first paper we saw was the Chicago Sun-Times and it was a banner. The Boston Globe, Miami Herald, Seattle Times all carried it. We even sold it to the Billings, Montana, paper. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s front-page headline was, “Lieutenant Accused of Murdering 109 Civilians.”
ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH, NOVEMBER 13, 1969
LIEUTENANT ACCUSED OF
MURDERING 109 CIVILIANS
By Seymour Hersh
FORT BENNING, GA., Nov. 13—LL William L. Calley Jr., 26 years old, is a mild-mannered, boyish-looking Vietnam combat veteran with the nickname “Rusty.” The Army is completing an investigation of charges that he deliberately murdered at least 109 Vietnamese civilians in a search-and-destroy mission in March 1968 in a Viet Cong stronghold known as “Pinkville.”
The New York Post and Newsday ran it big. But The New York Times wouldn’t buy it. They assigned a reporter to go to My Lai and he wrote a story a couple days later. It also ran in some British papers and it led to a debate in Parliament. The story ran Thursday in thirty-seven papers, and in the antiwar demonstration that weekend there already were signs, “Free the Pinkville People.” The area was called “Pinkville” because on the military maps My Lai was colored in pink because it was communist territory.
BARRY ROMO
I was now a first lieutenant at twenty years old; I’m at First Battalion headquarters. I had volunteered to go back [into combat], so they sent a bunch of us down to the Eleventh Brigade to be briefed. We got incredibly drunk, and the next morning in a briefing we were told, “This is really a great unit you’re going into, they’ve just come into country a short while ago, they’ve got this really incredible body count going on.”
It was something close to a five hundred confirmed body count. And all of a sudden we all fucking sobered up. One guy asked, “How many American casualties?” And he goes, “One, self-inflicted. Not a single American wounded by enemy forces.” So, five hundred, and one American—fuck, you know? Normally we would have the same number of casualties. Not the same killings, because we had much better medical care, so if we took five hundred, there might be a hundred people killed and four hundred people wounded. We had never seen combat like that.
So we’re really sober now, and one full colonel, G-2, goes, “How many weapons did they capture off these dead Viet Cong?” And he says, “Three.” Three could have been two hand grenades and a pistol. Three could have been on one person. Three could have been found in a pigsty. Three could have been what they carried into the area. One of us said back to the colonel, because we really didn’t care, “They’re killing civilians, aren’t they?”
He called an end to the meeting and sent us to the Eleventh Brigade. When we get there after that, people didn’t talk about it.
SEYMOUR HERSH
That Sunday, November 16, a paper in Phoenix wrote a story about the My Lai story, as everybody else did. At the bottom they had a little squib that said Ronald Ridenhour, a native of Phoenix, said that he was the first to investigate it. This is true. The army started its investigation because this kid Ridenhour was what they call a LRRP [long-range reconnaissance patrol], an advanced patrol guy, very elite unit in the army. He had been told about it by some of the kids in the unit the next day after it happened, and he got a helicopter and flew over it. He saw the scene. He saw ditches and bodies smoldering. He couldn’t believe it. He waited until he got out of the army, and about six months later he reported it to the army and they began an investigation. I didn’t know any of this.
I found out Ridenhour was at Claremont College in California and I flew out the next morning to see him. He couldn’t have been more gracious, and he said, “I always wanted to write it but you can do it, I can’t. I couldn’t get anybody interested in the story. You’ve got it in print.” It turned out that Ridenhour had given the whole story to Life magazine and they’d passed on it.
BOBBY MULLER
You come back, you’re in a normal place, you’re not in a war zone, you think about the shit that you did, and you don’t believe that you fucking did this. What the fuck? And you then live with the memory. Because not only did those defense mechanisms protect you from shit by lessening their effect; it also enables you to do that which you would never have done because it doesn’t have the effect. You look at all the reports of what the good guys, the American soldiers, do, whether it’s in Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, massacring people, innocent people, and you remember, hey, these are Little Leaguers. These are the good guys. We look at what goes on in the world and we think it’s a subspecies of human bei
ngs. It’s not. It’s us.
SEYMOUR HERSH
Ridenhour said to me, “Here’s a company roster and I know one of the guys.” There’s a guy named Mike Terry and Mike lives in Orem, Utah. I flew to Salt Lake, rented a car, and I drove over a snowy pass. He was one of about six or seven kids, Mormon. So I knocked on the door and one of the kids answered it and I said, “I’m looking for Michael Terry.” He comes out and I said, “Hi, my name is Hersh. I’m a reporter. Ron Ridenhour gave me your name….” “Oh yeah,” he says. He couldn’t have been nicer. And I said, “I want to talk to you about what happened.” He said, “Well, do you want me to tell you the same thing I told the colonel?” I said, “Sure.” “Well, it was a Nazi-type thing, how they mowed down people.” That was the line I used and I called Obst up from the airport and I said I’m going to dictate. David sold the second story, which ran in lots of papers on Thursday, November 20.
ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH, NOVEMBER 20, 1969
HAMLET ATTACK CALLED
“POINT-BLANK MURDER”
By Seymour Hersh
…Why did it happen?
“I think that probably the officers didn’t really know if they were ordered to kill the villagers or not….A lot of guys feel that they (the South Vietnamese civilians) aren’t human beings; we just treated them like animals.”
SEYMOUR HERSH
Then somebody finally told me about Paul Meadlo. Meadlo was a Project 100,000 kid. He fired clip after clip into the people. Calley told him to fire. There was this moment when they had shot everybody in the ditch and they were eating their K-rations lunch right next to the ditch. War is war. And if you don’t dehumanize the enemy you can’t do anything, so you have to. They were dehumanized. They heard a keening, a noise. And from the bottom of the pit, even though they thought they’d killed everybody by shooting repeatedly into the pit, there were three pits, each with hundreds of people—the number was staggering. So a kid crawls up to the surface full of other people’s blood and he’s a two- or three-year-old and he starts running across the ground and Calley with his big show of he-man braggadocio, went up behind him and blew his head off.
That next morning they were interrogated by the colonel and they said, “Sir, nothing unusual happened.” The colonel said, “I take your word for it, men. Thank you very much.” That evening the officers said, “No, sir, nothing untoward. We were in a firefight, sir. We did a good fight.” They got on the front page of The New York Times for that fight. GIs kill one hundred and eighteen in combat. Three weapons captured. I mean I can’t believe it made the front page. Westy [General William Westmoreland] flew out to congratulate them right in the middle of all this shit. It’s just amazing.
Anyway, the next morning on patrol a couple miles away, Meadlo gets his leg blown off by a land mine. And while he’s lying there waiting for the medevac, he’s issuing an oath, “God will punish me. And Lieutenant Calley, God will punish you.” And the kids were all saying, “Get him out of there! Get him out!” Finally, they take him away and he spends months recovering from his wound in Japan. He never spoke; he was totally comatose.
WAYNE SMITH
I was in this aid station in Dong Tam. There was a supply building behind a little hospital. I had to go out and get some supplies, and there was a key that you needed to get in there. It was the morning shift; I went out there, opened it up—and some casualties, some dead Americans had come in the night before. Typically, they’re either in a body bag or had a body bag over them that they’re going to be put in. So, there was this dead soldier, a white guy, he had a peace ring on his finger. I’ll never forget this. I believe it was a Sunday morning. And it was, like, Holy shit. Here’s this dead guy. His family is probably on their way to church, maybe having Sunday dinner without a fucking clue that their life has changed forever. Here I had this almost privilege, of being with this dead fellow. I said a little prayer, “Our Father.” I was just so totally demoralized; so struck by the contradictions of life and death. Who knows, his family could be telling stories like “Johnny’s over there fighting the war.” Unbeknownst to them, Johnny’s dead. I also realized that it could be any one of us. It could be me. One tried to suppress those kinds of thoughts. But reality would find strange ways of breaking through into your psyche.
SEYMOUR HERSH
Finding him wasn’t that easy. The only thing I knew from the company roster was M-E-A-D-L-O was from Indiana, and so I just phoned every Meadlo I could find in the whole state. I finally found somebody near Terre Haute, in a place called New Goshen. I called and I said, “Hi, I’m looking for Paul. Is he okay?” “Well, what do you mean?” I said, “You know, how’s his leg?” “Oh, well, he’s doing all right. Who are you?” And I said, “I’m just a reporter. I want to talk to him about what happened in the war.” And she said, “Well, I don’t know if he’ll talk to you.” I said, “Is it okay if I come?” She said, “I can’t promise.” She had a very deep, Indiana rural voice.
So the next day I flew to Indianapolis, rented a car, and drove. It might have been ten in the morning when I got to New Goshen. I couldn’t find his place for a long time. It was a chicken farm. But when I pulled into the farm I could see that it was all messed up and there were chickens all over the place. His mom comes out and she’s this little old lady. She’s fifty but looks closer to seventy—just beat down, and living in this old wooden shack. So I say, “Is he in there? Is it okay if I go in?” She said, “Yes, of course.” And then she said this great line: She looked at me and she said, “I sent them a good boy and they made him a murderer.” It’s one of those lines that’ll stick with you forever.
I sat down and first I asked him about his leg, which is always what you do. You’ve got to do that. I said, “I want to see the stump.” And he showed me his stump and after a few minutes I said, “Okay, tell me your story. What’s your story?” And he smiled. Happy to have somebody not pretend that nothing ever happened to him.
He said, “I just began to shoot people. Calley told me to shoot and he shot and shot.” And I’m taking notes. “I just shot and shot.” I spoke to seventy of the kids in the next six months, to write the book, after doing the first five articles.
Credit 12.2
Investigative reporter Seymour Hersh tracked down Private Paul Meadlo at his family’s remote Indiana farm, where Meadlo told Hersh the disturbing details of the My Lai massacre. Meadlo’s mother told Hersh, “I sent them a good boy and they made him a murderer.”
ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH, NOVEMBER 25, 1969
EX-GI TELLS OF KILLING CIVILIANS AT PINKVILLE
By Seymour Hersh
TERRE HAUTE, IND., NOV. 25—A former GI told in interviews yesterday how he executed, under orders, dozens of South Vietnamese civilians during the United States Army attack on the village of Song My in March 1968. He estimated that he and his fellow soldiers shot 370 villagers during the operation in what has become known as Pinkville.
WAYNE SMITH
I saw a lot of heroin. When I first got there, there wasn’t much. But by ’70 it was a snowfield. There were these little plastic vials that could be bought for dollars. It was very inexpensive, very powerful, and very pure. In fact, even some of the marijuana was laced with opium and laced with heroin. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers got addicted. The counterculture went to Vietnam. Some of them got caught up in it. There were people that, clearly, knew about marijuana cultivation, and so much of the music was antiwar and, you know, anti-imperialism.
I started using drugs and was self-medicating—marijuana with opium, some heroin. At first I was smoking it. It was awful. I eventually did shoot some heroin. If one is in pain, almost of any kind, one of the worst things you can do is heroin. Because it is, dare I say, the almost perfect solution to ending your pain. For me, it was ghosts. Seriously, it was voices. It was noise in my head that I couldn’t quiet. Honestly, it’s not about getting high. It’s about just avoiding pain and avoiding the noise. It wasn’t uncommon—I mean, it was an ep
idemic.*4
I always found it bizarre how anyone had PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder). I had immediate stress disorder. Delayed? Hell no. It was immediate. I was depressed, I was angry. There was a part of me that thought, Hey, the world would be better off if I wasn’t here.
SEYMOUR HERSH
Walter Cronkite knew me from being Eugene McCarthy’s press secretary, and he wanted this story on the air, so he pushed me to get Meadlo. When I asked Meadlo, he said, “I’ll go.” I said, “Well, you can bring your wife and the baby. And they’ll pay to fly us.” He agreed. So the next morning we flew to New York. It was November 25. I’ll never forget. We were doing a pre-interview with Mike Wallace, who asked, “So what happened?” Meadlo said, “Well, I began to shoot.” I remember Mike stopped and he said, “Roll the camera.” That was the great interview. Mike won prizes for it, and it became a famous antiwar poster.
WALLACE: How many people did you round up?
MEADLO: Well, there was about forty to forty-five people that we gathered in the center of the village. And we placed them in there, and it was like a little island, right there in the center of the village, I’d say.
Witness to the Revolution Page 25
