Two tragedies
took place
in 1968 in Viet Nam. One was
the massacre by United States soldiers of as many as 500
unarmed
civilians--
old men, women, children-- in My Lai on the morning of
March 16.
The other was the cover-up of that massacre.
U. S. military officials suspected Quang
Ngai
Province as
being
an enemy stronghold. The U. S. targeted the
province for the
first
major U.S. combat operation of the war. Military
officials
declared
the province a "free-fire zone" and subjected it to
frequent bombing
missions
and artillery attacks. By the end of 1967, many
dwellings
in the province had been destroyed and nearly 140,000
civilians left
homeless.
Not surprisingly, the U. S. operations led some within
the native population of Quang Ngai Province
to distrust
Americans. In some villages, children hissed at
soldiers and adults kept quiet. But the situation was
complicated. Other natives detested North
Vietnamese Army regulars, and in some native villages,
children would gather around American jeeps and try to
sell Cokes or offer to polish boots. Soldiers entering
a village didn't know quite what to expect.
Two hours of instruction on the rights of prisoners
and a
wallet-sized
card "The
Enemy
is in Your Hands" seemed to have little impact
on American
soldiers
fighting in Quang Ngai. Military leaders
encouraged and rewarded
kills in an effort to produce impressive body counts
that could be
reported
to Saigon as an indication of progress. GIs
joked that "anything
that's dead and isn't white is a VC" for body count
purposes.
Angered
by a local population that said nothing about the VC's
whereabouts,
soldiers
took to calling natives "gooks."
Charlie Company came to Viet Nam in December,
1967. It
located
in Quang Ngai Province in January, 1968, as one of the
three companies
in Task Force Barker, an ad hoc unit headed by Lt.
Col. Frank Barker,
Jr.
Its mission was to pressure the VC in an area of the
province
known
as "Pinkville." Charlie Company's commanding
officer was Ernest
Medina, a thirty-three-year-old Mexican-American
from New Mexico
who
was popular with his soldiers. One of his platoon
leaders was
twenty-four-year-oldWilliam
Calley. Charlie Company soldiers expressed
amazement
that Calley was thought by anyone to be officer
material. One described
Calley as"a kid trying to play war." [LINK
TO
CHAIN OF COMMAND DIAGRAM] Calley's
utter lack of respect
for the indigenous population was apparent to all in
the company.
According
to one soldier, "if they wanted to do something wrong,
it was alright
with
Calley." The soldiers of Charlie Company, like most
combat soldiers in
Viet Nam, scored low on military exams. Few
combat soldiers had
education
beyond high school.
Seymour Hersh wrote that by March of 1968 "many in
the
company had
given
in to an easy pattern of violence." Soldiers
systematically beat
unarmed civilians. Some civilians were murdered.
Whole villages
were
burned. Wells were poisoned. Rapes were common.
On March 14, a small squad from "C" Company ran into
a booby
trap,
killing
a popular sergeant, blinding one GI and wounding
several others.
The following evening, when a funeral service was held
for the killed
sergeant,
soldiers had revenge on their mind. After the
service, Captain
Medina
rose to give the soldiers a pep talk and discuss the
next morning's
mission.
Medina told them that the VC's crack 48th Battalion
was in the vicinity
of a hamlet known as My Lai 4, which would be the
target of a
large-scale
assault by the company. The soldiers' mission
would be to engage
the 48th Battalion and to destroy the village of My
Lai. By 7
a.m.,
Medina said, the women and children would be out of
the hamlet and all
they could expect to encounter would be the
enemy. The soldiers
were
to explode brick homes, set fire to thatch homes,
shoot livestock,
poison
wells, and destroy the enemy. The seventy-five
or so American
soldiers
would be supported in their assault by gunship pilots.
Medina later said that his objective that night was
to "fire
them
up
and get them ready to go in there; I did not give any
instructions as
to
what to do with women and children in the
village." Although some
soldiers agreed with that recollection of Medina's,
others clearly
thought
that he had ordered them to kill every person in My
Lai 4.
Perhaps
his orders were intentionally vague. What seems
likely is that
Medina
intentionally gave the impression that everyone in My
Lai would be
their
enemy.
At 7:22 a.m. on March 16, nine helicopters lifted off
for
the
flight
to My Lai 4. By the time the helicopters
carrying members of
Charlie
Company landed in a rice paddy about 140 yards south
of My Lai, the
area
had been peppered with small arms fire from assault
helicopters.
Whatever VC might have been in the vicinity of My Lai
had most likely
left
by the time the first soldiers climbed out of their
helicopters.
The assault plan called for Lt. Calley's first platoon
and Lt. Stephen
Brooks' second platoon to sweep into the village,
while a third
platoon,
Medina, and the headquarters unit would be held in
reserve and follow
the
first two platoons in after the area was more-or-less
secured.
Above
the ground, the action would be monitored at the
1,000-foot level by
Lt.
Col. Barker and at the 2,500-foot level by Oran
Henderson, commander of the 11th Brigade, both
flying
counterclockwise
around the battle scene in helicopters.
My Lai village had about 700 residents. They
lived in
either
red-brick
homes or thatch-covered huts. A deep
drainage ditch marked
the eastern boundary of the village. Directly
south of the
residential
area was an open plaza area used for holding
village
meetings.
To the north and west of the village was dense foliage[MAP].
By 8 a.m., Calley's platoon had crossed the plaza on
the
town's
southern
edge and entered the village. They encountered
families cooking
rice
in front of their homes. The men began their
usual
search-and-destroy
task of pulling people from homes, interrogating them,
and searching
for
VC. Soon the killing began. The first
victim was a man
stabbed
in the back with a bayonet. Then a middle-aged
man was picked up,
thrown down a well, and a grenade lobbed in after
him. A group of
fifteen to twenty mostly older women were gathered
around a temple,
kneeling
and praying. They were all executed with shots
to the back of
their
heads. Eighty or so villagers were taken from
their homes and
herded
to the plaza area. As many cried "No VC! No
VC!", Calley told
soldierPaul
Meadlo, "You know what I want you to do with
them". When
Calley returned ten minutes later and found the
Vietnamese still
gathered
in the plaza he reportedly said to Meadlo, "Haven't
you got rid of them
yet? I want them dead. Waste them."
Meadlo and Calley
began firing into the group from a distance of ten to
fifteen
feet.
The few that survived did so because they were covered
by the bodies of
those less fortunate.
What Captain Medina knew of these war crimes is not
certain.
It
was a chaotic operation. Gary Garfolo said, "I
could hear
shooting
all the time. Medina was running back and forth
everywhere.
This wasn't no organized deal." Medina would
later testify that
he
didn't enter the village until 10 a.m., after most of
the shooting had
stopped, and did not personally witness a single
civilian being
killed.
Others put Medina in the village closer to 9 a.m., and
close to the
scene
of many of the murders as they were happening.
As the third platoon moved into My Lai, it was
followed by
army
photographer
Ronald Haeberle, there to document what was supposed
to be a
significant
encounter with a crack enemy battalion. Haeberle
took many
pictures [HAEBERLE
PHOTOS]. He said he saw about
thirty different GIs
kill
about 100 civilians. Once Haeberle focused his
camera on a young
child about five feet away, but before he could get
his picture the kid
was blown away. He angered some GIs as he tried
to photograph
them
as they fondled the breasts of a fifteen-year-old
Vietnamese girl.
An army helicopter piloted by Chief Warrant Officer
Hugh
Thompson
arrived
in the My Lai vicinity about 9 a.m. Thompson
noticed dead and
dying
civilians all over the village. Thompson
repeatedly saw
young
boys and girls being shot at point-blank range.
Thompson, furious
at what he saw, reported the wanton killings to
brigade headquarters[THOMPSON'S
STORY].
Meanwhile, the rampage below continued. Calley
was at
the
drainage
ditch on the eastern edge of the village, where about
seventy to eighty
old men, women, and children not killed on the spot
had been
brought.
Calley ordered the dozen or so platoon members there
to push the people
into the ditch, and three or four GIs did.
Calley ordered his men
to shoot into the ditch. Some refused, others
obeyed. One
who
followed Calley's order was Paul Meadlo, who estimated
that he killed
about
twenty-five civilians. (Later Meadlo was seen,
head in hands,
crying.)
Calley joined in the massacre. At one point, a
two-year-old child
who somehow survived the gunfire began running towards
the
hamlet.
Calley grabbed the child, threw him back in the ditch,
then shot him.
Hugh Thompson, by now almost frantic, saw bodies in
the
ditch,
including
a few people who were still alive. He landed his
helicopter and
told
Calley to hold his men there while he evacuated the
civilians.
(One account reports Thompson
told his helicopter crew chief to "open up on the
Americans" if they
fired
at the civilians, but Thompson later said he did not
remember having
done so.) He put himself between Calley's men
and the
Vietnamese.
When a rescue helicopter landed, Thompson had the nine
civilians,
including
five children, flown to the nearest army
hospital. Later,
Thompson
was to land again and rescue a baby still clinging to
her dead mother.
By 11 a.m., when Medina called for a lunch break, the
killing was
nearly
over. By noon, "My Lai was no more": its
buildings were destroyed
and its people dead or dying. Soldiers later
said they didn't
remember
seeing "one military-age male in the entire
place". By night, the
VC had returned to bury the dead. What few
villagers survived and
weren't already communists, became communists.
Twenty months
later
army investigators would discover three mass graves
containing the
bodies
of about 500 villagers.
II.
The cover-up of the My Lai massacre began almost as
soon as
the
killing
ended. Official army reports of the operation
proclaimed a great
victory: 128 enemy dead, only one American casualty
(one soldier
intentionally
shot himself in the foot). The army knew
better. Hugh
Thompson
had filed a complaint, alleging numerous war crimes
involving murders
of
civilians. According to one of Thompson's crew
members, "Thompson was
so
pissed he wanted to turn in his wings". An order
issued by Major
Calhoun to Captain Medina to return to My Lai to do a
body count was
countermanded
by Major General Samuel Koster, who asked Medina how
many civilians has
been killed. "Twenty to twenty-eight," was his
answer. The
next day Colonel Henderson informed Medina that an
informal
investigation
of the My Lai incident was underway-- and most likely
gave the Captain
"a good ass-chewing" as well. Henderson interviewed a
number of GIs,
then
pronounced himself "satisfied" by their answers. No
attempt was made to
interview surviving Vietnamese. In late April,
Henderson submitted a
written
report indicating that about twenty civilians had been
inadvertently
killed
in My Lai. Meanwhile, Michael Bernhart, a Charlie
Company GI severely
troubled
by what he witnessed at My Lai discussed with other
GIs his plan to
write
a letter about the incident to his congressman.
Medina, after
learning
of Bernhart's intentions, confronted him and told him
how unwise such
an
action, in his opinion, would be.
If not for the determined efforts of a
twenty-two-year-old
ex-GI
from
Phoenix, Ronald Ridenhour, what happened on March 16,
1968 at My Lai 4
may never have come to the attention of the American
people.
Ridenhour
served in a reconnaissance unit in Duc Pho, where he
heard five
eyewitness
accounts of the My Lai massacre. He began his
own investigation,
traveling to Americal headquarters to confirm that
Charlie Company had
in fact been in My Lai on the date reported by his
witnesses.
Ridenhour
was shocked by what he learned [RIDENHOUR'S
STORY]. When he was
discharged in December,
1968,
Ridenhour said "I wanted to get those people. I
wanted to reveal
what they did. My God, when I first came home, I
would tell my
friends
about this and cry-literally cry." In March,
1969, Ridenhour
composed
a letter detailing what he had heard about the My Lai
massacre[LINK
TO
LETTER]and sent it to President Nixon,
the Pentagon, the
State Department, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and
numerous members of
Congress.
Most recipients simply ignored the letter, but a few,
most notably
Representative
Morris Udall, aggressively pushed for a full
investigation of
Ridenhour's
allegations.
By late April, General Westmoreland, Army Chief of
Staff,
had
turned
the case over to the Inspector General for
investigation.
Over
the next few months, dozens of witnesses were
interviewed.
It
became apparent to all connected with the
investigation that war crimes
had been committed. In June, 1969, William
Calley was flown back
from Viet Nam to appear in a line-up for
identification by Hugh
Thompson.
By August, the matter was in the hands of the army's
Criminal
Investigation
Division for a determination as to whether criminal
charges should be
filed
against Calley and other massacre participants.
On September
5,
formal charges, included six
specifications
of premeditated murder, were filed against
Calley.
Calley hired as his attorney George
Latimer, a Salt Lake City lawyer with
considerable military
experience,
having served on the Military Court of Appeals.
Latimer
pronounced
himself impressed with Calley. "You couldn't
find a nicer boy,"
he
said, adding that if Calley was guilty of anything it
was only
following
orders "a bit too diligently."
Meanwhile, the issue of the My Lai massacre had
gotten the
attention
of President Nixon. Secretary of Defense Melvin
Laird briefed
Nixon
at his San Clemente retreat. The White House
proceeded with
caution,
sensing the potential of the incident to embarrass the
military and
undermine
the war effort. The President characterized what
happened at My
Lai
as an unfortunate aberration, as "an isolated
incident."
In November, 1969, the American public began to learn
the
details
of
what happened at My Lai 4. The massacre was the
cover story in
both
Time and Newsweek. CBS ran a Mike Wallace
interview with Paul
Meadlo.
Seymour Hersh published in depth accounts based on his
own extensive
interviews.
Life magazine published Haeberle's graphic
photographs.
Reaction to the reports of the massacre varied.
Some
politicians,
such as House Armed Services Subcommittee Chair L.
Mendel Rivers
maintained
that there was no massacre and that reports to the
contrary were merely
attempts to build opposition to the Viet Nam
war. Others called
for
an open, independent inquiry. The Administration
took a middle
course,
deciding on a closed-door investigation by the
Pentagon, headed
by
William Peers, a blunt three-star general.
For four months the Peers Panel interviewed 398
witnesses,
ranging
from
General Koster to the GIs of Charlie Company.
Over 20,000 pages
of
testimony were taken. The
Peers
Report criticized the actions of both officers
and enlisted
men.
The report recommended action against dozens of men
for rape, murder,
or
participation in the cover-up.
III.
The Army's Criminal Investigation Division continued
its
separate
investigation.
Most of the enlisted men who committed war crimes were
no longer
members
of the military, and thus immune from prosecution by
court-martial.
A 1955 Supreme Court decision, Toth vs Quarles,
held that
military
courts cannot try former members of the armed services
"no matter how
intimate
the connection between the offense and the concerns of
military
discipline."
Decisions were made to prosecute a total of
twenty-five officers and
enlisted
men, including General Koster, Colonel Oran Henderson,
Captain
Medina.
In the end, however, only few would be tried and
only one,
William
Calley, would be found guilty. The top officer
charged, General
Samuel
Koster, who failed to report known civilian casualties
and conducted a
clearly inadequate investigation was, according to
General Peers, the
beneficiary
of a whitewash, having charges against him dropped and
receiving only a
letter of censure and reduction in rank. Colonel
Henderson was
found
not guilty on all charges after a trial by court
martial. Peers
again
expressed his disapproval, writing "I cannot agree
with the
verdict.
If his actions are judged as acceptable standards for
an officer in his
position, the Army is indeed in deep trouble."
Captain Ernest Medina faced charges of murdering 102
Vienamese
civilians.
The charges were based on the prosecution's theory of
command
responsibility: Medina, as the officer in charge
of Charlie Company
should be accountable for the actions of his
men. If Medina knew
that a massacre was taking place and did nothing to
stop it, he should
be found guilty of murder. (Medina was
originally charged also
with
dereliction of duty for participating in the coverup,
but the offense
was
dropped because the statute of limitations had
run.) Medina was
subjected
to a lie-detector test which tended to show he
responded truthfully
when
he said that he did not intentionally suggest to his
men that they kill
unarmed civilians. The same test, however,
tended to to show that
his contention that he first heard of the killing of
unarmed civilians
about 10 to 10:30 A.M. was not truthful, and that he
in fact knew
non-combattants
were being killed sometime between 8 A.M. and 9 A.M.,
when there would
still have been time to prevent many civilian
deaths. The
prosecution,
led by Major William Eckhardt, was unable, however, to
get the damaging
lie-detector evidence admitted. Medina's lawyer,
flamboyant
defense
attorney F. Lee Bailey, conducted a highly successful
defense, forcing
the prosecution to drop key witnesses and keeping
damaging evidence,
such
as Ronald Haeberle's photographs, from the jury.
After
fifty-seven
minutes of deliberation, the jury acquitted Medina on
all
charges.
(Months later, when a perjury prosecution was no
longer possible,
Medina
admitted that he had suppressed evidence and lied to
the brigade
commander
about the number of civilians killed.)
The strongest government case was that against Lt.
William
Calley.
On November 12, 1970, in a small courthouse in Fort
Benning, Georgia,
young
Prosecutor Aubrey Daniel stood to deliver his opening
statement: "I
want
you to know My Lai 4. I will try to put you
there." Captain
Daniel
told the jury of six military officers the shocking
story of Calley's
role
in My Lai's tragedy: his machine-gunning of people in
the plaza area
south
of the hamlet; his orders to men to execute men,
women, and children in
the eastern drainage ditch; his butt-stroking with his
rifle of an old
man; his grabbing of a small child and his throwing of
the child into
the
ditch, then shooting him at point-blank range.
Daniel told the
jury
that at the close of evidence he would ask them to "in
the name of
justice"
convict the accused of all charges.
Daniel built the prosecution's case
methodically. For
days,
the
grisly evidence accumulated without a single witness
directly placing
Calley
at the scene of a shooting. One of the early
witnesses was Ronald
Haeberle, the army photographer whose pictures brought
home the horror
of My Lai [TESTIMONY
OF
HAEBERLE]. Another was Hugh
Thompson, My Lai's
hero.
Defense attorney Latimer's handling on cross of
Haeberle, Thompson, and
other witnesses led many courtroom observers to
conclude that his
glowing
reputation was undeserved. His questioning of
Haeberle, whose
credibility
was largely irrelevant, was pointless. His
attempt to question
Thompson's
heroism "failed utterly," according to Richard Hammer,
author of The
Court-Martial of Lt. Calley.
In the second week of the trial Daniel began to call
his
more
incriminating
witnesses. Robert Maples, a machine gunner in
the first platoon,
testified that he saw Calley near the eastern drainage
ditch, firing at
the people below. Maples said that Calley asked
him to use his
machine
gun on the Vietnamese in the ditch, but that he
refused [TESTIMONY
OF
MAPLES]. Dennis Conti provided
equally damning
evidence.
Conti testified that he was ordered to round up
people, mostly women
and
children, and bring them back to Calley on the trail
south of the
hamlet.
Calley, Conti said, told us to make them "squat down
and bunch up so
they
couldn't get up and run." Minutes later Calley
and Paul Meadlo
"fired
directly into the people. There were burst and
shots for two
minutes.
The people screamed and yelled and fell." Conti
said that Meadlo
"broke down" and began crying [TESTIMONY
OF
CONTI].
The prosecution's final witness was its most
anticipated
witness.
Paul Meadlo had been promised immunity from military
prosecution in
return
for his testimony in the Calley case, but when he was
called earlier in
the trial, Meadlo had refused to answer questions
about March 16, 1968,
claiming his fifth amendment right not to incriminate
himself.
Daniel
called Meadlo to the stand for a second time, and the
ex-GI, who had
lost
a foot to a mine shortly after the massacre, limped to
the stand in his
green short-sleeve shirt and green pants. Judge
Kennedy warned
Meadlo
that if he refused to answer questions, two U. S.
marshals would take
him
into custody. Meadlo said he would testify. He
told the jury that
Calley had
left him with a large group of mostly women and
children south of the
hamlet
saying, "You know what to do with them, Meadlo."
Meadlo thought
Calley
meant he should guard the people, which he did.
Meadlo told the
jury
what happened when Calley returned a few minutes
later:
He said, "How come they're not dead?"
I
said, I
didn't
know we were supposed to kill them." He said, I want
them
dead." He backed off twenty or thirty
feet and
started
shooting into the people -- the Viet Cong --
shooting automatic. He was
beside me. He burned four or five
magazines. I
burned
off a few, about three. I helped shoot ‘em.
Q: What were the people doing after
you shot
them?
A: They were lying down.
Q: Why were they lying down?
A: They was mortally wounded.
Q: How were you feeling at that time?
A: I was mortally upset, scared,
because of the
briefing
we had the day before.
Q: Were you crying?
A: I imagine I was....
Daniel then asked Meadlo about the massacre at the
eastern
drainage
ditch, and in the same almost emotionless voice,
Meadlo recounted the
story,
telling the jury that Calley fired from 250 to 300
bullets into the
ditch.
One exchange was remarkable:
Q: What were the children in the
ditch doing?
A: I don't know.
Q: Were the babies in their mother's
arms?
A: I guess so.
Q: And the babies moved to attack?
A: I expected at any moment they were
about to
make a
counterbalance.
Q: Had they made any move to attack?
A: No.
At the end of Meadlo's testimony, Aubrey Daniel
rested the
for the
prosecution[MEADLO'S
TESTIMONY].
The defense strategy had two main thrusts. One
was to
suggest
that the stress of combat, the fear of being in an
area thought to be
thick
with the enemy, sufficiently impaired Calley's
thinking that he should
not be found guilty of premeditated murder for his
killing of
civilians.
Latimer relied on New York psychiatrist Albert LaVerne
to advance this
defense argument [LAVERNE
TESTIMONY]. The second argument
of the defense was
that
Calley was merely following orders: that Captain
Ernest Medina had
ordered
that civilians found in My Lai 4 be killed and was the
real villain in
the tragedy.
On February 23, 1971, William Calley took the
stand.
He told
the
jury he couldn't remember a single army class on the
Geneva Convention,
but that he did know he could be court-martialed for
refusing to obey
an
order. He testified that Medina had said the
night before that
there
would be no civilians in My Lai, only the enemy.
He said that
while
he was in the village, Medina called and asked why he
hadn't "wasted"
the
civilians yet. He admitted to firing into a
ditch full of
Vietnamese,
but claimed that others were already firing into the
ditch when he
arrived.
Calley said, "I felt then--and I still do-- that I
acted as directed, I
carried out my orders, and I did not feel wrong in
doing so" [CALLEY
TESTIMONY].
Ernest Medina was called as a witness of the
court.
Medina
directly
contradicted Calley's testimony. Medina said he
was asked at the
briefing on March 15 whether "we kill women and
children," and--
looking
straight at Calley behind the defense table--he said
to the GIs "No,
you
do not kill women and children...Use common
sense." At the close
of his testimony, Medina saluted Judge Kennedy, then
marched past
Calley's
table without glancing at him [MEDINA
TESTIMONY].
It was time for summations. George Latimer for
the
defense
argued
that Medina was lying about not giving the order to
kill civilians,
that
Medina knew perfectly well what was going on in the
village, and now he
and the army were trying to make Calley a scapegoat[LATIMER
SUMMATION]. Aubrey Daniel for the
prosecution asked
the
jury who will speak for the children of My Lai.
He pointed out
that
Calley as a U. S. officer took an oath not to kill
innocent women and
children,
and told the jury it is "the conscience of the United
States Army"[DANIEL
SUMMATION].
After thirteen days of deliberations, the longest in
U. S.
court-martial
history, the jury returned its verdict: guilty of
premeditated murder
on
all specifications. After hearing pleas on the
issue of
punishment,
jury head Colonel Clifford Ford pronounced
Calley's sentence: "To
be confined at hard labor for the length of your
natural life; to be
dismissed
from the service; to forfeit all pay and allowances."
IV.
Opinion polls showed that the public overwhelmingly
disapproved of
the
verdict in the Calley case [OPINION
POLLS]. President Nixon ordered
Calley removed from
the
stockade (after spending a single weekend there) and
placed under house
arrest. He announced that he
would
review the whole decision. Nixon's action
prompted Aubrey Daniel
to write a long and angry letter in which he told the
President that
"the
greatest tragedy of all will be if political
expediency dictates the
compromise
of such a fundamental moral principle as the inherent
unlawfulness of
the
murder of innocent persons"[AUBREY
LETTER]. On November 9, 1974, the
Secretary of
the Army announced that William Calley would be
paroled. In 1976,
Calley married. In August 2009, while speaking
at a Kiwanis
meeting in his hometown of Columbus, Georgia,
66-year-old Calley
offered a public apology for his role at My Lai:
"Not a day goes
by that I do not feel remorse for what happened that
day at My
Lai. I am very sorry."
My Lai mattered. Two weeks after the Calley
verdict
was
announced,
the Harris Poll reported for the first time that a
majority of
Americans
opposed the war in Viet Nam. The My Lai episode
caused the
military
to re-evaluate its training with respect to the
handling of
noncombatants.
Commanders sent troops in the Desert Storm operation
into battle with
the
words, "No My Lais-- you hear?"