On March 16, 1968 the
angry and frustrated men of Charlie Company, 11th Brigade, Americal
Division entered the village of My Lai. "This is what you've been
waiting for -- search and destroy -- and you've got it," said their
superior officers. A short time later the killing began. When news
of the atrocities surfaced, it sent shockwaves through the US
political establishment, the military's chain of command, and an
already divided American public.
My Lai lay in the South Vietnamese district of Son My, a heavily
mined area of Vietcong entrenchment. Numerous members of Charlie
Company had been maimed or killed in the area during the preceding
weeks. The agitated troops, under the command of Lt. William Calley,
entered the village poised for engagement with the elusive Vietcong.
As the "search and destroy" mission unfolded it soon degenerated
into the massacre of over 300 apparently unarmed civilians including
women, children, and the elderly. Calley ordered his men to enter
the village firing, though there had been no report of opposing fire.
According to eyewitness reports offered after the event, several old
men were bayoneted, praying women and children were shot in the back
of the head, and at least one girl was raped, and then killed. For
his part, Calley was said to have rounded up a group of the
villagers, ordered them into a ditch, and mowed them down in a fury
of machine gun fire.
Word of the massacre did not reach the American public until
November of 1969, when journalist Seymour Hersh published a story
detailing his conversations with ex-GI and Vietnam veteran, Ron
Ridenhour. Ridenhour learned of the events at My Lai from members of
Charlie Company who had been there. Before speaking with Hersh, he
had appealed to Congress, the White House, and the Pentagon to
investigate the matter. The military investigation resulted in
Calley's being charged with murder in September 1969 -- a full two
months before the Hersh story hit the streets.
As the gruesome details of the massacre reached the American
public serious questions arose concerning the conduct of American
soldiers in Vietnam.
Calley (his mother strategically placed behind)
Calley, an unemployed college dropout, had managed to graduate from
Officer's Candidate School at Fort Benning, Georgia, in 1967. At his
trial, Calley testified that he was ordered by Captain Ernest Medina
to kill everyone in the village of My Lai. Still, there was only
enough photographic and recorded evidence to convict Calley, alone,
of murder. He was sentenced to life in prison, but was released in
1974, following many appeals. After being issued a dishonorable
discharge, Calley entered the insurance business.
EXCERPTS:
"By the time Calley and men sat down to lunch,
they had rounded up and slaughtered around 500 unarmed civilians.
Within those few hours, members of Charlie Company had 'fooled
around' and laughed as they sodomized and raped women, ripped
vaginas open with knives, bayoneted civilians, scalped corpses, and
carved "C Company" or the ace of spades onto their chests,
slaughtered animals, and torched hooches. Other soldiers had wept
openly as they fired on crowds of unresisting old men, women,
children, and babies."
—description of the
My Lai massacre (16 March 1968). From An Intimate History of
Killing, p 160.
"Sergeant Michael McCuster
recalled one time when his Marine platoon went into a village [in
Vietnam] and gang-raped a woman (the last man to rape her, shot
her). He recalled that their sergeant 'took no part in the raid. It
was against his morals. So instead of telling his squad not to do
it, because they wouldn't listen to him anyway, the sergeant went
into another side of the village and just sat and stared bleakly at
the ground.'"
—from An Intimate
History of Killing, p 200. McCuster's quote is from Vietnam
Veterans Against the War, The Winter Soldier Investigation
(1972), p 29.
"I
could watch a burned infant trying to nurse from its dead mother's
breast, see young men with their faces blown away, witness a boy
deliberately gutted...and never protest."
—reporter Richard
Boyle in Vietnam. The Flower of the Dragon: The Breakdown of the
US Army in Vietnam by Richard Boyle (San Francisco, 1972), p.
22. Reprinted in An Intimate History of Killing by Joanna
Bourke (Basic Books, 1999), p 199.
The first two platoons of Charlie Company, still unfired upon,
entered the hamlet. Behind them, still in the rice paddy, were the
third platoon and Captain [Ernest] Medina's command post. [Lt.
William] Calley and some of his men walked into the plaza area in
the southern part of the hamlet. None of the people was running away;
they knew that U.S. soldiers would assume that anyone running was a
Viet Cong and would shoot to kill. There was no immediate sense of
panic. The time was about 8 a.m. Grzesik and his fire team were a
few meters north of Calley; they couldn't see each other because of
the dense vegetation. Grzesik and his men began their usual job of
pulling people from their homes, interrogating them, and searching
for Viet Cong. The villagers were gathered up, and Grzesik sent
Meadio, who was in his unit, to take them to Calley for further
questioning. Grzesik didn't see Meadlo again for more than an hour.
Some of Calley's men thought it was breakfast time as they walked
in; a few families were gathered in front of their homes cooking
rice over a small fire. Without a direct order, the first platoon
also began rounding up the villagers. There was still no sniper fire,
no sign of a large enemy unit. Sledge remembered thinking that "if
there were VC around, they had plenty of time to leave before we
came in. We didn't tiptoe in there."
The killings began without warning. Harry Stanley told the C.I.D.
that one young member of Calley's platoon took a civilian into
custody and then "pushed the man up to where we were standing and
then stabbed the man in the back with his bayonet. . . . The man
fell to the ground and was gasping for breath: The GI then killed
him with another bayonet thrust or by shooting him with a rifle. . .
. There was so many people killed that day it is hard for me to
recall exactly how some of the people died." The youth next "turned
to where some soldiers were holding another forty- or fifty-year-old
man in custody." He "picked this man up and threw him down a well.
Then [he] pulled the pin from a M26 grenade and threw it in after
the man." Moments later Stanley saw "some old women and some little
children--fifteen or twenty of them--in a group around a temple
where some incense was burning. They were kneeling and crying and
praying, and various soldiers . . . walked by and executed these
women and children by shooting them in the head with their rifles.
The soldiers killed all fifteen or twenty of them. . . ." There were
few physical protests from the people; about eighty of them were
taken quietly from their homes and herded together in the plaza area.
A few hollered out, "No VC. No VC." But that was hardly unexpected.
Calley left Meadio, Boyce and a few others with the responsibility
of guarding the group. "You know what I want you to do with them, "
he told Meadlo. Ten minutes later--about 8:15 a.m.--he returned and
asked, "Haven't you got rid of them yet? I want them dead." Radioman
Sledge, who was trailing Calley, heard the officer tell Meadlo to "waste
them." Meadlo followed orders: "We stood about ten to fifteen feet
away from them and then he [Calleyl started shooting them. Then he
told me to start shooting them. I started to shoot them. So we went
ahead and killed them. I used more than a whole clip--used four or
five clips." There are seventeen Ml6 bullets in each clip. Boyce
slipped away, to the northern side of the hamlet, glad he hadn't
been asked to shoot. Women were huddled against children, vainly
trying to save them. Some continued to chant, "No VC." Others simply
said, "No. No. No. . . ."
Haeberle noticed a man and two small children walking toward a
group of GIs: "They just kept walking toward us . . . you could hear
the little girl saying, 'No, no. . . .' All of a sudden the GIs
opened up and cut them down." Later he watched a machine gunner
suddenly open fire on a group of civilians--women, children and
babies--who had been collected in a big circle. "They were trying to
run. I don't know how many got out." He saw a GI with an M 16 rifle
fire at two young boys walking along a road. The older of the two--about
seven or eight years old fell over the first to protect him. The GI
kept on firing until both were dead. Now it was nearly nine o'clock
and all of Charlie Company was in My Lai 4. Most families were being
shot inside their homes, or just outside the doorways. Those who had
tried to flee were crammed by GIs into the many bunkers built
throughout the hamlet for protection--once the bunkers became filled,
hand grenades were lobbed in. . . .
Carter recalled that some GIs were shouting and yelling during
the massacre: "The boys enjoyed it. When someone laughs and jokes
about what they're doing, they have to be enjoying it." A GI said, "Hey,
I got me another one. " Another said, "Chalk up one for me." Even
Captain Medina was having a good time, Carter thought: "You can tell
when someone enjoys their work." Few members of Charlie Company
protested that day. For the most part, those who didn't like what
was going on kept their thoughts to themselves. . . .
At one point in the morning one of the members of Medina's CP
joined in the shooting. "A woman came out of a hut with a baby in
her arms and she was crying," Carter told the C.I.D. "She was crying
because her little boy had been in front of their hut and.....
someone had killed the child by shooting it." When the mother came
into view, one of Medina's men "shot her with an Ml 6 and she fell.
When she fell, she dropped the baby." The GI next "opened up on the
baby with his Ml 6." The infant was also killed. . . .
Those Vietnamese who were not killed on the spot were being
shepherded by the first platoon to a large drainage ditch at the
eastern end of the hamlet. After Grzesik left, Meadlo and a few
others gathered seven or eight villagers in one hut and were
preparing to toss in a hand grenade when an order came to take them
to the ditch. There he found Calley, along with a dozen other first
platoon members, and perhaps seventy-five Vietnamese, mostly women,
old men and children. Calley then turned his attention back to the
crowd of Vietnamese and issued an order: "Push all those people in
the ditch." Three or four GIs complied. Calley struck a woman with a
rifle as he pushed her down. Stanley remembered that some of the
civilians "kept trying to get out. Some made it to the top. . . ."
Calley began the shooting and ordered Meadlo to join in. Meadlo told
about it later: "So we pushed our seven to eight people in with the
big bunch of them. And so I began shooting them all. So did Mitchell,
Calley... I guess I shot maybe twenty-five or twenty people in the
ditch . . . men, women and children. And babies." Some of the GIs
switched from automatic fire to single-shot to conserve ammunition.
Herbert Carter watched the mothers "grabbing their kids and the kids
grabbing their mothers. I didn't know what to do."
Calley then turned again to Meadlo and said, "Meadlo, we've got
another job to do." Meadlo didn't want any more jobs. He began to
argue with Calley. Sledge watched Meadlo once more start to sob.
Calley turned next to Robert Maples and said, "Maples, load your
machine gun and shoot these people." Maples replied, as he told the
C.I.D., "I'm not going to do that." He remembered that "the people
firing into the ditch kept reloading magazines into their rifles and
kept firing into the ditch and then killed or at least shot everyone
in the ditch." William C. Lloyd of Tampa, Florida, told the C.I.D.
that some grenades were also thrown into the ditch. Dennis Conti
noticed that "a lot of women had thrown themselves on top of the
children to protect them, and the children were alive at first. Then
the children who were old enough to walk got up and Calley began to
shoot the children."
Some GIs. . . didn't hesitate to use their bayonets. Nineteen-year-old
Nguyen Thi Ngoc Tuyet watched a baby trying to open her slain
mother's blouse to nurse. A soldier shot the infant while it was
struggling with the blouse, and the slashed at it with his bayonet.
Tuyet also said she saw another baby hacked to death by GIs wielding
their bayonets. Le Tong, a twenty-eight-year-old rice farmer,
reported seeing one woman raped after GIs killed her children .
Nguyen Khoa, a thirty-seven- year-old peasant, told of a thirteen-year-old
girl who was raped before being killed. GIs then attacked Khoa's
wife, tearing off her clothes. Before they could rape her, however,
Khoa said, their six-year-old son, riddled with bullets, fell and
saturated her with blood. The GIs left her alone . . . .
In the early afternoon the men of Charlie Company mopped up to
make sure all the houses and goods in My Lai 4 were destroyed.
Medina ordered the underground tunnels in the hamlet blown up; most
of them already had been blocked. Within another hour My Lai 4 was
no more: its red-brick buildings demolished by explosives, its huts
burned to the ground, its people dead or dying.
Michael Bernhardt later summarized the day: "We met no resistance
and I only saw three captured weapons. We had no casualties. It was
just like any other Vietnamese village--old papa-sans, women and
kids. As a matter of fact, I don't remember seeing one military-age
male in the entire place, dead or alive. The only prisoner I saw was
in his fifties." By nightfall the Viet Cong were back in My Lai 4,
helping the survivors bury the dead. It took five days. Most of the
funeral speeches were made by the Communist guerrillas. Nguyen Bat
was not a Communist at the time of the massacre, but the incident
changed his mind. "After the shooting," he said, "all the villagers
became Communists."
When Army investigators reached the barren area in November,
1969, in connection with the My Lai probe in the United States, they
found mass graves at three sites, as well as a ditch full of bodies.
It was estimated that between 450 and 500 people--most of them women,
children and old men--had been slain and buried there.
Excerpted from My Lai 4: A Report on the
Massacre and Its Aftermath (New York: Random House, 1970),
48-75.
