nineteen sixty-eight started with chaos. On January 30–31, tracers from heavy artillery fire streaked across the dark sky and the ground shook from the blasts of shells. North Vietnamese Army (NVA) and National Liberation Front (Viet Cong) forces had launched an offensive, a full-scale assault on South Vietnam that violated the traditional truce celebrating the Lunar New Year, known as Tet. The attack raised serious questions about White House assurances that it had turned the corner in Vietnam. Opposition to the war had escalated in the United States over the previous few months, leading the Lyndon Johnson administration to pursue an aggressive public relations campaign, intended to restore faith in the war effort by forecasting imminent victory. But Communist strategists made a mockery of this optimism by engineering a massive operation that shattered White House credibility. Nineteen Viet Cong sappers armed with explosives blew a hole in the wall of the U.S. embassy in Saigon and invaded its grounds, killing and wounding several Americans, whose bloody images appeared in newsreels and photographs all over the world. The U.S. Marines only regained control of the complex the next morning after a seven-hour firefight.
The Communist offensive had spread simultaneously across South Vietnam, hitting nearly all forty-four provincial capitals—including Quang Ngai City, a small settlement in the northern sector of Quang Ngai Province that had become the gateway to Viet Cong territory. A strong counterattack by the government’s ARVN (Army of the Republic of Vietnam) forces soon drove the seriously depleted Viet Cong units from the city, leaving them vulnerable to attack during their retreat, yet able to escape because the region was under ARVN jurisdiction, and it refused either to give chase or to permit Americans to enter what they called in wartime slang “Indian country.”
Situated a mere six miles away, along the South China Sea and just below the Batangan Peninsula, was a Viet Cong stronghold known to Americans as “Pinkville,” because of the distinctive coloring on U.S. Army maps that signified a thickly populated area. The commander of 24 Corps, Lieutenant General Melvin Zais, declared Pinkville a vital part of the three most dangerous provinces south of Da Nang—“the birthplace of the Viet Minh, and now the Viet Cong. You find mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, grandmothers, and grandfathers a part of this insurgent movement.”1
Located in Pinkville was the coastal fishing village of My Khe (known to Americans as My Lai 1), which allegedly housed the headquarters of the Viet Cong’s fabled 48th Local Force Battalion. Farther inland were nearly four hundred Vietnamese living in the reputed Viet Cong hotspot of My Lai 4, one of several subhamlets in Son My Village that protected Pinkville’s western flank. Tet made Pinkville the focal point of U.S. military action in this bitterly contested area.2
The Tet Offensive is the backdrop to the tale of two U.S. soldiers stationed in Vietnam: Captain Ernest Medina and William Calley, a young second lieutenant and platoon leader under his command. Medina was a ten-year veteran and Latino who had built a successful career in an Anglo-dominated officer corps after graduating fourth in his class of two hundred from Officer Candidate School (OCS). Following two tours in Germany and one in Fort Riley, Kansas, he trained at Schofield Barracks in Hawaii in preparation for assuming command of Charlie Company of the 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry Brigade, in late December 1966 at the age of thirty. Success at his new post virtually assured him of promotion to major and a long career in the service. Calley, for his part, had compiled a far less impressive record, joining the company in Hawaii in mid-September of 1967 after graduating from OCS at Fort Benning, Georgia, in the bottom quarter of his class and without knowing how to read a map or use a compass.3
Medina was a highly respected officer from New Mexico, where his father worked on a farm and his mother had died of cancer when he was less than a year old. Moving to Colorado to live with his grandparents, Medina spent his last five teenage years with the National Guard before joining the army at twenty. Stern but fair, he bore down on the raw recruits he commanded in Hawaii, molding them into the best company in the battalion. “Mad Dog,” as Medina became known, drove his men so hard that they won numerous awards in camp.4
Calley was born in 1943 and raised in an affluent neighborhood in Miami, where he lived with his parents and three sisters in a two-story stucco house. Weighing less than 130 pounds and quite short—five foot three—he did not stand out. Yet he had a number of friends and appeared to blend in well. Nicknamed “Rusty” due to his reddish hair, Calley occasionally got into trouble but had no criminal record or history of violence and never used drugs.
Then his life took a downward turn. His father developed diabetes, and his mother was stricken with cancer. The family lost its construction business and had to give up its Miami home and move to its vacation cabin in North Carolina. The young Calley not only switched schools and lost friends, but he split his high school years between military school and public school when he ultimately returned to Miami to live and graduated in the bottom quarter of his class in 1962. Afterward, he entered nearby Palm Beach Junior College, flunking out in a single year with four Fs, one D, and two Cs. The army provided the chance for a new direction in life, but it rejected him because of hearing problems. All alone, twenty-one, he drifted from one small job to another—including bellhop, salesman, short-order cook, car washer, dishwasher, railroad conductor on a freight train, and insurance company investigator.5
Calley was going nowhere in the summer of 1966 when he came to the turning point in his life while job hunting in San Francisco: Two letters from his draft board caught up to him, ordering him back to Miami’s Selective Service Office for a reassessment of the army’s rejection of him two years earlier. Already in violation of the law for not reporting earlier, he immediately began the long drive home, but his car broke down in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and he had less than five dollars in his pocket. “What am I going to do?” Calley asked the sergeant at the army’s local recruitment office in Albuquerque. “You enlist.” Calley called his home induction center, which agreed not to draft him if he joined the army—which he did.6
Calley had never held a position of authority or shown any sign of leadership qualities, but his demeanor changed drastically in the army. After eight weeks of basic training at Fort Bliss, Texas, he attended clerical school at Fort Lewis in Washington State, where he did well, before entering OCS at Fort Benning in response to the army’s urgent need for junior officers in Vietnam. The Citadel, West Point, and the Virginia Military Institute had been unable to fill the growing demand, and the Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) had fallen out of favor on many college campuses. The army immediately needed more recruits from OCS—which opened the door to Calley.
At Fort Benning, in an accelerated training program at Infantry School, Calley learned how to attack while never mastering the other part of officer training: how to convince an army of “grunts” (slang for infantrymen), averaging under twenty years of age—younger than those who had fought in either of the world wars or Korea—to follow his orders in battle. As one of his commanding officers put it, Calley lacked both “command presence and command voice,” liabilities that dogged him throughout his time in uniform.7
Calley became mesmerized by his teacher at OCS, a rough hulk of a sergeant clad in gym shorts and T-shirt who demonstrated the art of killing without a weapon. While future commanders sat in rapt attention, the sergeant selected a young soldier from the group, gruffly called him to the front, and promptly kicked him in the kidney. As the soldier rolled on the ground in agony, Calley apparently was appalled and transfixed.8
With the first man staggering back into the group and another “volunteer” warily taking his place, the sergeant stood ready with another demonstration. This one he “really kicked, or he flipped … with karate and WHAM,” Calley related years later to journalist John Sack. The sergeant would “stomp” on the soldier “right between the eyes: pretend to, and push his nose right into his brain. Or stomp on his solar plexus: his ribcage, to push splinters into his lungs. And then stomp on his heart to smash it.”9
The sergeant then taught them how to kill silently with a garrote, readily available in Vietnam in the form of a jungle vine to wrap around the enemy’s neck. A knife or bayonet created noise, he warned. “Don’t slit a man’s throat if you don’t want a sound: an ughughugh sucking sound, and don’t stab a man in the back anytime. A back has so many muscles,” he emphasized with a haunting sincerity, that “you’ll never get a bayonet back out.” The best place to stab the enemy from behind was down through the shoulder, “the left shoulder, preferably, where the heart is, that’s how to kill someone best.”10
This was combat Audie Murphy style, Calley thought in recalling the most decorated combat soldier of World War II and a massive box office draw in the Hollywood action movies of the 1950s—“Kick in the door, run in the hooch, give it a good burst—kill. And get a big kill ratio in Vietnam. Get a big kill count.”11 Murphy starred in more than forty movies, many of them violence-ridden Westerns. His most popular movie was To Hell and Back, the story of his life, which appeared in 1955 when Calley was a boy of twelve.
After graduating from OCS ranked 120 in a class of 156, Calley joined Charlie Company, knowing that basic training had been the first stop on the road to Vietnam. In preparation for his tour of duty, Calley took a class called Vietnam Social Environment, which focused on the culture and history of its people, and he attended Jungle Warfare School, where instructors taught guerrilla tactics and the treatment of noncombatants. He and other soldiers in Vietnam were required to carry two cards, the “Nine Rules” and “The Enemy in Your Hands,” both calling for humanitarian treatment of civilians and captives. Americans were guests of the Vietnamese and were to treat everyone, including and especially women, with respect while avoiding “loud, rude, or unusual behavior.”12
On the day before Calley left for Vietnam, the instructor selected him to deliver a three-minute orientation titled “Vietnam Our Host.” “Oh god, what a farce that was,” he declared years later. With the men horseshoed around him on the floor and visibly bored, he shouted, “Wake up! We’re going to Vietnam! Wake up! Because it’s our host—” He then read the “Do’s” and “Don’t’s” of soldierly behavior in Vietnam to his non-listening comrades. “Do not insult the women. Do not assault the women.” And above all, “Be polite.”13
A vast body of international law covered guidelines—the rules of engagement—for dealing with both combatants and noncombatants in war, but few trainees or officers were familiar with or understood its intricacies. First Platoon staff sergeant and squad leader L. G. Bacon was an experienced military man who served under Calley in Vietnam and later provided an army inquiry valuable insights into what information reached the GIs and whether it had an impact on their behavior. After more than ten years in the army, he could not remember a single instance in which he and his men underwent meaningful training on the rules of land warfare. They learned about the proper handling of prisoners of war but received little guidance on the treatment of civilians and what to do if they witnessed war atrocities.14
The situation was no different with Medina. Though the leader of Charlie Company, he, too, had never seen a copy of the rules of engagement, nor had he read anything about the treatment of detainees, Viet Cong or otherwise. In a one-day orientation in Vietnam, he received verbal directives to evacuate civilians or move them toward friendly forces. He learned to yell “Dung lai” (stop) in the event that an unarmed Vietnamese tried to run away. If that did not work, he could fire a warning shot. Then he could shoot to disable. And he was under instructions not to shoot women and children.15 Beyond these basic directives, Medina and his men would have to improvise in the heat of combat.
Even if the soldiers and commanders had received proper instruction, the directives were subject to flexible interpretation. Article 4 of the Hague Convention of 1907 on the Laws and Customs of War on Land, for example, appeared to clarify proper wartime behavior but was ambiguous. All “personal belongings, except arms, horses, and military papers,” remained the property of prisoners of war. But what about rice or other items that were potentially helpful to the enemy? Article 23, furthermore, declared it illegal to confiscate or destroy enemy property but included an exception that would have enormous ramifications—unless “demanded by the necessities of war.” What “necessities of war” meant, of course, was a matter of conjecture. Article 25 prohibited the “attack or bombardment” of undefended homes or buildings. Yet what constituted a defended bunker or place of refuge that made it open to attack? Article 28 prohibited the “pillage of a town or place,” and yet, as with the property stipulations mentioned above, what if the items in question were valuable to the enemy? Where was the line between confiscation and “pillage”?16 These exceptions made the guidelines virtually meaningless.
The rules of engagement were the U.S. military’s attempt to adhere to the Nuremberg principles of 1946, set out during the German war crimes trials. Among their assertions was the stipulation that a person following an order of either his government or a superior officer was not thereby freed of his “responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him.” Article 6 of the charter of the Nuremberg Tribunal contained a list of war crimes that included “murder or ill-treatment of prisoners of war” and “plunder of public or private property, wanton destruction of cities, towns, or villages, or devastation not justified by military necessity.”17
The United States was a signatory nation to the Geneva Conventions of 1949, which upheld these same principles. Article 3 assured humane treatment to persons not participating in the hostilities, including enemy forces who had put down their weapons. At no time was it acceptable to commit murder or to torture, mutilate, humiliate, or degrade detainees. The Geneva Conventions also required providing medical assistance to the sick and injured.18
Aside from the rules of engagement and the Geneva Conventions, the U.S. Army Field Manual 27-10 of July 1956 followed international law in providing commanding officers with a detailed explanation of acceptable combat behavior. Titled The Law of Land Warfare, the manual was a revised and expanded version of the War Department’s pamphlet Rules of Land Warfare, issued in October 1940. According to the 1956 manual, American military personnel were to protect “both combatants and noncombatants from unnecessary suffering” by safeguarding “certain fundamental human rights of persons who fall into the hands of the enemy.” Military needs did not relieve the soldier of legal obligations. “Every violation of the law of war is a war crime,” reads section 499.19
Perhaps the most far-reaching part of the Army Field Manual was section 501, which appeared to follow the so-called Yamashita Principle. In the Japanese war crimes trials following World War II, the American Military Tribunal sentenced General Tomoyuki Yamashita to death for crimes committed by his soldiers in the Philippines. Even though the defense argued that Yamashita was not personally aware of his men’s actions, the key to the decision was the prosecution’s claim that he was involved in a series of similar crimes committed under the supervision of Japanese officers and NCOs under his command. His headquarters were adjacent to or within two POW camps in which a number of atrocities took place. Moreover, Yamashita personally ordered the executions of two thousand Filipinos in Manila suspected of being guerrillas and was the source of a number of orders to execute pro-American Filipinos. These violations were so widespread, the tribunal concluded, that Yamashita must have been responsible. The defense appealed his conviction, but the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the decision in 1946, and he was hanged.20
The Yamashita trial did not establish strict liability, as is popularly believed, but it did hold commanders responsible for controlling their soldiers. It is not clear whether the military tribunal decided there was sufficient circumstantial evidence to prove Yamashita had actual knowledge of the crimes and planned and ordered them, or that he knew about them and did nothing to stop them. It is clear, however, that the tribunal determined that a commander must make every effort to prevent war crimes even if they were not responsible for all crimes by subordinates. The issue was not what he knew but what he should have known concerning violations from reports, and then whether he failed to investigate or take corrective action. Were this determined, he shared the guilt of the principals who committed the crimes. Dereliction of duty was criminal negligence.21
According to the Army Field Manual, should troops become engaged in “massacres and atrocities” against noncombatants, the commander giving the orders “may” be as responsible as the perpetrators. He could not plead ignorance of a violation. He also was responsible if he had “actual knowledge, or should have knowledge” from reports indicating that his troops either committed or were about to commit war crimes and did nothing to stop them. Furthermore, section 507 declared that troop commanders must guarantee punishment for war crimes committed by their forces.22
Section 509b of The Law of Land Warfare seemed less clear about whether a soldier had the right to disobey what appeared to be an illegal order. The army asserted that its forces must “obey only lawful orders but opened the door to interpretation by adding three qualifications: that no one could expect soldiers in war to determine the legality of an order, that rules of war are sometimes subject to dispute, and that no one could justify a war crime committed as an act of retaliation.23
Lest uncertainty remain, the commanding general of the III Marine Amphibious Force of MACV (Military Assistance Command, Vietnam) included on his distribution list further directives on reporting suspected war crimes. Anyone knowing or hearing about an alleged war crime was to immediately notify his commanding officer. The commanding general would select an officer to submit a “report of investigation.”24
These laws and regulations did not particularly preoccupy Calley, whose priority, as with most if not all American soldiers in Vietnam, was personal security, not protecting civilians in combat areas. What he learned at base camp did not relate to treatment of the enemy but to warnings about them, generally referred to as “gooks,” “dinks,” “slopes,” and “slants.” Treat every Vietnamese as an enemy, including the children. According to Calley, during his testimony at his court martial, the children were “even more dangerous” than adults. They warned of Americans arriving, threw hand grenades, and gathered and distributed mines and booby traps—at times planting the mines. No one at OCS spoke of “innocent civilians” in Vietnam, he explained. The Viet Cong made the decision to hide among the populace, making it nearly impossible to distinguish between civilian and combatant. Calley used the words “fear,” “hatred,” “hostility,” and “frustration” to describe his inability to identify the enemy. He always felt uneasy about the villagers.25
The countryside belonged to the Viet Cong, Calley emphasized to Sack. “Be sharp! On guard! As soon as you think these people won’t kill you, ZAP! In combat you haven’t friends! You have enemies!” He promised himself, “I’ll act as if I’m never secure. As if everyone in Vietnam would do me in. As if everyone’s bad.”26
He would not be alone in this belief. As Vietnam veteran and popular writer Philip Caputo put it: where trust did not exist and body counts became the only yardstick of victory, the rule in the bush was, “If it’s dead and Vietnamese, it’s VC.”27
In A Rumor of War, the memoir of his marine experiences in Vietnam, published in 1977, Caputo confirmed Calley’s observations at his trial, noting how the stress of search-and-destroy missions in the jungle led to short tempers. The truth—that all Viet Cong were Vietnamese but not all Vietnamese were Viet Cong—was not readily apparent when both sides were Vietnamese. War “can arouse a psychopathic violence in men of seemingly normal impulses,” but the type of war waged in Vietnam deteriorated into an “absolute savagery” that was unlike any other conflict. American lives were at stake in an environment in which they could not be sure who or where the enemy was.28
It was unnerving to American soldiers to fight in Indian country with no battle lines, against a ghost-like guerrilla army without uniforms that hid among the populace and employed a labyrinth of jungle trails and tunnels. Anyone Vietnamese was responsible for their plight—or so they came to believe during endless hours in the heat, humidity, and incessant pounding rain of the monsoon season.
Dry season was no better. Long patrols trudged forward, the soldiers with heavy backpacks that tugged in the opposite direction as they worried about whether their M-16 assault rifles, which frequently malfunctioned, would work at crunch time.29 And all this in temperatures that soared to more than a hundred degrees and humidity trailed not far behind. Sweat drenched their clothing and rolled off the sweatbands on their foreheads as they pressed forward through clouds of dust or groin-high grass or hacked through the bush with its towering bamboo and banana trees and wire-like wait-a-minute vines. Dense and razor-sharp elephant grass could rise up to fifteen feet in height, making it difficult to see more than three feet ahead.
In Vietnam, misery came in many forms for American soldiers like Calley and Medina. Whether during the advance or waiting in ambush in foxholes or brush, they fought a relentless war against flies, mosquitoes, fire ants, spiders, chiggers, centipedes, leeches, ticks, honeybees, rats, snakes, and every other pest of nature that walked, crawled, or flew. The monsoon season brought some relief from the stifling heat, but that was of little consolation to soldiers slogging through mud and muck while being hammered by the monotonous and seemingly unending rain. Massive flooding churned up scores of snakes, many of them poisonous, slithering amid a sticky, lava-like mud that bogged down everything and everyone in its path, particularly those already debilitated by trench foot, jungle rot, blackwater fever, malaria, and dysentery. Yet far worse than the pitiless environment was the stress of interminable, mind-numbing patrols, the so-called search-and-destroy operations that kept the soldiers in the bush for weeks, prey to all these afflictions, as well as mines, booby traps, and snipers.30
Calley and his comrades in arms hoped that basic training had prepared them for everything Vietnam could throw at them. After OCS, Calley entered six months of accelerated training at Fort Benning as a junior officer in mid-March 1967, where he felt confident he had learned the essentials of command. The gold bars on each shoulder attested to his qualifications for leading a platoon into battle.31
Medina for his part had hoped he had inherited a group of young men who knew how to kill with or without weapons, both in long-range and hand-to-hand fighting, and would obey orders without hesitation. Drill sergeant Kenneth Hodges helped to prepare the soldiers in Charlie Company for both types of fighting and never admitted to such a thing as an illegal order. To question a command in the heat of battle could cost the lives of fellow soldiers. Charlie Company had learned the two most fundamental rules of being a soldier: Shoot to kill and do not question orders. As Calley asserted to Sack, OCS and final training in Hawaii had taught him and others to kill.32
Charlie Company did not appear to be unique. Almost 90 percent of its non-commissioned officers (NCOs) had graduated from high school, which was slightly above the norm in the army. The soldiers’ ages ranged from eighteen to twenty-two, with the median at about twenty-two, and about half of them were African Americans or Latinos. Only about a dozen came from Robert McNamara’s pet program, Project 100,000, an attempt by the secretary of defense to rescue disadvantaged youths from the streets and put them in uniform. Fred Widmer, a high school graduate from Pittsburgh, proudly declared that he and his new comrades were “a cross-section of just your general, basic young people at that point in time. We were from all over the country. You know—East Coast, West Coast, blacks, whites, Mexicans—there was nothing special about us. We were just your common, ordinary teens… . Having grown up with parents that came from World War II and people that were in the Korean War and everything, being exposed to their generations, yeah, you felt it was basically your duty to go ahead and go to war.” Charlie Company was typical of most units in Vietnam, in which blacks and whites stayed separate, and it was composed of the usual blend of American youths, coming from cities as far east as Richmond, Virginia, and as far west as Portland, Oregon, along with many points in between, both small towns and farm areas north and south. This cross section of America cut across racial, ethnic, and religious lines, making the infantry company appear representative of the nation as a whole.33
On December 1, 1967, Charlie Company rose at four in the morning to depart from Hawaii on a chartered Pan American Airways flight, covering the 6,060 miles to Da Nang Air Base in South Vietnam, in about twelve hours. Not long afterward, the men were airlifted seventy-six miles south to their new home, Quang Ngai Province, a longtime hotbed of Viet Cong activity.34
Almost immediately, Lieutenant Calley’s relationship with Captain Medina became strained. Calley made every effort to impress him. In Hawaii he had grown to like and respect Medina: “A man would have to commission close to a half million officers before he had someone equal to Captain Medina,” Calley declared to John Sack in his as-told-to book. “A real leader.” That camaraderie, if it ever existed, rapidly disappeared. Within weeks of arriving in Vietnam, Medina routinely referred to him as “Lieutenant Shithead”—in front of the other soldiers.35
Calley had established a reputation for ineptitude early. On his first foray into the bush in mid-December 1967, he forgot to bring hand grenades and had to rush back to the ammunition center, where he had to uncrate them. Medina, as his men recollected, was livid over the delay. “Calley, I would relieve your ass in a goddamn second!” he threatened his junior lieutenant at one point, as recounted by Sack. On a nighttime ambush set up in a cornfield with no place to camouflage themselves, Calley heard rustling in the stalks sometime after midnight and suspected that the Viet Cong were sneaking up on them in the darkness. He panicked and called for a massive and continuous firing of yellow flares, which lit up the area for miles—not realizing the enemy could see them as well.
When Medina became aware of the lighted skyline, he phoned Calley: “Now what in the goddamn hell?”
“It’s a dark and rainy night and—”
“You nitwit!” Medina stormed. “You’re without a doubt the most stupid second lieutenant on the face of this earth!”
“Yes sir. I know sir. I’m stupid sir. What should I do?”
“Turn off them goddamn lights!”
Four hours later, dawn came with no further incident.36
According to most accounts, Calley seemed oblivious to the cutting remarks. Charlie Company, he boasted, again in his book with Sack, “was really made for war! We were mean! We were ugly!” With his rifle held low and his helmet pulled down, he thought, “This is my day! And these are my men! We’re rough and we’re tough, and Charlie’s here: Charging Charlie! To end this damned war tomorrow!”37
Others besides Medina were unsure of Calley and expressed their concerns to journalist Seymour Hersh. SP4 Robert Maples of Freehold, New Jersey, declared that Calley would do anything to make himself into a “hero” and a “good boy” in front of Medina. Another member of Charlie Company, Private Roy Wood of Richmond, Virginia, marveled that Calley had even made it through OCS: “He couldn’t read no darn map and a compass would confuse his ass.” The Peers Inquiry confirmed these assessments, declaring that Calley appeared to have been the only one of Medina’s three platoon leaders not referred to as a “nice guy” by his subordinates. “A little kid trying to play war,” observed SP4 Charles Hall from Columbus, Ohio—liked by few and hated by many.38
Another platoon member, PFC Michael Bernhardt from New York City, remembered sharing these concerns with his group. Soon after his assignment to Charlie Company, he declared years afterward, “I knew there was something wrong. You could smell it and feel it.” The men felt “no sense of community, no sense of duty or responsibility, no sense of pride.” Bernhardt recalled that Medina had difficulty controlling his troops. “They were just like a bunch of street thugs doing whatever they wanted to do.” Lacking discipline, they were “leaderless, directionless, armed to the teeth, and making up their own rules out there.” To them, Bernhardt sarcastically added, “the epitome of courage and manhood was going out and killing a bunch of people.”
Adding to this problem was what Bernhardt identified as the “three pillars” of the war effort. There was, he said, the “free-fire zone,” which meant the freedom to shoot anyone who moves; the “search-and-destroy mission,” which Bernhardt termed the “portable free-fire zone,” one you could “tote” wherever you went—“just another way to shoot anything that moves”; and, last, there was the body count, which in a war of attrition provided the chief means for “measuring the success or failure of whatever you’re doing.” Given these three elements of war in Vietnam, Bernhardt concluded, “It doesn’t take a genius to figure out how it’s going to end up.”39
Like Wood and others, Bernhardt detested Calley and was mystified that he had made it through OCS. Bernhardt remembered that, on one occasion in the field after Tet, he had just emerged from searching an underground bomb shelter when he saw Calley with his pants down and a woman kneeling before him while he held a .45 pistol to her head. “I really, really wanted to kill that guy but there were just too many guys around,” Bernhardt recalled. “I saw him as pure evil … rotten to the core.” If the men of Charlie Company “were kind of waiting for someone to tell them what the hell to do, to make some kind of moral judgment for them,” that someone was not Calley.40
On its arrival in Vietnam, Charlie Company merged into the newly formed Americal Division, a mixed division of three infantry brigades, the 11th, 196th, and 198th. They broke down into infantry battalions comprised of three companies in each, which in turn broke down into platoons and the platoons into squads. The brigades had once been part of Task Force Oregon, formed in the spring of 1967 as the first army unit to conduct operations in Quang Ngai Province. In late September, the army re-designated the unit as the 23rd, or Americal, Division, a name derived from a division formed during World War II when the American Army defended the French colonial island of New Caledonia in the South Pacific against a Japanese assault and then collaborated with the marine corps in the attack on Guadalcanal in October 1942. Americal in Vietnam would reinforce the marines in the northern provinces.41
Americal Division infantrymen proudly called themselves “Jungle Warriors” and were under the leadership of a rising star within the army, Major General Samuel Koster. Critics such as Michael Bernhardt, however, called the division a troubled and mongrelized collection of hoodlums who ignored regulations and were so disgruntled with their station that they worsened its already dysfunctional chain of command. Serious command and control issues stemmed from inadequate training and no leadership from top to bottom, which encouraged a lack of regard for Vietnamese civilians and a poor field record that led to the division’s deactivation in late 1971.42
Koster had his sights on becoming superintendent of West Point and felt it would help for him to have experience in commanding a division—even this one. Since he thought his tenure there would be temporary, he rarely talked with his staff and sought to avoid any questions about his leadership and promotional aspirations. Each day was preparation for his next step up the chain of command, in the tradition of MACV’s commander, General William Westmoreland, and other four-star generals.43
Koster’s stay with Americal proved especially problematic, because its headquarters were in South Vietnam’s most northern reaches, which were under Marine command, requiring him to report to a Marine general. Westmoreland’s vice-chief of staff, General Bruce Palmer, Jr., summed up Koster’s situation in an oral interview for the U.S. Army Military Institute some years afterward. It was “terribly difficult,” particularly in what was “perhaps the toughest part of Vietnam to fight in, ‘Indian Country’ that the Viet Cong had owned for generations.” Without much troop experience, Palmer added, “we gave the toughest job in Vietnam to our most inexperienced commander, who was least qualified to be a division commander.”44
Charlie Company’s timing set it up for disaster. It had arrived in South Vietnam at a touchy time—as noted, just before the Tet Offensive—and in a highly sensitive area. By the time it made it to My Lai 4, the region had earned its reputation as a Viet Cong hotspot and one of the most dangerous parts of Vietnam. Quang Ngai Province appeared serene, a scenic haven graced with silky white beaches brilliantly contrasted by the warm, turquoise waters of the South China Sea. Yet beneath this outward calm lay a sense of foreboding, as recalled by those who were there, in large part because of the presence of the Viet Cong. In mid-1967, the U.S. Army had launched its initial operation in the area with Task Force Oregon, whose architects claimed to have killed more than three thousand Viet Cong and rounded up another five thousand suspects by the end of the year. But this effort, as ambitious as it was, hardly made a dent in the enemy’s numbers, as Tet would show.45
Westmoreland had recognized soon after becoming MACV’s head on June 20, 1964, that one key to success in the war was persuading the local farmers not to help the Viet Cong. But he also was aware of the great divide between theory and practice. For example, he knew he could not guarantee the friendly farmer’s safety twenty-four hours a day. To win the war, Westmoreland insisted that he had to wear down the enemy and convince him of the impossibility of victory—which meant stepping up American firepower and leaving pacification of the countryside to the South Vietnamese. The injection of more firepower would of course result in more civilian casualties in the target areas and thereby interfere with pacification. By the end of 1967, in fact, U.S. soldiers had alienated the populace by destroying more than half of the province’s homes, killing a great many civilians, and forcing large numbers of peasants to seek refuge in Quang Ngai City. American firepower drove many Vietnamese into either helping or joining the Viet Cong in a “people’s war” against the outsider.46
Yet Washington’s policymakers failed to grasp the implications of what had become a war of attrition. The Vietnamese suffered as much as the Americans in these harsh surroundings, but attrition worked to their advantage against an outsider unfamiliar with the terrain. According to a Vietnamese tradition that traced back to the thirteenth century—to the guerrilla tactics employed by the revered leader Tran Hung Dao in repeatedly repelling Kublai Khan’s Mongol invaders—every Vietnamese would treat all intruders as the enemy.47
The American high command tried to reduce civilian casualties. Its aircraft dropped millions of leaflets on trouble spots, warning their inhabitants (most of whom could not read) of what was ahead, offering them the choice to leave and live as Vietnamese nationals or stay in their homes and die as Viet Cong supporters. Thus were the countryside and villages in the region turned into “free-fire zones” where, by definition, the only people remaining after an ordered evacuation had to be Viet Cong or their sympathizers and therefore legitimate targets. Yet in a battle of nomenclature, those who refused to leave and were injured or killed came to be called “collateral damage”—a euphemism perhaps indicating that the American military regarded the growing numbers of dead and wounded villagers as an acceptable cost of war. “No one has any feeling for the Vietnamese,” reported one young soldier from Texas. “The trouble is, no one sees the Vietnamese as people. They’re not people. Therefore, it doesn’t matter what you do to them.”48
Thus the deadly catch-22 of Vietnam faced Charlie Company and indeed all American soldiers in Vietnam: “collateral damage” was a phrase without meaning, since ultimately there was no way of distinguishing between innocent civilian and deadly foe.
The presence of children in war zones posed the most perplexing problem. Medina, for one, had been warned by an Australian adviser to be “extremely leery of children.” As late as December 1967 when Charlie Company arrived, the Americans remained sympathetic toward young people, but that sentiment was rapidly disappearing with the escalating violence and with the realization that the enemy did not distinguish between children and adults. Intelligence experts asked a telling question: “If there are a hundred kids in a village, where are the men?” Calley thought he had the answer. Vietnamese men, he told Sack, were “getting ready to zap us while we’re tied up talking to nice sweet kids.” Calley remembered that “intelligence had a VC code saying this was a VC tactic now. Intelligence told us, ‘Bust through. Get through to the goddamn village.’ You know? Those kids had been following us right to where we would RON [remain overnight]. And been telling the VC, ‘They’re there.’ ”49
Calley’s first encounter with the Vietnamese villagers led to what he remembered as a sharp disagreement with Medina, and it was over children. Calley expected his platoon to hate the children as much as he did. While he and his men guarded a bridge, hundreds of Vietnamese kids milled around, excitedly begging for gifts and offering to do laundry for pay. “All the men love them,” Calley declared with disgust. “Gave the kids candy, cookies, chewing gum, everything. Not me: I hated them.” OCS instructors had warned that kids put explosives in gasoline tanks or in GIs’ hooches. “I was afraid of prostitutes too … but I was more afraid of Vietnamese kids.”50
When Calley complained to Medina about the kids, the response came in the form of questions. Whether or not he shared Calley’s concerns, he had more important matters to deal with than childish squabbles between an officer and his men.51
“Are you an officer of the United States Army?” Medina asked Calley during a confrontation.
“Yes sir.”
“And can you control your men?”
“Yes sir.”
Calley had taken away a PFC’s stripe in an attempt to stop him from coddling the kids. Medina, however, refused to back him on this demotion. When Calley admitted that his tactics had not worked, Medina simply asked, “Why should I do the paperwork?” “And what do I do about those kids?” Calley asked Medina. “Well, you’re a lieutenant, aren’t you? And you can control your men?” The meeting was over. Calley rejoined his men, angrily telling them, “Someday, a little sonofabitch’s going to grenade you.” Seeing that his warning had no impact, he muttered to himself, as he told John Sack, “Let them learn.”52
Calley always maintained that he had learned a great deal in his first three months in Vietnam, both about his men and about himself, but little about the Vietnamese themselves. In an exchange recorded by Sack, Calley recalled a conversation with a prostitute he had befriended. “Susie”—employing pidgin English—had been trying to understand why Calley, and by extension all the Americans, were so against the Viet Cong.
“You no like VC. Why?”
They were bad, he responded.
“VC no hurt me, VC no hurt you. You nice to VC, he nice to you.”
The VC hurt the Vietnamese people, Calley insisted.
“Same same!” Susie exclaimed. “VC Vietnamese. Vietnamese VC.”
But the VC are Communists, he declared.
“No bitt,” she replied, saying she did not understand. Calley remembered that he was determined to drive the lesson home. “Even the Good Book, the Bible, says, ‘You shall destroy your enemy.’ I just knew, I must communicate with you. Or else you’re dead.”53
The Bible aside, the heart of the problem in Quang Ngai was the Viet Cong’s 48th Local Force Battalion, which reportedly operated out of My Lai 1 and numbered more than 250 strong. Since the fall of 1965, the Local Force had become legendary, masterfully avoiding full-scale engagements while conducting highly effective harassment actions from deep within Pinkville. Nguyen Duc Te, chief of the Census Clearance Center and a resident of Quang Ngai Province, went so far as to declare My Lai 4 a “combat village of the Communists.” When asked if the women and children were also Communists, a villager warned that all his relatives were Communists and that “if any friendly units from the government controlled area go to My Lai they would fight.” Both men and women gathered information for the Viet Cong and laid mines and booby traps. My Lai 4, Te insisted, was a “VC stronghold.”54
Nguyen Duc Te was part of MACV’s Phoenix Program (known in Vietnam as Phung Hoang, the mythical “All Seeing Bird”), created in 1967 and financially supported by the CIA to gather intelligence and make arrests aimed at destroying the Viet Cong infrastructure by means of Provincial Reconnaissance Units (PRUs), or People’s Action Teams. These PRUs became known for using any means necessary, including open-ended detentions, torture, and even assassination. Te’s agents in the Communist-controlled areas supplied the program’s American leaders with the names of many residents of My Lai 4, including women who worked with the Viet Cong and were on a “Black List” kept by the Quang Ngai Province Committee.55 Phoenix strategists soon set monthly quotas for “neutralizing” the Viet Cong, a euphemism for gathering intelligence by whatever methods their agents deemed effective.
Ta Linh Vien of the Census Grievance Center (secretly funded by the CIA) dealt with intelligence for the entire province and also thought My Lai 4 was, as he put it, “under VC control.” The center had officers working with the people in government-controlled areas, along with secret agents passing in and out of the Viet Cong–controlled areas or actually living there. The Viet Cong had planted a number of booby traps and mines around the settlement, which had inflicted horrific injuries on Vien’s agents with explosives detonated by women and small children. “My Lai is a combat village,” Vien claimed, where many ARVN had died. All people living there—women, children, the elderly—“have some weapon at home.” All the younger men fight with the Viet Cong.56
Vien further asserted that the Viet Cong had kept constant pressure on Quang Ngai City, using My Lai 4 and the whole of Son My Village as bases for mounting attacks in the surrounding area. Most if not all civilians were VC sympathizers or had relatives who worked for the Viet Cong and refused to leave despite warnings of personal harm. Vien insisted that the blacklist was meaningless, because all the inhabitants in the My Lai area worked for the VC. And, he added, the VC support group included children.57
The Saigon government’s intention—as everyone in Quang Ngai Province knew—was to launch a big “saturation area of operation,” as Vien put it. In December 1967 a helicopter repeatedly broadcasted warnings as it loudly flew around My Lai 4. Government agents assured its residents and others living in surrounding areas that those not supporting the Viet Cong who moved out and waited until the government’s forces had cleared the village before returning would receive assistance. Those who remained would be in “a free-fire zone.” By this point, nearly everyone understood what that term meant.58
U.S. military personnel thus drew the conclusion from Vietnamese and American intelligence sources that My Lai 4 was essentially an enemy bastion. The head of the U.S. intelligence team, Captain Eugene Kotouc, drew on Vietnamese contacts and other sources of information in declaring My Lai 4 a well-fortified bunker connected to a maze of tunnels. Medina’s radio-telephone operator (RTO), Fred Widmer, thought that most of the villages in this area were Viet Cong because of the large number of Russian, Communist Chinese, and NVA flags. When asked whether My Lai 4’s people sympathized with the Viet Cong, rifleman William Doherty spoke for many others in responding, “Yes, sir, definitely… . a hundred per cent.”59
Satisfied that My Lai 4 was a Viet Cong staging area, the U.S. Army command in Quang Ngai focused on destroying the village with a new outfit created on New Year’s Day of 1968: Task Force Barker, a contingent of five hundred soldiers put together from several units under the command of an eighteen-year veteran, Lieutenant Colonel Frank Barker. His men soon dubbed themselves “Barker’s Bastards” because of their alleged illegitimate status within the already bastardized Americal Division. The major components of this force were three companies—Alpha, Bravo, and Charlie—which would engage in search-and-destroy missions for the next ninety days in Pinkville as part of Operation Muscatine, named by Major General Koster after a town close to his home in Iowa. When Medina in turn announced the imminent offensive to his men, they cheered. They were finally going to destroy the Viet Cong’s 48th Local Force Battalion.60
Charlie Company’s initiation into guerrilla warfare proved so horrid that it dispelled any dreams of glory that Medina’s men might have had. In mid-January 1968, he sent his forces on a series of patrols in the hills of Quang Ngai Province, a hundred miles or so west of the heart of Pinkville. Private Eusebio Santellana of Texas was among these young grunts and later provided a graphic first-hand account of their introduction to the Viet Cong. A patrol had worked its way up a hill held by the enemy but did not return by nightfall. No one in his platoon ate or talked much that night. “We hadn’t had a loss. The hills were as quiet as a Texas desert.”61
Late in the night, they were startled by blood-chilling screams—“the vomit cry,” recalled Santellana. “Like death. But it didn’t stop. Not after one time. It kept going. It got weaker and weaker, but it held out. And it did make you want to shit right there in your tracks. The bastards!” Calley remembered the agonizing, gut-wrenching sound, magnified in the darkness as if the Viet Cong were using some amplifying device. He and the others could do nothing except wait for morning. No one slept. Several of the young men cried, their bodies shaking.62
At daylight, the first patrol in that area found the body of a tortured American soldier, a bloody hulk hanging from a pole. “Dink shitheads had skinned him alive,” asserted Santellana. The Viet Cong had peeled off most of his skin and then doused his wounds in salt water while forcing him to drink water to remain alive and scream even more. Calley noted that the Viet Cong had ripped the skin from all parts of his body except his face—even cutting off his penis. “What in the hell’s happening? What in the hell inhuman, crude, and—and God,” thought Calley. Nothing but death, death, and more death.63
“We never did find the others,” Santellana recalled. “God knows what the sonsofbitches did to them.” After a pause, he announced his decision: “Goddam, you had to kill.”64
This soldier’s grisly death and the presumed similar fates of his missing comrades quickly combined with the growing numbers of casualties from mines, booby traps, and snipers, to fuel an enraged and frustrated cry for revenge. But just as Task Force Barker was gearing up for action, Viet Cong and NVA forces suddenly attacked South Vietnam in the Tet Offensive of late January 1968.
At four in the morning of January 31, 1968, Charlie Company was bunked in base quarters on the outskirts of Quang Ngai City when they were awakened by a thunderous barrage on the airfield, jail, fort, and ARVN headquarters and training area. The Americal Division responded with mortar and rocket fire, lighting up the sky. Tet had begun, leading to a major American and South Vietnamese counteroffensive that helped to make 1968 the bloodiest year of the war. As part of this return assault, Task Force Barker’s mission took on added importance by going after the Viet Cong in Pinkville. Caught up in this vortex was Medina and his three platoon leaders, including Calley.65