Four

from his vantage point across the hedge, PFC Dennis Bunning did not fully realize that the killings had picked up almost in sync with the rising number of villagers. As had been made clear, no one had expected to find civilians in the village, but when great numbers of them filed out of hooches and bunkers, the soldiers followed what they understood to be Medina’s direct orders. Floyd Wright had said he argued that the company commander’s directives were unclear and the men “did not know what else to do with them.” Although not all soldiers joined in the killing, others excused their own participation by attesting that everyone took part. Sergeant Esequiel Torres nonetheless asserted in the CID report that “they had been under orders and there was not a man in the company who did not kill that day.” Thomas Partsch concurred with this assessment, tying the killings to Medina’s assurance that only Viet Cong would be in the village. When they came across increasing numbers of Vietnamese, he said, “the situation got out of hand” and “nobody took the initiative to stop the mass killing.”¹

I

Numerous soldiers in the 2nd Platoon admitted to witnessing or taking part in the killings, but no one claimed to have seen mass murders comparable to those committed by the 1st Platoon. The major difference between the two platoons’ approaches appears to have stemmed from the relationship between Captain Medina and Lieutenant Calley. The soldiers in Calley’s platoon had followed his instructions at the briefing to collect the villagers from individual hooches and deliver them to him, thinking he would send them to Quang Ngai City’s refugee centers. But the process ground to a halt on the trail, largely because of the surprisingly large numbers of elderly men, women, and children involved. To placate his irate superior, Calley ordered his men to open fire on them.

Yet the killings by the 2nd Platoon were no different than those of the 1st and were perhaps even more personal, in that small numbers of soldiers shot or threw grenades inside homes and bunkers or killed them from up close when they came outside. And the manner of their killing allowed a quicker advance through the village. Kill them where they were and move on to the next hooch: that became the mantra of the 2nd Platoon as it inched toward the expected climactic confrontation with the Viet Cong, unencumbered by evacuees and leaving no one to attack from behind. In his testimony, Charles Hutto confirmed this approach, reporting that he and others killed every Vietnamese man, woman, and child they had encountered, not stopping until they finished the sweep.²

They were to kill everything living, Varnado Simpson asserted, speaking for many of his fellow GIs. “From women and children to dogs and cats, yes. Yes.” He admitted to shooting and killing eight elderly men, women, and children trying to hide or run away from the onslaught, and he saw Gary Roschevitz, Max Hutson, Floyd Wright, Charles Hutto, Stephen Brooks, John Mower, and others likewise kill a large number of “defenseless women and children.” Hutson later declared that he followed orders in machine-gunning women and children, adding that his squad was responsible for about a third of the seventy-five civilians killed by the platoon. Medic George Garza saw up to forty men, women, and children killed on the spot, and James McBreen saw about thirty men, women, and children shot in or near their huts. Numerous times Tommy Moss watched his buddies beat villagers before shooting them and leaving them where they lay.³

One of these deaths in particular had created Simpson’s own special hell. Ordered to shoot a woman running and seemingly carrying a weapon, he turned her over and found a dead baby—her three-month-old son, killed by bullets that had passed through his mother. “The baby’s face was half gone,” he declared in an interview in 1989. “My mind just went.” The first killing had made it easier to kill again and again without emotions. Lieutenant Brooks had ordered Simpson to shoot the woman because she appeared to be carrying a weapon. That act triggered a string of killings. Simpson confessed, “I was personally responsible for killing about twenty-five people. Personally. Men, women.”⁴

Why didn’t someone speak out?

To the Peers commission, Bunning offered two reasons, and the first was racism. Most of the men in his company despised the Vietnamese and would not turn in any soldier for killing them. “The fact is some of them … didn’t even consider them human. I would rather see a Vietnamese die than me die if I have to make a choice,” Bunning admitted, but he could never condone the actions of those soldiers who dismissed the Vietnamese as “plain nothing.” Still, he added, anyone who reported what had happened could expect severe in-house retribution. “Nobody is going to squeal,” Bunning asserted, “because you’ve got your own life to think about.”⁵ The second reason Bunning gave was fear.

Once the 2nd Platoon completed its sweep and arrived at the eastern side of the village, the men received a radio message that gunships had shot two armed villagers among some hedgerows or trees to the north and that someone needed to retrieve their weapons. Bunning drew the assignment of walking point in a small file formation through three-foot-high rice paddies outside My Lai 4, guided to the victims by radio and smoke grenades dropped from the gunships. About two hundred yards past the village, his small party located the bodies of two young men, both about twenty years of age and in black clothing. One of them was wearing a pistol belt holding clips of ammunition, and the other was carrying rice. The GIs also found a carbine and an M-1 rifle. The two Viet Cong cadres were from Binh Tay, a subhamlet immediately north. The rest of the platoon headed toward the settlement, determined to deliver a message to the Viet Cong.⁶

Bunning and his companions caught up with the others in Binh Tay a few moments later. The soldiers already there were standing around in no particular formation. Some of them were tearing up the hooches, looking for souvenirs, weapons, or anything helpful to the Viet Cong. Others had collected about twenty Vietnamese men, women, and children from two or three huts into a group.⁷

And Roschevitz was at its center. According to Gary Garfolo, Roschevitz was sneering that he needed more practice with his M-79—on the small number of Vietnamese squatting in a circle. Earlier that morning in My Lai 4, he had fired his rifle grenade launcher into some Vietnamese sitting on the ground. His first shot missed the mark, but the follow-up missile hit the middle of the group, ravaging its victims and yet leaving some alive for other soldiers to finish off. The M-79 was not really effective at point-blank range, so in this instance, as Bunning testified, Roschevitz backed up in preparation for test firing “a few rounds into this group of people, which would wound most of them, and kill a few of them.”⁸

Onlookers watched Roschevitz climb a little hill about ten feet high—probably a bunker—and walk about a hundred feet. Within seconds of reaching the needed distance, he fired three rounds of grenades into the little band of Vietnamese. The muffled and airy oomph from each shot preceded the immediate successive explosions, leaving some of the victims barely alive until several other soldiers shot them with their M-16s. Lieutenant Brooks had already passed through this area but, like Sergeant Jay Buchanon, did not witness what had happened.⁹

In short, no non-commissioned officer (NCO) or sergeant was nearby to regulate the actions of the lower ranks.

Moments later, PFC Leonard Gonzalez spotted Roschevitz in another sector of the village standing next to the bloody remains of seven naked Vietnamese women ranging in age from their late teens to mid-thirties. Roschevitz was loudly boasting to those nearby that he had persuaded the women to strip by warning that he would shoot them if they refused. When he grabbed one and demanded “boom-boom,” they all screamed in fright and clung to each other. Roschevitz had coolly backed away a few steps and killed them all with his M-79.¹⁰

Gonzalez later maintained that he had never seen anything so purely evil. Roschevitz had combined murder with attempted rape. Gonzalez had arrived on the gory scene and saw the seven women piled near a hooch, their bodies peppered with pellet-sized black holes. Roschevitz had loaded his grenades with buckshot—a special ingredient reserved for close-in jungle fighting.¹¹

Yet Gonzalez should not have been so shocked. His 2nd Platoon had become a legend in its own time, the lair of the most prolific rapists in Charlie Company. Pham Day had hidden in the fields when the Americans approached but later saw them kill a number of Vietnamese civilians that day, including women they first raped. She noted what now appears to have been a widespread rite in Vietnam that many GIs considered a badge of manhood. More than a few men in Charlie Company had joined the ranks of other soldiers in-country who had earned the reputation of “double veterans” by first raping women and then killing them—sometimes after performing any number of sadistic acts. They often left the company’s calling card with their victims—the likeness of an ace of spades cut into their chests as a portent of bad luck. Officers as well as grunts took part in the sexual assaults. According to Thomas Partsch’s testimony to the Peers commission, Lieutenant Brooks regularly turned a blind eye to reports of his men’s actions, but in at least one instance he took a place in line with his men waiting their turns with a woman a hunter team had found after searching the hooches.¹²

Gonzalez witnessed rapes every time his platoon entered a village on what several of the men regarded as a treasure hunt for eligible females. In one case, he tried to save a young woman from his own squad by urging her to run away; he had heard that thirteen soldiers had raped her and now more men wanted their turn. Gonzalez told them to leave her alone but realized he could do nothing to stop what was about to happen and that the woman could barely walk, much less run. Like Bunning, Gonzalez had refused to kill innocent Vietnamese, and, like Bunning, he had been exiled to the far left wing of the platoon.¹³

There were at least two gang rapes in Binh Tay among the estimated twenty rapes—according to CID findings and the Peers Report—recorded that day in Pinkville, at least one and perhaps both of them involving a sergeant, Kenneth Hodges, and eight subordinates: Andress Delgado, a twenty-three-year-old from Texas; Diego Rodriguez, a twenty-one-year-old also from Texas; and six other soldiers who were never identified.¹⁴

Bunning witnessed the first instance of gang rape, later declaring it one of seven rapes that occurred in less than an hour in Binh Tay, including one committed by three men of a girl he thought was “about eighteen years old.”¹⁵

Bunning did not know the names of the three men, but thought two of them may have been Delgado and Rodriguez. “I saw three U.S. soldiers with her.” Two others in the 2nd Platoon, Max Hutson and Dean Fields, confirmed Bunning’s allegation, claiming they saw the GIs rape and sodomize the young and naked Vietnamese girl.¹⁶

Afterward, as Bunning continued to observe, the girl stood up, dressed quickly, and tried to get away, only to run into Hodges, who restrained her with a bear hug. At first she shrieked and tried to fight him off, but she “wasn’t putting up that big of a fuss; she only yelled or screamed a very little bit right at first when he grabbed her but then she never did any more after that.”¹⁷

According to Bunning’s testimony, Hodges shoved her inside a small hut with no doors, and from thirty feet Bunning and four or five others could see that “she was just laying there” as he knelt over her on the floor. Hodges was in the hooch for no more than three minutes, Bunning declared, adding that only the sergeant’s head and the top of his body were visible as he rocked back and forth. When she came outside a few moments later, McBreen claimed she had a “red face” and was clothed only in her blouse.¹⁸

The girl did not appear to have any bruises or cuts, and soon afterward joined a small group of other Vietnamese, Bunning remembered. As she walked with her people she had her arm around someone—a male Bunning could not identify. “She never resisted or tried to run or escape… . Could have been shock you know, of being grabbed, because she never really struggled or yelled… . Well, you know how a girl will scream sometime, you know, just a couple little screams or something.”¹⁹

The victim of the other gang rape was thirty-eight-year-old Nguyen Thi Cuong, who was at home with her mother, husband, and twelve-year-old son when the soldiers burst through the door. They first took her family from the house, but six of them kept her inside. After stripping her, she later attested, three soldiers raped and sodomized her while the others held her down. They then took her outside, still naked, and pushed her into a group of fifteen villagers. Then, without warning, several soldiers began shooting them, one shot hitting her arm and causing her to lose consciousness. When she awoke, the soldiers were gone, but they had killed all the villagers, including her family, and destroyed her house and animals.²⁰

In his testimony to the Peers commission, Bunning recalled how the rapes had started weeks before the assault on My Lai 4 and stated that when he criticized some of the soldiers for their actions, they threatened to kill him if he interfered. He was one of the biggest men in the battalion, perhaps only five or six pounds lighter than Roschevitz, and on one occasion warned two or three of his comrades to stop the rapes. “You leave that girl alone,” he maintained that he repeatedly declared. But after a couple weeks of bitter exchanges, five soldiers came to him and threatened him. “Look Bunning, you leave us alone or we’re going to kill you.”²¹

What could he or anyone else do? All the perpetrators had to do was shoot anyone who objected and dump his body in the bush. “We had a pretty rough bunch in the company”—a group of “thugs,” Bunning called them in his testimony. Hodges did nothing to stop the rapes, Bunning asserted. “He kind of liked it himself.”²²

As for Brooks, Bunning praised him as “a real good man” and remarked that the rapes “almost had to be done behind his back.” Yet the very openness with which the GIs looked for women, making little or no effort to hide both individual and gang rapes, shows that they expected no one to report their actions higher up the chain of command. These so-called conquests were acts of violence aimed at proving their prowess and power, perhaps a rite of passage to manhood, which they enhanced by their boasting and, as Hodges and others made clear, by providing voyeurs with something to look at on the pathway, inside a doorless hooch, or in close quarters. Rapes were “an everyday affair,” claimed John Smail from the 3rd Platoon to Hersh. “The guys are human, man.” Word of gang rapes traveled like lightning through the informal news circuit of a company of soldiers already competing on the platoon level for the fiercest reputation. Bunning would surely have been surprised by the accusation that Lieutenant Brooks had looked the other way a few weeks before when hearing of a rape and cavalierly remarking about his men, “They’ve got to get it someplace” and “might as well get it in the village.” He would have been floored had he seen his commanding officer lined up with his men for that same reason, as later testimony stated he did.²³

About halfway through Binh Tay, at 0915 hours, Captain Medina radioed Brooks “to quit killing people.” It has never been clear in the nearly fifty years since My Lai why he issued the ceasefire to only the 2nd Platoon, leaving the other two platoons to continue on their rampage for another hour or so. Bunning thought the killings in Binh Tay stopped after the order arrived, but he knew of one instance in which a villager ducked into a home bunker and never came back out after a soldier threw in a grenade. The 2nd Platoon soon released about sixty civilians before returning to My Lai 4. In less than an hour, its forces had killed at least seventy men, women, and children in Binh Tay.²⁴

Bunning, for one, maintained that he thought the ceasefire made no sense. Why did the killings have to stop, when Medina had said they were going to sweep all the villages? “All I could ever figure out was, he figured he got away with as much as he probably thought we were going to get away with.”²⁵

The ceasefire issued to the 2nd Platoon did nothing to deter the 1st and 3rd Platoons, both of them now operating in My Lai 4. And yet there was still no recognition by Medina that anything had gone awry—that his chief intelligence officer had been wrong and that his officer corps had either lost control over its men or was leading them or even participating with them in conduct not befitting their uniforms.

Despite all the testimony and paperwork, it has proven difficult to say how many Vietnamese civilians the 2nd Platoon killed that day, particularly because its men often intermingled with those of the 1st Platoon in My Lai 4, making it impossible to determine which platoon was responsible for which specific killings. The best estimates, consisting of victims from both My Lai 4 and Binh Tay, range between 120 and 170, based purely on the soldiers’ observations.²⁶

II

The 1st Platoon’s mass killings on the trail had meanwhile brought a stunned silence that Lieutenant Calley broke around 0900 hours by ordering his men to search for more Vietnamese to take to the irrigation ditch outside the village’s eastern edge. When a still-distraught Paul Meadlo arrived a few moments later with SP4 Ronald Grzesik, they saw ten soldiers standing guard over close to a hundred Vietnamese, including a number of infants held by their mothers or crawling on the ground. Nearby was a crude log bridge over a drainage ditch about six feet wide and four feet deep with a watery bottom. PFC Dennis Conti was already there, bragging to a soldier from Ohio, Charles Hall, that Calley had caught him having sex with one of the village women. Hall and the other soldiers close by would not have been surprised by Conti’s behavior; they all knew him as one of a half dozen soldiers who had become a legend around camp by having to take penicillin shots before every mission to avoid contracting venereal disease. Calley had seated himself on the ground but looked up at Meadlo and Grzesik and groused, according to Meadlo’s interview on 60 Minutes, “Meadlo, we got another job to do.”²⁷

But Calley first wanted to question a Buddhist monk from the group about the location of the Viet Cong and their weapons. In a clearing near the temple, the monk, about fifty years of age and dressed in white robes and with a goatee, had been praying for a sick elderly woman lying on a makeshift bed when American soldiers pulled him aside.

“VC Adai?” demanded two interpreters, first Grzesik and then Stanley, asking where to find the Viet Cong.

“No bitt,” responded the monk again and again.

Recognizing from their threatening demeanor that this was no usual interrogation, the monk started to cry and repeatedly bowed before his captors, trying to tell them he knew nothing. By this time Calley stood before him, angry and certain that he was lying. According to multiple accounts, Calley rifle-butted the man in the face, crumpling him to his knees just as a child about two years old crawled out of the ditch and toddled toward the village. “There’s a kid!” yelled someone. Calley abruptly turned from his prisoner to hurry over and grab the young boy, sling him back into the muddy trough, and shoot him. Calley then calmly strolled back to the monk and, over the pleas of horrified villagers to spare his life, finally said, “You’re a VC” and dragged him toward the rice paddy and shot him in the head at point-blank range with Meadlo’s M-16. When the elderly woman cried out in anguish while trying to rise from her sickbed, “someone shot her,” Stanley later testified.²⁸

According to the CID Report, Calley told Meadlo and PFC Allen Boyce that he wanted all the Vietnamese killed as he shoved three standing near him into the ditch and shot them. SP4 Greg Olsen, a Mormon from Oregon who was barely out of high school, remembered that Calley ordered Meadlo to “waste ’em.” Meadlo meanwhile had gathered his emotions and instantly pushed the closest Vietnamese into the ditch and then shot him as well. Again Conti turned away and, joined by Thomas Turner and Daniel Simone, went to sit in a dike about two hundred feet from the site. They watched Calley and others rifle-butt most of the remaining villagers into the ditch and kill them in a lengthy hail of gunfire. Meadlo later testified that they spared the lives of a few “gooks,” as he called them, so they could take point in front of the advancing soldiers to shield them from mines and enemy fire.²⁹

Turner and the others remained seated at the dike, numbed by the systematic killings. When the shooting finally ended about ten minutes later, Calley walked toward them just as a frightened young Vietnamese woman approached with her hands in the air. Turner claimed that Calley “shot her several times” before returning to the ditch.³⁰

If Calley’s purpose was to facilitate Charlie Company’s rapid passage through the subhamlet, his strategy was not working as the soldiers kept bringing more and more villagers to the ditch. Frustrated that the captives were holding him back, he ordered his men to kill them. Sa Thi Qui tearfully recalled that she and other villagers “were chased into the ditch like ducks” and “fell head first.” They were crying while pleading, “Oh God, have pity!” But the soldiers obeying his order shot everyone. Then came a brief silence, Qui testified, broken only by the faint scuffing sounds of “tiny children crawling along the edge of the ditch”—soon followed by more shots. Qui lay still, knowing any movement meant death. “I couldn’t breathe.”³¹

SP4 James Dursi and Herbert Carter had been playing with some children as this scene unfolded before them. Dursi stood in shock, helplessly watching as mothers scrambled to protect their babies and children from the automatic fire of M-16s amid the shrieks and screams of both the killers and the killed. “Why aren’t you firing?” Meadlo yelled at Dursi, according to the CID Report. “Fire, why don’t you fire?” Dursi could not move. “I think Calley wants them all killed,” he said he muttered to Carter, who likewise stood motionless, mumbling in disbelief, “Oh no.”³²

Neither Carter nor Dursi were new to violence, but they reacted differently to what was happening. The previous month Carter and Calley had been interrogating an elderly peasant farmer when Carter—according to Stanley’s testimony to CID—suddenly punched the man twice in the mouth and heaved him into a well. Four witnesses attested that Calley shot him and, according to James Bergthold in his testimony, radioed Medina that he had killed a suspect trying to escape. Dursi had actually killed someone. Earlier that same day he had shot a Vietnamese running from the scene while apparently carrying a weapon, only to find a woman clutching her baby. Still reeling from this incident, Dursi had made the decision, he said, not to kill again. Calley “can send me to jail but I am not going to kill anybody.”³³

Grzesik and Stanley also refused to obey Calley’s order. Already repulsed by the large number of bodies on the trail and in the ditch, Grzesik could take no more. Calley ordered him back to the village. Stanley’s refusal, however, led to a confrontation. An officer’s rights were nowhere more clear, Calley knew, than in shooting a subordinate who refused to follow orders. In combat, as the officer in charge he became at one time the judge, the jury, and the executioner.

Calley threatened him with a court martial. “If you wanna court-martial me,” Stanley declared, “you do that.” Calley angrily turned his M-16 toward Stanley, who held his ground and shouted, “Go to Hell!” Calley finally turned away. As Stanley explained in an interview years afterward, “A soldier, he’s taught not to disobey orders. But murder was totally against my nature. You can’t order me to do this. It’s craziness.”³⁴

PFC Robert Maples had just come to the site with his machine-gun crew and immediately took a stand against Calley’s order to shoot the captives. He had recently seen fellow soldiers roll over the bodies of Vietnamese they had ambushed, lopping off ears to string as trophies. He had been with Bergthold when he shot and killed a defenseless man in front of three children. Like Turner, Dursi, Grzesik, and Stanley, Maples had seen enough.³⁵

Calley, for his part, had also seen enough—of insubordination. He glared at Maples, standing next to a Vietnamese woman who had just shown him where she had been shot in the arm. Calley jerked her away and threw her into the ditch. “I wanna use your machine gun,” Calley told Maples.

Maples refused to hand over his gun. Nor would he use it. “I’m not going to do that,” he declared. “I’m not going to kill these people.”

“I’ll have you court-martialed,” Calley yelled and pointed his M-16 at Maples.

“You can’t order me to do that, lieutenant,” Maples shouted back, according to Stanley’s testimony to the Peers commission. Maples had seen women and children among dozens of victims he passed during the sweep, and now he was looking at more than a dozen other civilians forced into a ditch and shot. “I knew it was wrong,” Maples told CID investigators and repeated in an interview some twenty years afterward. Those who killed civilians were “crazy.”³⁶

Calley angrily threatened to shoot Maples on the spot, just as he had Stanley. But the other GIs in Maples’s group pulled their guns on Calley, causing him to back down and storm away as Maples and his men left the scene.³⁷

Other groups of soldiers had meanwhile arrived at the ditch, including some from the 2nd Platoon, further stiffening Calley’s determination to kill the remaining captives. He ordered Sergeant Mitchell to gather other men to help carry out the killings, and now, according to Meadlo, he led a group including himself, Boyce, Bergthold, Simone, and possibly Mitchell in shoving fifteen more Vietnamese into the ditch and methodically emptying their rifles again and again into the huge throng of elderly men, women, and children clinging to each other below.³⁸

Not all died. Pham Thi Tuan and her children survived by lying still throughout the shooting and afterward. “Their dead bodies weighed down on me,” she recalled. Another woman, a Mrs. Thieu, had earlier escaped with her children after her house was burned, but the Americans captured her and threw her into the ditch with the others. Pretending to be dead during the shooting, she lay face down as the pool of blood deepened and threatened to drown her. Ever so slightly, she turned her head until she could breathe through her nose.³⁹

Stanley and others who had refused to follow Calley’s order soon joined the small number of GIs gathered on the opposite side of the rice paddy.⁴⁰

Olsen was haunted by what he saw while crossing the ditch afterward. Calley had been waving them out of the village and across a makeshift bridge when Olsen first gazed down into the ditch filled with bodies. “I don’t know how I walked across that ditch,” he declared in perhaps one of the most haunting pieces of testimony about My Lai. “I remember looking down and making eye contact with somebody in the ditch and it was like looking at a mannequin… . Some of the people appeared to be dead and others followed me with their eyes.”⁴¹

Shortly after the guns went silent, Lieutenant Brian Livingston, the pilot of one of the two Huey gunships, flew over the targeted area. He had earlier seen a team of gunships firing into fifty or so Vietnamese civilians running southwest out of the village, and now he saw an even larger number of dead in the ditch and no signs of enemy fire in the village. “All of the killing was unnecessary,” he later attested to CID investigators. Most of the bodies were women and children, and the “shallow water in the ditch appeared to be red with blood.”⁴²

Calley had called a halt to determine that everyone was dead, and in that quiet interval shortly after 0915 hours, a small helicopter noisily circled the area, preparing to land. It was Thompson and his two-man crew. Earlier they had seen a large group of primarily women and children heading down the road to market with their empty baskets and, seeing no military action, had returned to base for refueling. But when coming back to the combat scene some ten to fifteen minutes later, they saw large numbers of these same Vietnamese lying dead on the trail and now in a ditch. What had happened? In his testimony to the Peers panel, Thompson remembered that he had heard nothing unusual on the radio, no call for medevacs or more forces. And yet, “all heck had broken loose” in the short time he was gone.⁴³

Thompson had begun tossing around alternative explanations in his mind. Had the Vietnamese panicked from the artillery barrage and run from their houses into the open? That made no sense, because of the greater safety provided by their bunkers inside. “Maybe,” Thompson said he thought, the American soldiers “took the dead and put them in this big ditch as a mass burial, you know, a mass grave.” But in looking closer at the ditch, he could see movement. “We don’t put the living with the dead to bury them.” He thought about the Nazis “marching everybody down into a ditch and blowing ’em away.” Surely Americans had not done this. “We’re supposed to be the good guys in the white hats.”⁴⁴

Thompson’s teenage door gunner, Lawrence Colburn, was also sickened by what he saw. Moments before they had seen a number of bodies scattered in the rice paddies below the village and “bunched up” on the road—elderly men and women, as well as children. There did not seem to be any males of draft age. There were no signs of a battle having been fought. Merely bodies. The American soldiers were “just walking around in a real nonchalant sweep. No one was crouching, ducking, or hiding.” “Like fish?” asked a member of the Peers commission. “Yes,” Colburn replied. “I thought they had either been marched down into the ditch and shot or they had been shot and collected and thrown in the ditch.” And there was no sign of an enemy threat, he added.⁴⁵

So many casualties with no Americans taking fire, Thompson thought to himself as they got closer to the ground. “It didn’t make sense.” Something kept telling him that Americans had “marched these people down there and shot them.” He remembered feeling complicit. Had he not marked the victims’ locations for the troops on the ground?⁴⁶

Just twenty minutes earlier, Thompson had spotted an unarmed young woman lying in the grass, “flailing around, waving back and forth,” with “gushing chest wounds.” Thompson dropped a smoke flare intended to mark her location for medical assistance from a squad a short distance away. He then wanted someone on the ground to help the woman. But he lacked radio communication with the ground command and had to send the message through the pilot of the nearby high gunship, who relayed the request to the ground command. The response came: “Yes, I will help her.”⁴⁷

Soon a soldier with captain’s bars on his helmet came to the spot and pushed her with his foot, before turning and moving away. Curious about what the officer might do, Thompson lingered nearby in his helicopter, no more than twenty feet away and barely ten feet above ground. Suddenly, the captain wheeled around after about ten steps and for no apparent reason repeatedly shot her with his M-16 on automatic. “She’s history,” Thompson muttered, “and I’m sitting here. My God, he just killed her.” His companion Colburn told an identical story. He and crew chief Glenn Andreotta watched the captain “look down at her, kick her with his foot, step back and just [blow] her away, right in front of us.”⁴⁸

“You son of a bitch!” they yelled in unison.

Only later did the three men in the helicopter learn that the officer was Medina.

Colburn remembered that this particular shooting clinched the case for guilt. Rather than just bodies, they had actually seen an American soldier—an officer—kill a Vietnamese civilian: Americans were responsible for the bodies on the trail and in the ditch. Thompson, Colburn told the Peers panel, “was just beside himself.” He told his crew, “This isn’t right, these are civilians, there’s people killing civilians down here.” Turning to Colburn and Andreotta, he angrily asked, “We’ve got to do something about this. Are you with me?”

“Yeah!” they replied.⁴⁹

As they flew closer to the ditch, Thompson estimated that he saw 150 dead and dying Vietnamese “babies, women and children and old men” before suddenly seeing soldiers shooting survivors trying to crawl out. Thompson asserted in disbelief that it’s “our people doing the killing! This is going to stop right now!” Lacking air-to-ground radio communication, he broke a cardinal rule of safety and landed his helicopter in a combat zone. Colburn recalled that they could see the Vietnamese “begging for mercy,” but, he added in an interview, “there was no mercy until Thompson arrived.”⁵⁰

The shooting came to an end as Thompson eased the helicopter down next to the ditch and jumped out, demanding to know who was in charge. SP5 Lenny Lagunoy was the first person Thompson saw, and he called him over to his helicopter, though neither Lagunoy nor the four other GIs nearby could hear a word because of the propellers. The pilot was “kind of upset,” Lagunoy remembered. Sergeant Mitchell immediately approached Thompson, who shouted above the din, asking whether he could do anything for those in the ditch. No, Mitchell sharply replied, adding that “the only way to help them was to put them out of their misery.” “Come on man!” Thompson said he yelled, thinking this a morbid attempt at humor. “Quit joking around. Help them out.” “OK, Chief, we’ll take care of it.”

Thompson recalled that he thought he had resolved the matter when a lieutenant (later determined to be Calley) joined the conversation, and it soon became clear that something was wrong—really wrong.⁵¹

“There’s lots of wounded here,” Thompson declared, angrily shaking his finger at an officer who outranked him.

“Yes,” Calley crisply replied.

“So what will you do about it?”

“Nothing. Relay it to higher.”

“I already did,” Thompson testily asserted, referring to the only radio communication he had—with a nearby gunship. “Can you call for a dust-off?”⁵²

“Can you?” asked Calley, visibly irate over Thompson’s interference in infantry business and making it clear this was not his concern.

“I already did. But they don’t respond,” declared Thompson.

“If they don’t respond to you,” Calley asserted, “they won’t respond to me.”

Thompson knew he could not win this argument and, still thinking he had put a halt to the killing, abruptly wheeled around in anger and headed back to his helicopter.

“He don’t like the way I’m running the show,” Calley remarked to Sledge, standing nearby, “but I’m the boss here.”⁵³

As soon as the helicopter was off the ground, Calley radioed Medina about the pilot’s complaint. “Get in the goddamn position,” Medina shot back for at least the fifth time. “And don’t worry about the casualties.” Calley immediately ordered Mitchell to “finish off” the wounded. Thompson’s helicopter was still taking off when Mitchell resumed the killing. “My God, he’s firing into the ditch again,” shouted Andreotta over the intercom.⁵⁴

Calley and his soldiers were leaving the scene. He had left Mitchell behind to kill the wounded.⁵⁵

“My God, what’s happening here,” Thompson said to the others in stunned disbelief, according to his testimony in the Hébert Hearings.⁵⁶

“That did it for me,” Thompson hotly declared after swinging the Scout around so his crewmates could see what was happening in the ditch. He was determined to stop the killing, but he could not figure out how. He was unable to speak with the commander in the air (Colonel Henderson) because they were on a different radio frequency. Thompson radioed the Huey pilot in the high gunship, urging him to contact the commander on the ground and persuade him to stop the shooting. No response. He could return to LZ Dottie and report the killings. But so much time would pass and so many more lives would be lost.⁵⁷

Thompson’s radio messages had not gone unheard—but they did not lead to any corrective action. Thelmer Moe of Texas was in a field operations van a little after 0930 hours when he heard Thompson radio his allegations that American soldiers had indiscriminately killed many civilians and that he got no help from ground forces when trying to rescue some women and children.⁵⁸

III

Attention then and later remained on My Lai 4, which meant that another part of the assault on Pinkville went largely unnoticed. Task Force Barker had instructed Bravo Company to attack the eastern sector of this hot zone lying between enemy-controlled area and that parcel still held by the South Vietnamese Army (or ARVN). First reports (unconfirmed) indicated that American troops had sustained mild losses while killing a moderate number of Viet Cong in My Khe 4 (known to the Vietnamese as Khe Hoi or My Hoi). But the U.S. Army remained silent about this second and concurrent assault a little more than a mile to the east, helping to explain why it attracted little interest until many months afterward.

Bravo Company had begun its operations not only in My Khe 4 but in the central target of My Lai 1, located less than two miles from My Lai 4. In accordance with Barker’s operational plan, this American contingent held its blocking position below My Lai 4 until Charlie Company’s first two platoons had safely entered the village. Then Bravo’s forces relocated at LZ Uptight to await a lift to the landing zone just below Route 521 and southwest of My Lai 1. In preparing for the assault, the army followed the approach used at My Lai 4: an artillery barrage near the targeted area, this one at 0808 hours—about the time the lift got underway. The helicopters took a southeast route over the South China Sea before veering inland and north toward the eastern sector of Pinkville. After a brief delay caused by the unexpected length of the artillery preparation, the first lift of helicopters reached its destination at 0815 hours, followed by the second lift twelve minutes later. Both landings were cold, meaning they experienced no resistance.⁵⁹

Bravo prepared to launch a two-pronged assault, one on the suspected Viet Cong Battalion headquarters at My Lai 1, the other on My Khe 4. The 2nd Platoon, under the command of Lieutenant Roy Cochran, moved northward to My Lai 1, crossing Route 521 toward its target, while to the west the 3rd Platoon, along with the weapons platoon and the command group, moved in the same direction to secure the area just above the trail. Some of the men heard rifle shots and thought they were under attack. It seems likely, however, that these were the rounds fired by Charlie Company advancing east through My Lai 4. In the meantime, the 1st Platoon, led by Lieutenant Thomas Willingham, made its way north to Route 521 and then turned east to follow the road to the narrow bamboo bridge over the Song My Khe just outside My Khe 4. At that point the platoon operated on its own, although maintaining radio contact with Captain Michles and the others in his company. The troops almost immediately encountered trouble: someone allegedly threw a couple of grenades at them that failed to explode. No one found either a culprit or a grenade.⁶⁰

The 2nd Platoon’s attempt to enter My Lai 1 resulted in a number of American casualties that ultimately caused it to abort its mission. One of the GIs tripped a land mine, killing Lieutenant Cochran and critically injuring four members of his platoon as they crossed a hedgerow just outside the village. The advance came to a halt until a dust-off evacuated the victims at 0915 hours. But as soon as the helicopter left, the 2nd Platoon tried again to enter My Lai 1. And again, someone stepped on a mine, which wounded three more men. Barker was overhead at the time of the second explosion and notified Michles that he would pick up the wounded and carry them back to LZ Dottie. The heavy losses demoralized not only the remaining members of the 2nd Platoon but also those men in the 3rd Platoon, weapons platoon, and command group, who had twice watched the shattered victims carried away, five on the medevac and three on the command helicopter. The concern etched on these soldiers’ faces must have convinced Barker to terminate the My Lai 1 operation, because Michles ordered his men to pull back.⁶¹

There still had been no evidence of the Viet Cong’s 48th Battalion.

The 1st Platoon had meanwhile made it to the My Hoi bridge leading into My Khe 4—and without casualties. Shortly after 0900 hours, Willingham organized his men into two rifle squads, each accompanied by a machine-gun crew and all following a four-man point team whose assignment was to locate mines and booby traps along the way. When they reached the western approach to the bridge, Willingham requested gunship support as his men prepared to cross a bridge about a hundred feet long and only three feet wide. But the gunships were reloading in camp and unavailable, and Barker recommended that the platoon clear any potential resistance by firing mortar rounds into the area east of the bridge. More bad news. Most of the four or five rounds fired were duds that hit the beach beyond the target. Michles then directed Willingham to spray the area on the other side of the bridge with machine-gun fire before moving forward. By this time, the captain had doubtless informed Willingham of what had happened to Cochran and his platoon—the land mines—news that probably made the men jumpy. Willingham believed they were taking heavy sniper fire, which drove them back in their first attempt to cross; several others claimed the sniper fire was light; still others reported no shots at all. Whatever the case, the platoon kept moving forward.⁶²

About 0930 hours, the 1st Platoon began inching across the Song My Khe in a widely spaced single-file formation while three men remained behind at the western entrance of the bridge to protect the rear. The platoon followed its point team and, to dodge booby traps, remained on a trail leading directly into the narrow village. Between the upper part of the trail and the South China Sea was a ridge that blocked a view of the beach only a hundred yards away and on both sides of the trail sat the tiny village of My Khe 4—fifteen to twenty mud and straw huts still standing amid the rubble of dwellings that at one time housed about 200 villagers. The GIs could see a few villagers through the brush, “washing or something,” said one soldier, “just their household chores.”⁶³

The American troops did not know this, but watching them cross the bridge was a young man not quite sixteen years of age, Vo Cao Loi, who was among about ten males of fighting age who had fled their homes to hide in the huge swamp-like area along the riverbank known as the Rung Dua Nuoc (“water coconut forest”). Loi must have wondered how much more damage his village could take. Most houses had already been bombed or burned, forcing nearly everyone to live in shelters. Now here he was, more than 600 feet from the bridge and hiding under one of many widely spaced floating shelters made of water coconuts covered by bamboo.⁶⁴

Despite the artillery barrage and two helicopters guarding against a Viet Cong attack, Loi initially thought it a normal military operation. The continual passing of Viet Cong regulars through the village, some of them staying the night, had led to ARVN raids every ten days or so. The area had long been a problem for both the Saigon government and its U.S. ally, particularly after the military arm of the National Liberation Front (NLF) in South Vietnam, the People’s Liberation Armed Forces (PLAF, known to the West as Viet Cong), claimed to have liberated it in 1964.⁶⁵

In interviews with the author, Loi emphasized that most if not all the people in the village supported the Revolution rather than the ARVN and its American ally. Some of the villagers in both My Lai 4 and My Khe 4 worked for the Viet Cong as “undercover guerrillas”—as Loi put it—in promoting the “political struggle.” The night before the American assault, a Viet Cong unit of about nine cadres had stayed there until learning an attack was coming and left before dawn. His two brothers had joined the Viet Cong, as did his two sisters. His father was away, fighting for the Viet Cong.⁶⁶

American and ARVN forces had entered My Khe 4 a number of times during the preceding months, sometimes beating and robbing villagers while shooting animals and burning houses, but never killing people. If the invading force was strong, Loi declared, the NLF troops avoided a confrontation by hiding in the tunnels beneath My Lai 1, a sector with few if any civilians that had become a battlefield. U.S. forces usually asked questions about the Viet Cong before moving on, but the ARVN—sometimes accompanied by a squad of Americans—stayed longer and came more often, looking for males sixteen to fifty years of age to force into joining its army. The NLF did not recruit by force, Loi declared; the ARVN did. The Saigon government had passed a law ostensibly intended to prevent enemy conscription of these males by prohibiting them from living in Viet Cong-controlled areas and thereby forcing them into the ARVN. Village priority was to evacuate eligible males when either American or ARVN forces approached. All others remained behind—in the shelters, where they had always been safe.⁶⁷

Loi was a month away from turning sixteen but close enough to fighting age for his mother to want him out of the village. “Now you are already a grown-up, you need to hide away,” he said she told him. She rushed him and other family members into their shelter, where in preparation for his escape she hurriedly filled a cloth bag with two cans of rice and another set of clothes. Knowing her son could not go far—the village was a veritable island sitting between the river and the sea—she told him to go with Uncle Bay (Vo Cao Tai) next door. Tai’s wife was away at market, leaving him in charge of their four children. Thinking the Americans would not harm them and knowing they were little and he could not carry them all, he left his three young daughters under the care of his twelve-year-old son Duc and told them to go into the shelter. Tai took Loi with him to join others already in the water, none under fifteen and a few farmers in their early forties, all hiding along the riverbank and out of reach of the Americans.⁶⁸

Loi left the shelter around eight that morning, but to avoid being seen with his uncle they had to dodge the two American helicopters circling overhead. He had earlier watched the pilots periodically rotate their positions by changing their height so that one was always flying higher than the other. These short periods of adjustment required undivided attention on the part of the pilots and afforded the only opportunities for Loi and his uncle to move from one shelter to the next. It took them more than a half hour of harrowing starts and stops to reach the riverbank, which was less than a mile from the village.⁶⁹

From their secluded site Loi and his uncle could see the U.S. troops crossing the bridge—eighteen, Loi counted, all of whom he knew to be Americans “because they were big.”⁷⁰

At 9:35 a.m., Loi and the others watched the soldiers regroup in a horizontal formation less than 250 feet from the village and throw grenades before opening fire. M-16 rifles and M-60 machine guns raked the hooches and dirt paths for nearly five minutes, the firing so intense that the radio operator on a navy Swift Boat nearby reported “a lot of small arms fire coming from that direction on the beach.” The platoon’s fire killed or wounded large numbers of the nearly 150 villagers inside—mostly women and children. Less than a dozen others had been fishing at the ocean, and perhaps as many as forty more were not there, including the ten hiding in the swamp.⁷¹

Willingham ordered a ceasefire at this point and the invasion began. Ten soldiers comprised of the point team and six members of the 1st Squad followed the trail south into the village, one machine gunner ignoring the cease-fire order and firing from the hip while “everybody,” according to another participant, shot at anyone who ran. As one GI attested, “We engaged upon them whenever they would run like that.” Still another soldier cynically recalled that they “were out there … having a good time. It was sort of like being in a shooting gallery.” From the swamp, Loi remembered that he could hear the nearly unbroken sounds of small-arms fire but even more the grenades exploding and destroying the shelters filled with people—including his family. Moments into My Khe 4, one soldier not identified by Hersh declared, “the word was out … you more or less can do anything you like.” Captain Michles encouraged this attitude, according to this soldier. He may have stressed the importance of “treating the people right. ‘Now remember they’re human,’ he’d say—and then he’d sort of snicker.”⁷²

The small American force slaughtered a large number of civilians in the village. In addition to searching through and then burning down their huts, they destroyed bunkers and shelters with TNT, usually without checking to see if anyone was inside and under orders to “shoot them as they came out,” according to another GI Hersh also did not identify. Most of the deaths came from grenades tossed into shelters, Loi asserted. Of three villagers in one shelter, one died, and his eleven-year-old cousin Vo Thi Lien and a Mr. Tam survived two grenades, one collapsing part of the shelter, the other destroying the opposite side, but neither hitting the middle where they had huddled together. According to Hersh, one unnamed soldier remembered, “We got sixty women, kids, and some old men.” Another soldier, SP4 Homer Hall, told the Peers commission, “We just flattened that village.”⁷³

Just before 1000 hours, fifteen minutes after the entry into My Khe 4, Willingham began reporting casualty figures. Michles passed on the message to Barker, telling him the 1st Platoon had killed twelve Viet Cong fitted with web gear holding ammunition and supplies. A half hour later, Willingham informed Michles that his men had killed eighteen more Viet Cong and by 1420 hours that afternoon another eight, meaning they had killed thirty-eight enemy forces that day. The American troops suffered no casualties, never needed fire support, and, perhaps most surprising, seized no weapons.⁷⁴

Furthermore, according to the Peers Report, Willingham reported no civilian casualties, despite his radio operator’s claim to have walked with him through the village in the late morning and counted twenty dead civilians—all women and children.⁷⁵

By one that afternoon, the gunshots had sharply diminished and the helicopters had left. Two hours later, the firing had ended and the Americans withdrew. In the silence Loi heard someone in the village scream, “They killed everyone!”⁷⁶

Loi and his uncle waited with the others until they were certain all the U.S. troops had gone before returning to their homes. All the men’s wives except Tai’s and most of their children were dead. Loi found his mother shot in the head and lying near the gate of their collapsed shelter. Amid the debris were his sister-in-law and his nephew and niece, all dead. Three siblings had died, one sister burned to death along with her year-old son. He frantically searched through other shelters nearby, finding in one of them his sister-in-law and her five-year-old son, both dead, along with sixteen others. During the course of the day Loi had lost eighteen family members, and Tai found all three of his daughters dead—including his five-year-old, who had gotten on top of the shelter to play, where a soldier shot her. The other two girls burned to death under the shelter. His son Duc survived but lost his arm when the shelter fell on him.⁷⁷

Neither Tai nor Loi returned to My Khe 4. Tai and his wife and son moved to Hué; Loi joined other youths in following VC Battalion 48 to the mountain location of the NLF’s armed forces (PLAF), where they became active supporters of the revolution. “It’s either being a soldier for the ARVN, or the NLF,” Loi explained. “I lived with the NLF and then joined the Army,” where he often whipped up emotions by telling his story to troops.⁷⁸

Several Vietnamese sources soon accused U.S. forces of killing up to ninety noncombatants in My Khe 4. Two days after the assault, the Census Grievance Center in Quang Ngai City filed a report alleging that Americans had killed eighty Vietnamese people, both “young and old.” Less than a week later, Son My’s village chief submitted a report to the district chief of Son Tinh that raised the number to ninety. The chief of Co Luy Hamlet had talked with survivors in Quang Ngai City and declared that the Americans killed eighty-seven. The National Liberation Front Committee charged the Americans with killing ninety-two civilians.⁷⁹

The most detailed account of the My Khe 4 massacre came from a survivor—Nguyen Thi Bay, who told CID investigators that she witnessed the killings and was raped by two American soldiers. U.S. troops entered the village between nine and ten o’clock in the morning and, despite encountering no opposition, shot and killed ninety Vietnamese civilians, many of them as they came out of their shelters. She had hidden in a shelter with two women and three children, but three soldiers found them and took them to a hooch, where two of them raped her after hitting the other two women with a rifle butt when she at first refused their advances. Bay was two months pregnant at the time and lost her baby the following day.⁸⁰

It remains impossible to be certain about the number of Vietnamese casualties at My Khe 4. Of the ten participants in this search-and-destroy operation, two were dead by the time the Peers commission learned of possible atrocities in that village, and all the others refused to talk about what happened or claimed not to remember.⁸¹

According to Loi, ninety-seven elderly men, women, and children died that day in My Khe 4.⁸²

the overwhelming consensus is that American forces encountered no organized resistance on the morning of March 16, either in My Lai 4 or My Khe 4 because, as one villager in each targeted area explained, a contingent of Viet Cong regulars had stayed in both villages the night before but followed their usual pattern of leaving early in the morning.⁸³

Four Viet Cong cadres had been in My Lai 4 earlier that morning but none from the 48th Battalion, the target of the attack. Truong Quy, as security chief, had been in the field and declared the attack a surprise. Do Vien, a thirty-four-year-old man who worked for the Viet Cong, asserted that about ten active supporters had been in the village when the shooting began. All but one of them—a local VC guerrilla—worked in propaganda, civilian labor management, education and youth guidance, or security matters. American gunships killed two Viet Cong as they fled the village. Vien was in the fields but escaped. Dang Thi was a twenty-three-year-old medical corpsman for the Viet Cong in My Lai 4 who, when captured, insisted that no fighters were there. And Nguyen Co was a subhamlet chief for the Viet Cong, who had hidden with his family in their bunker when the Americans ordered them out. He ignored the order and remained inside the bunker until noon, when he emerged to look for his family. His wife and children had escaped by pretending to be dead, but he found the bodies of his mother and grandmother on the trail.⁸⁴

All this death and destruction had been for the sake of attacking an enemy who was not there.