in late october the my lai story took a national turn when a lawyer and part-time Washington journalist named Geoffrey Cowan called Seymour Hersh, whom he had never met. An anonymous source in the military had informed him that the army had charged an officer at Fort Benning with killing nearly eighty Vietnamese civilians. Concerned that the army would bury the story, he took the advice of an attorney friend and called Hersh, then a freelance investigative journalist. Cowan had heard of Hersh’s reputation as a “tenacious reporter” and hoped the stories were true.1
At the time, Hersh was writing a book on the Pentagon, but he realized this new story was too big to pass up. Like the majority of Americans in 1969, his opposition to the Vietnam War had grown, as had his interest in helping bring that conflict to a close through reportage. Less than a week before Cowan made his telephone call to Hersh, 250,000 people had descended upon Washington to protest the war, while antiwar demonstrations spread to numerous other cities as well. “I stopped all other work and began chasing down the story of the My Lai massacre.”2
The day after receiving Cowan’s tip, Hersh called Fort Benning’s information office and asked Lieutenant Colonel Douglas Tucker about an impending trial. Tucker denied that any such trial was underway. He provided no further information other than reading him a short piece on the matter in the New York Times of September 7 that mentioned Lieutenant William Calley. The next day Hersh began searching for him. He soon discovered that Calley did not live in Miami but in Waynesville, North Carolina, and, with Cowan’s help, learned that a former judge of the U.S. Court of Military Appeals in Washington, George Latimer of Utah, headed his defense. Hersh then contacted a source in the Pentagon who indicated that the charge was first-degree murder for an incident in a place called My Lai on March 16, 1968. Latimer had served as defense counsel for one of the accused in the Green Berets case, but the government had recently declared that a fair trial was impossible and dropped the charges after the CIA barred its people from testifying on the grounds of national security. Hersh could not have known that Latimer had already considered asking the army to drop its charges against Calley. The so-called evidence, Latimer insisted, was hearsay.3
Hersh was in the Pentagon, checking out his tip, when he ran into an acquaintance, a colonel now working for General Westmoreland’s chief of staff. “Tell me,” Hersh asked, according to an interview he gave in 2012, “what’s this about some guy shooting up a bunch of people?” His friend abruptly stopped in the hallway and, in what Hersh called “one of those magic moments,” declared, “Let me tell you, Hersh, that guy Calley, he didn’t shoot anybody higher than this high,” holding his hand at his knees. “He just shot little kids. He deserves everything he gets.” Hersh believed this story, because, he later remarked, “You can’t make it up.”4
Hersh wanted to discuss the matter with Latimer in Salt Lake City and called him: “I want to talk about this fellow Calley,” Hersh declared, according to an interview cited in Robert Miraldi’s book. “Oh, what a tragedy,” Latimer replied. “The government is making a tragic mistake.” Hersh made up the story that he was going to California but could stop in Salt Lake City if acceptable. Latimer agreed to a meeting.
Hersh planned first to win over Latimer by discussing some of his past cases and showing his familiarity with them. Before departing Washington, he went to the Army Military Library to print out some of these cases to read on the plane. The strategy worked. Not only did Latimer talk freely about his earlier experiences in court with Hersh, he brought up the subject of Calley and vehemently emphasized his innocence. Hersh wanted to know how many Vietnamese Calley allegedly killed in the village and doubled the number he had heard—in an effort to prod Latimer into correcting him. “I understand he was accused of killing 150 people.” Latimer became so upset that he pulled out a piece of paper on the case and began reading aloud from it, while Hersh copied the first ten or twelve lines upside down. The army had charged Calley with the premeditated murder of 111 “Oriental human beings”—three words “I’ll never forget,” Hersh later asserted.5
Latimer told Hersh that Calley was at Fort Benning, and Hersh went looking for him there on November 11. Not finding him at the army barracks, he went to the office of the judge advocate general who would prosecute the case, identified himself as a reporter to a sergeant at the desk, and asked to speak with William Calley. The officer reached for a phone, explaining that he was under orders to call the colonel if anyone inquired about Calley. Hersh, however, slipped away before the colonel arrived but continued his search on the base.
Hersh soon found a soldier asleep in a bunk and, hoping to get lucky, kicked it while shouting, “Wake up, Calley.” It was not him.
“Ever hear of the name Calley?” Hersh said he asked.
“William Calley? Oh, you mean the guy that shot up everybody?”
“Yeah.”
The soldier put Hersh in touch with a friend in the mailroom, who checked the personnel files for Calley’s address off base. But on arriving there, Hersh learned that Calley had recently moved. Disheartened, Hersh returned to the base, where a group of soldiers milling around told him Calley lived in the Senior Bachelor Officers’ Quarters—complete with tennis court and swimming pool. Hersh remembered thinking at the time that the army had hidden Calley in the least likely place for anyone to look.6
At around seven in the evening Hersh began knocking on the first of fifty doors to find Calley, without success. He did, however, run into an officer, who invited him to a party where Calley would likely be. Near midnight Calley showed up, and the officer introduced him to Hersh. Calley maintained that he was not surprised by the visit; Latimer had told him that Hersh would show up sometime soon. They went to Calley’s room, where, according to Hersh, he “pretended to be very cocky and calm” while relating his experiences in Vietnam. The war was “cool,” Calley remarked—“really a fight, really a war.” But somewhere around four or five in the morning they were still talking and drinking beers when Calley suddenly went to the bathroom and vomited blood—the result of an ulcer, Hersh thought, while gazing through the open door.7
Calley then turned to My Lai. Murders took place there, he declared, but all under orders. “Call Medina. He will tell you. He’s on the base.” Hersh did not know who Medina was until Calley explained that he was the company captain. At five-thirty in the morning, Hersh awakened Medina with a phone call and identified himself as a reporter following up on the killings at My Lai. Medina, Hersh recalled, went “wild.”
“What? Where did you get this number? How do you know about this?”
“Captain,” Hersh explained, “Calley said he was under orders.”
“I never gave any such order! Calley’s an unmitigated liar.”
Calley was standing, listening to Medina’s response as Hersh held out the phone. “After that,” Hersh remembered telling himself, “Calley knew he was gone.”8
This five-hour conversation with Calley provided the material for Hersh to write the first national exposé of the events at what he called “a Viet Cong stronghold known as ‘Pinkville,’ ” an article he quickly realized no mainstream U.S. news outlet would print. He had originally sold the story to the Washington Post, but after editor Ben Bradlee and his staff had met with Hersh to discuss publishing it, they decided against doing so, opting instead to have one of their own journalists, Peter Braestrup, write a separate piece. After failing at both Life and Look magazines, Hersh placed the article with his friend (and tennis rival), David Obst, who had recently founded the Dispatch News Service—what he called “an antiwar news service devoted to telling the ‘truth’ about Vietnam.” It proved to be a wise move. Obst persuaded thirty-five American and Canadian newspapers—including the Boston Globe, Chicago Sun-Times, Miami Herald, Milwaukee Journal, and St. Louis Post-Dispatch—to publish the article on November 13 under the title, “Lieutenant Accused of Murdering 109 Civilians.” That same day the Washington Post ran Braestrup’s story with appropriate references to Hersh’s work, and the New York Times published its own account of the charge against Calley of the premeditated murder of more than one hundred Vietnamese civilians at Pinkville—but without the intimate details Hersh had mined from the accused.9
Hersh’s article was not a complete scoop. The day before it appeared, Alabama journalist Wayne Greenhaw published a story of Calley’s possible involvement in killing more than ninety Vietnamese civilians in March 1968. On the front page of the November 12, 1969, issue of the Alabama Journal, Greenhaw wrote an article headlined “Ft. Benning Probes Vietnam Slayings” and followed by the subhead, “Officer Suspect in 91 Deaths of Civilians.”10
About two months earlier, Greenhaw had received an anonymous tip from the Pentagon that the army was holding a lieutenant for killing a number of South Vietnamese civilians. The newspaper’s editor, Ray Jenkins, knew from a private source that the story was on the edge of breaking, and since the Journal was located just ninety miles from Fort Benning, he sent Greenhaw to investigate. Finding most of his contacts on the base reluctant to talk, Greenhaw returned with what Jenkins called “the barebones story,” which appeared in the Journal’s afternoon issue the day before Hersh’s more detailed account.11
Greenhaw reported that Lieutenant William Calley was under investigation for “the multiple murder of civilians in South Vietnam.” Calley, according to “informed sources,” was suspected of “wiping out an entire South Vietnamese village by killing 91 people—men, women and children.” Lieutenant Colonel Tucker explained that his Office of Information at Fort Benning got the case for investigation at the end of August and that if an Article 32 investigation determined that the evidence justified the suspicion of a war crime, army authorities there would hold a court martial on the base. The judge advocate general would lead the prosecution against Calley’s civilian defense attorney, George Latimer of Salt Lake City, a retired judge on the Military Court of Appeals.12
Hersh’s more detailed story attracted more attention than others, because it appeared in a host of national newspapers and drew from his interview with Calley himself. Hersh provided the accused officer’s first-hand account of the multiple killings committed in the “Viet Cong fortress” of “Pinkville” on March 16, 1968. Readers learned that this was the army’s third attempt to breach this enemy-infested area after the Tet offensive of the previous January and that it claimed 128 Viet Cong killed in action by U.S. forces. But also slain in the operation, Hersh declared, were a large number of civilians who found themselves in a free-fire zone. The army’s report, Hersh’s piece noted, did not mention these casualties.13
Hersh had suddenly become part of a raging debate both inside and outside the army that started right after it had formally charged Calley on September 6 with the premeditated murder of “at least 109 Vietnamese civilians” in Pinkville. Hersh noted in his article that Latimer claimed his defendant was following orders, quoting him as saying, “You can’t afford to guess whether a civilian is a Viet Cong or not. Either they shoot you or you shoot them.” A soldier who accompanied Calley on the mission insisted, “There are always some civilian casualties in a combat operation. He isn’t guilty of murder.” An anonymous officer remarked, “It could happen to any of us. He has killed and has seen a lot of killing… . Killing becomes nothing in Vietnam.” Yet another anonymous officer blasted high-up army authorities for “using this as a Goddamned example.” Calley was “a good soldier. He followed orders.”14
But Hersh’s piece asserted that an anonymous source in Washington had rejected this argument and considered Calley a cold-blooded murderer. His platoon “simply shot up this village and he was the leader of it. When one guy refused to do it, Calley took the rifle away and did the shooting himself.” Hersh told of his talking with a Pentagon official who tapped his knee with his hand while glaring at him and angrily remarking, “Some of those kids he shot were this high. I don’t think they were Viet Cong. Do you?”15
“With expressionless gray eyes and thinning brown hair,” Calley appeared, according to Hersh, “slightly bewildered and hurt by the charges.” In an interview, the young lieutenant insisted, “I like the Army … and I don’t want to do anything to hurt it.”16
Unknown to anyone outside of the Pentagon’s inner recesses, on the same day Hersh’s article appeared, the ongoing CID investigation led to a series of preliminary conclusions that not only substantiated Hersh’s story but expanded it. CID sent a progress report to General Westmoreland affirming Hersh’s public charge of massacre by American soldiers and adding three more explosive findings: Lieutenant William Calley “ordered and took part in the summary execution of unresisting noncombatant civilians”; Sergeant David Mitchell committed an “assault with intent to murder about thirty Vietnamese civilian noncombatants”; and Captain Ernest Medina either ordered his men to “wipe out” the village or left the “inference” that they should “kill everyone” in it. The company captain “was controlling the action by moving about the area, yet no one could remember Medina doing anything to stop the shooting of noncombatants as it was taking place.”17
CID showed that Lieutenant Colonel Barker’s after action report had not told the truth. The testimonies of seventy-five witnesses to date—twenty-eight still in the military and the others now discharged—had combined with numerous photographs of the scene to demonstrate that American forces had encountered no resistance. The victims were either seeking refuge from small-arms fire or were in “sizable controlled groups” of mainly women and children, “including infants.”18
The CID report remained confidential, of course, but the army’s past efforts to keep this story silent suggested that it was only a matter of time before these allegations leaked and reinforced those made publicly by Hersh.
Other reporters were already at work fleshing out more details of the story. The day after Hersh’s article appeared, three members of the press corps covering the Vietnam War visited My Lai and confirmed there had been a massacre. Americal Division forces provided protection for Don Baker of ABC-TV, Paul Brinkley-Jones of Newsweek, and Henry Kamm of the New York Times, who found a destroyed and desolate village. The proof of life once there was, ironically, the evidence of death now everywhere—human bones, earthen mounds covering mass graves, shattered remains of bunkers, charcoal remnants of thatch and mud hooches, and burned out, skeletal foundations and framework of brick homes at times barely discernible because of the uncontrolled growth of vegetation. Those few Vietnamese who survived the assault had relocated to a refugee camp.19
Yet the immediate public reaction to Hersh’s article was not the widespread outrage he had hoped for. Other stories attracted more interest, including the second moon landing and—ironically enough—the Nixon administration’s attacks on the American press for its coverage of the war in Vietnam. More important, however, was the skepticism of many if not most Americans, who refused to believe that one of their young soldiers (and, as Hersh reported, perhaps at least six others under consideration for similar charges by the army) could deliberately murder more than a hundred Vietnamese men, women, and children. How could the army accuse a war hero like Calley of premeditated murder after awarding him the Purple Heart for a combat wound and recommending him for the Bronze Star with Oak Leaf Cluster for meritorious service in combat?20
To its critics, Hersh’s article appeared to be part of the leftist antiwar movement in the country—a concern he had when going to press. He had, after all, released the article through a reputedly leftist, antiwar media outlet. The night before its publication, thousands of antiwar demonstrators in Washington grabbed both national and international attention when they began a long and single file “March against Death” in the freezing rain that started close to the gates of the Arlington National Cemetery, wound around the Lincoln Memorial, and moved past the White House toward Union Square Park. Six drummers playing a death-march beat led a long procession of participants from nearly every state in the nation, carrying candles and wearing placards bearing the names of those who had died in Vietnam. As they passed the White House, each person called out the name on the placard before putting it in one of the forty black wooden coffins at the end of the march near the Capitol. “There is no light at the end of the tunnel, only the darkness that came over my husband,” said a widow just before the march began.21
To opponents of the war in Vietnam, the massacre charges confirmed their antiwar position; to the war’s supporters, they were communist lies.
Yet the stories kept coming and, together with Hersh’s article, began to raise nationwide concern about what had happened in Pinkville. The day after Hersh’s article appeared, the public learned that the army had charged one of Calley’s squad leaders, Sergeant Mitchell, with assault with intent to murder thirty Vietnamese civilians. Braestrup’s November 13 article in the Washington Post had aroused great interest when he referred to an unnamed Vietnam veteran who wrote a letter to the Pentagon that brought about an in-house army investigation. And on the following day, Ronald Ridenhour, now a student at Claremont Men’s College in California, told the New York Times that he was the ex-GI who had learned from friends about the massacre and sent the letters to various government officials that put pressure on the army to investigate. Calley and Mitchell were not the only perpetrators of this war crime, Ridenhour insisted. “The important thing is there are a lot of bigger fish in this kettle and they aren’t being caught.”22
The next day, November 17, a front-page story in the New York Times reported that more than a hundred Vietnamese had survived the massacre by playing dead under the bodies of victims and that one of them, Do Hoai, claimed that American soldiers destroyed their village and killed all the others who lived there. This amounted to 567 unarmed men, women, and children.23
The furor was already beginning when three days later, November 20, Hersh published a second article titled “Hamlet Attack Called ‘Point-Blank Murder,’ ” which focused on three other GIs who had participated in the Pinkville assault. Hersh and Obst had gotten the idea for this article from Braestrup’s reference to the unnamed soldier who wrote the original letter of exposé, followed by Ridenhour’s coming forth in the New York Times. Hersh had immediately booked a flight to the West Coast to become the first reporter to talk with him. As they had lunch, Ridenhour provided dozens of addresses and phone numbers of soldiers who had been in Charlie Company, including three he had interviewed for his letter to leaders in Washington: Michael Terry, now at Brigham Young University in Utah, and two others still in the army—Michael Bernhardt at Fort Dix in New Jersey and William Doherty at Fort Hood in Texas. Hersh convinced all three participants to discuss the massacre with him by reading them key selections over the phone from Ridenhour’s letter describing what happened at Pinkville and then emphasizing the letter’s importance in leading the army to launch an investigation the previous April. Ridenhour agreed to wait three days until Hersh’s article appeared before sharing the story with anyone else. “I was glad to,” Ridenhour later declared. “He was the first person to respond.”24
Hersh’s second article attracted even more national attention than the first, as it contained the first eyewitness accounts of the massacre and testimony against Calley. It was “point-blank murder and I was standing there watching it,” said Bernhardt, who honored his earlier commitment to Ridenhour to tell the story even though he was now a sergeant completing his time in the army. Calley’s forces “were gathering people in groups and shooting them”—women and children as well as men—many of them with an M-79 grenade launcher and a machine gun. “You’re surprised?” Bernhardt exclaimed to Hersh in the piece. “I wouldn’t be surprised at anything these dudes did.” U.S. forces encountered no resistance and incurred no casualties. The estimated death toll ranged from 170 to more than 700, many of the victims piled throughout the village. An army photographer had taken pictures of the bodies, Bernhardt asserted, photographs he saw during his late-October testimony during the ongoing Article 32 proceeding regarding whether to charge Calley with murder. In fact, the orders to destroy Pinkville undoubtedly came from higher up the command chain. “Calley’s just a small fry.”25
As we have seen, Bernhardt had sensed a cover-up as soon as the mission had ended, and he recounted what Medina had said to him—not to write his congressman because an investigation was underway. But nothing came of the inquiry, Bernhardt noted.26
Asked the reason for the mass killings, Bernhardt declared that “the company was conditioned to do this. The treatment was lousy… . We were always out in the bushes. I think they were expecting us to run into resistance at Pinkville and also expecting them [the Viet Cong] to use the people as hostages.” Another chief factor, he added, was the widespread hatred for Vietnamese civilians after a land mine blew up and killed or wounded more than twenty GIs. About 90 percent of the company took part in the shootings. He, however, refused to follow orders, asserting, “I only shoot at people who shoot at me.”27
Terry, then in his second year in college, declared that American forces “just marched through shooting everybody… . Seems like no one said anything… . They just started pulling people out and shooting them.” He maintained that he then saw them shuffle more than twenty villagers toward a large number of others “in a group standing over a ditch—just like a Nazi-type thing… . One officer ordered a kid to machine-gun everybody down, but the kid just couldn’t do it. He threw the machine gun down and the officer picked it up… . I don’t remember seeing any men in the ditch. Mostly women and kids.” At a lunch break later near the ditch, Terry saw that “some of them were still breathing… . They were pretty badly shot up. They weren’t going to get any medical help, and so we shot them. Shot maybe five of them.”28
The third witness to the shootings remained unidentified in Hersh’s article, because he was concerned about his active-duty status in the army. But that soldier—Doherty—detailed what both Bernhardt and Terry had claimed. “I was shooting pigs and a chicken while the others were shooting people,” he said. “It isn’t just a nightmare; I’m completely aware of how real this was.”29
Hersh’s second article received a major boost when the Cleveland Plain Dealer ran it after a front-page story and the publication of the first of eight color photographs (although reproduced in black and white) taken by Ronald Haeberle that depicted the victims of the massacre and much of the village on fire. Haeberle was a hometown graduate of Fairview High School who had returned to Cleveland after leaving the army. After reading about Calley in the newspaper, he called a college friend at Ohio University in Athens who was now a reporter at the Plain Dealer, Joseph Eszterhas, and told him, “Joe, I have some photographs which might be this, what they are talking about, this massacre in Vietnam.” Without hesitation, Eszterhas replied, according to an interview he gave, “Get down here.”30
The paper’s photographer, Richard Conway, was at his desk that night when Haeberle brought in the pictures. “I took a look at them and it was shocking,” he remembered saying in a Cleveland Plain Dealer article published in 2009. “They were in color. They showed the terror on people’s faces right before they were shot.”31
The editors at first expressed concern about switching the news emphasis from the ongoing Apollo 12 moon mission, but they quickly changed their minds. Everyone was “shocked” by the photos of a “clump of bodies on a road” that included women and children and realized that the pictures fit with Hersh’s article based on his interviews of three eyewitnesses. Eszterhas would write the story accompanying the photographs, which rested on an interview with Haeberle.32
According to Mike Roberts, at the time a Plain Dealer reporter in the Washington bureau, no one in the National Press Building believed Hersh’s massacre story, and the executive editor of the newspaper in Cleveland, Bill Ware, had serious doubts. “Almost simultaneously,” Roberts declared, “this kid comes forward with these pictures—Haeberle’s photographs legitimized the story.”33
This was not the first time the Plain Dealer had taken on a risky subject. It had established a reputation for boldness a year earlier by endorsing Carl Stokes for mayor of Cleveland and helping him become the first black mayor of a major American city. Soon afterward, the Plain Dealer became the state’s largest daily newspaper, with a circulation of about four hundred thousand readers. The U.S. Army urged the paper’s editors not to publish the photos as “prejudicial to the rights of individuals either charged or to be charged with illegal conduct in connection with the alleged murders.” But the editors disagreed, arguing that their readers were “entitled to see them for what they are purported to be.”34
Thus Calley and perhaps six others were not the only perpetrators of this massacre: as many as thirty soldiers, Haeberle declared in his interview for the paper, “indiscriminately and wantonly mowed down” about one hundred Vietnamese civilians—including women and babies. He vividly remembered a Vietnamese man holding a small boy in one arm and a little girl in the other, walking toward the Americans as the girl pleaded in English, “No, no.” From twenty feet away a machine gunner coldly cut down all three with a burst of fire.35
There was no firefight, Haeberle emphasized, because no Viet Cong forces had been in the village. “They were just poor, innocent illiterate peasants.” The soldiers were “intent on what they were trying to accomplish. There was no feeling, nothing human about it.” He did not know whether the men acted under orders in killing the civilians. “I was shocked. I’ve never been able to forget what I saw there. I never saw U.S. GIs act like that before.”36
Haeberle later declared in the Hébert Hearings of 1970 that he did not remember photographing the soldiers doing the shooting. Asked by a committee member why someone so close to the operation would not take such photographs, he replied that he had asked himself that question. “I can’t come up with an answer.” More than four decades later, however, he admitted to a reporter that he had taken pictures of American GIs shooting the villagers but destroyed the photos without showing them to anyone. “I was there in the operation,” he explained. “I’m not gonna point a finger at some soldier out there and have him, you know, put up. No. We were all guilty. So I’m just as guilty as anyone else in the cover-up. I’ll admit to that.”37
The evening of the second Hersh article, CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite—the “most trusted man in America,” according to some—displayed the Plain Dealer’s front page and the eight photographs in his lead story on his widely watched nightly news show. He first warned viewers of a gruesome sight before the cameras zoomed in on the photos. The images stunned Americans in staccato-like fashion: the bodies of men, women, and children shot to death by U.S. soldiers and left lying on top of each other in a ditch or along the road; the terrified expressions of nine women and children caught in the camera’s eye just before American GIs raised their M-16s and killed them; and the fiery destruction of most of the village by the so-called Zippo squads.38
On that same night, Bernhardt appeared on both the CBS and NBC television news programs to tell his story to thirty million Americans.39
Haeberle’s photos, coupled with Hersh’s second article and Bernhardt’s appearance on two major news networks, caused a national and worldwide sensation. Newsweek magazine referred to the Calley case as “only one of a string of related incidents” in which forty to fifty American GIs were “implicated” in the killing of 567 South Vietnamese. A New York Times editorial was more outspoken, declaring that the reports of “deliberative, methodical killing of hundreds of civilians—men, women and children—by American troops” were “so shocking, so contrary to principles for which this country has always stood, as to be beyond belief. Yet the evidence mounts daily that something horrible did take place.” This story, combined with the “aborted Green Beret murder trial” and reporter Daniel Lang’s recent account in the New Yorker of “the kidnapping, rape and murder of a Vietnamese girl by an American patrol,” had helped make the war in Vietnam “an American nightmare.” The Times called for a congressional investigation, insisting that the “barbaric conduct” by the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese must not be used as an “excuse for any foot-dragging or cover-up by American authorities.”40
Obst had meanwhile syndicated the story overseas. The London Times preceded Hersh’s article on the front page with a story headlined “We Saw Women and Children Killed, Say US Soldiers.” Inside the same edition were two related stories, one arguing that if the allegations were true, the My Lai massacre was worse than other cases of civilian deaths in that “American soldiers lined up unarmed civilians and mowed them down.” Why had it taken so long for there to be an American investigation? Why hadn’t Saigon’s leaders shown greater concern? Why hadn’t the Viet Cong more actively exploited the story? In the second story, an editorial, the writer called for a quick and open inquiry; otherwise the American military would continue burying accounts such as this one. Why had it taken twenty months for news of this alleged massacre “to filter out?” A front-page editorial in the sensationalist Daily Sketch of London made a pronouncement: “From today the war is over… . The president will have to pull out.”41
In fact, President Nixon had become aware of My Lai about two months before Hersh’s news stories appeared. On September 3, Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird sent him a memo warning that the publicity from the “My Lai Atrocity” could embarrass the United States and hurt popular support for the war by encouraging the antiwar movement and undermining the ongoing peace efforts in Paris. An attachment to the memo made clear that a soldier named Paul Meadlo had identified Lieutenant Calley as the chief director and participant in the small-arms killings of a large number of defenseless Vietnamese noncombatants who put up no resistance. Other witnesses corroborated the mass of bodies in the village, and an army photographer had provided color slides that helped launch a criminal investigation. “The known facts leave no doubt about the necessity of prosecution.” When pressure grew on the White House to appoint a special commission to investigate the incident, National Security Affairs Adviser Henry Kissinger assured Nixon in a memo that such a move was unnecessary at this time for what appeared to be an “isolated incident.” But if another atrocity occurred, a presidential commission would be advisable.42
Kissinger phoned Laird on November 21, warning that the “atrocity case” would become a “terrible mess” and informing him of the president’s call for a “game plan.” Laird thought Calley would plead insanity and probably escape conviction. “Only someone who had lost his sanity could carry out such an act.” Kissinger had not seen the pictures, and Laird saw no reason for him to do so. “There are so many kids just laying there; these pictures are authentic.” Laird remarked that he would “like to sweep the whole thing under the rug, but you can’t do that.” Laird convinced White House communications director Herbert Klein to warn the president’s chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, that the My Lai “incident” could “develop into a major trial almost of the Nuremberg scope and could have a major effect on public opinion.”43
The White House, Laird insisted, must emphasize to Congress and the American public that these mass killings “didn’t happen in our watch.” They needed “some unified line,” Kissinger declared. Laird intended to announce that he had discovered the atrocities in March and was so “shocked” that he ordered “a full investigation.” He conceded that “those boys had been suffering terribly” and that one of them “had been killed just twenty-four hours before.” As for killing civilians, “You can understand a little bit of this, but you shouldn’t kill that many.”44
In the meantime, the number of suspects of war crimes in the massacre continued to grow. On that same day of November 21, Robert Jordan, the army’s general counsel, held an hour-long news conference in the Pentagon in which he announced that twenty-six persons were under investigation in connection with the alleged massacre, fifteen of them no longer in the service. Criminal investigators in both the United States and Vietnam were conducting interviews and gathering information on the case.45
Asked whether the army could try former soldiers for war crimes committed while in the service, Jordan remarked that the Supreme Court—referring to Toth v. Quarles—“has not been favorably disposed” to the military bringing charges against civilians, even if they had once been soldiers. But, he added, the situation might be different in this case, because the issue here was war crimes. “That avenue is a potential avenue against the civilians,” but it involved “uncharted legal waters.” This was a profoundly important issue, because “in military law a guy who orders somebody to kill someone unlawfully is considered as guilty of the murder as the guy who pulls the trigger.” In an indirect reference to Calley, Jordan declared that “the charge against the two would be identical.”46
The public exposure of the massacre continued to grow, as domestic and international news outlets sought the rights to reproduce the pictures. Haeberle and Eszterhas met with the corporate managers of Life magazine in New York to market their publication in color. The magazine agreed to pay Haeberle $17,500 for the photos, considerably less than the $125,000 he asked for at first, but much more than the $500 he had received as a “gift” from the Cleveland Plain Dealer for showing eight of them. But he also sold reproduction rights outside the United States, receiving $5,400 from the London Times, $6,400 from Stern Magazine in West Germany, $500 from a Canadian newspaper, and $1,000 from an Australian paper. Eszterhas received $5,000 from Life magazine for helping to write an accompanying article.47
Hersh had meanwhile interviewed Paul Meadlo at his home in New Goshen, Indiana, on November 23 and convinced him to tell his story to the public. It had been almost as difficult for Hersh to find Meadlo as it had been to find Calley. While Hersh was on the West Coast, a soldier told him about Meadlo and thought he lived “somewhere in Indiana.” Hersh found Meadlo’s phone number, and his mother answered the call. “I don’t know if he’ll talk to you,” Myrtle Meadlo warned. “Just come, but I can’t promise.” Two plane flights and a car drive later, Hersh finally located Meadlo’s home—a shack housing him and his family and parents on a broken-down chicken farm about eighty miles from Indianapolis. His mother greeted Hersh unsmilingly on his arrival. “He’s in there,” she declared.48
Hersh first warmed Meadlo up by inquiring about his wounded leg, before asking what happened in Pinkville. “I just began to kill people,” Meadlo asserted. Hersh managed to maintain an outer demeanor of calm as he asked how many civilians the GIs killed. Perhaps three hundred, Meadlo estimated, including women and children. He had followed Calley’s orders, and together they had shot dozens of people on a trail and in a ditch. Meadlo showed some remorse. “The kids and the women, they didn’t have any right to die.”49
Hersh realized in the first moments of this interview that Meadlo had provided information crucial to convincing the public that its soldiers had acted under orders in massacring hundreds of Vietnamese civilians. He had gotten the first eyewitness account of Calley’s actions, the first confession to murder (by Meadlo), and the first statement by a witness that Calley had not only participated in the group killings but in fact had ordered them. Hersh nonetheless professed afterward that he was not shocked by these revelations. Meadlo had exposed “the cancerous fingernail of what’s going on in Vietnam,” Hersh asserted in Miraldi’s account. “This is what we do in Vietnam.”50
Hersh immediately called Obst after the interview, exclaiming triumphantly, “We [have] the front page story of the world.” Obst knew the press would run Hersh’s third article, but he and Hersh now opted for something bigger—a television interview of Meadlo by Mike Wallace, co-host of the new program 60 Minutes.51
But would Meadlo repeat his story to the American people? Hersh approached him with the idea, warning that he could be held responsible for anything he said. Meadlo consented to the TV interview.52
Hersh quickly brokered a deal whereby CBS paid the Dispatch News Service ten thousand dollars for facilitating Meadlo’s arrival in New York. Hersh had kept the army apprised of his discoveries, including this one, but it expressed concern that the publicity generated by a TV interview might lead to a mistrial in the event of Calley’s court martial, pending the ongoing Article 32 investigation stipulated by the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Hersh nonetheless convinced CBS of the overwhelming importance of broadcasting a first-hand report of what happened. The news network agreed to pay Meadlo’s travel expenses but nothing more.53
On November 24, just four nights after Haeberle’s photos appeared in the Cleveland press and on CBS-TV, Wallace interviewed twenty-two-year-old Paul Meadlo on national television. The night before, Hersh had stayed with him, sleeping on the couch. “I remember he cried out a lot that night.” Early in the morning, he accompanied Meadlo and his wife on the plane to New York. Meadlo had admitted more than once in private testimony to his involvement in the killings, but never had he done so in a public venue and before millions of viewers, nor had he ever confronted an interviewer with such a bulldog approach as Mike Wallace.54
This was the American public’s first introduction to an actual participant in the massacre, and to understand the reaction to his disclosures, one needs to know exactly what the viewers learned from Meadlo’s interview that night.
After a general discussion of the mission’s make-up and purpose in the assault on what was called Pinkville, Meadlo explained that his company’s first combat action came during its advance toward the village when someone spotted a “gook”—a scared elderly Vietnamese man hiding in a shelter. Sergeant David Mitchell ordered him shot. On entering the village, the platoon began ordering everyone out of their hooches and gathered them near the village center in a circle. The number soon grew to nearly fifty people.
“What kind of people—men, women, children?” asked Wallace.
“Men, women, children,” responded Meadlo.
“Babies?”
“Babies,” Meadlo replied. “And we all huddled them up. We made them squat down, and Lieutenant Calley came over and said, ‘You know what to do with them don’t you?’ And I said yes. So I took it for granted that he just wanted us to watch them.”
But when Calley left and returned about fifteen minutes later, he asked, “How come you ain’t killed them yet?” Meadlo tried to explain that he thought his job was to guard the captives, not kill them, but Calley told him in the presence of three or four other soldiers, “No, I want them dead.”
Without saying another word, Meadlo said, Calley backed up about fifteen feet and began shooting the Vietnamese with his M-16.
“And he told me to start shooting,” asserted Meadlo. “So I started shooting, I poured about four clips into the group.” Asked how many shots were in a clip, Meadlo explained that each clip carried seventeen rounds.
Meadlo was uncertain about how many he killed. He was firing on automatic, which meant “you just spray the area,” and he could not tell how many died because they were falling so quickly. “So I might have killed ten or fifteen of them.”
“Men, women and children?”
“Men, women and children.”
“And babies?”
“And babies.”
“Okay, then what?”
Meadlo explained that they moved on to collect about eight more people and order them into a hooch before tossing in a hand grenade. But someone told them to take the captives to a ditch instead, where more than seventy other villagers were already squatting or standing along its edge. “Meadlo, we got another job to do,” Calley declared while shoving them into the ditch. “And so we started pushing them off and we started shooting them,” Meadlo asserted. “So altogether we just pushed them all off, and just started using automatics on them. And then—”
“Again—men, women and children?”
“Men, women and children.”
“And babies?”
“And babies,” Meadlo replied. “And so we started shooting them, and somebody told us to switch off to single shot so that we could save ammo. So we switched off to single shot, and shot a few more rounds” before leaving to gather more villagers.
Meadlo explained that the next morning he stepped on a land mine in a field that blew off his foot. “I feel cheated,” he asserted, “because the V.A. [Veterans Administration] cut my disability like they did, and they said that my stump is well healed, well padded, without tenderness.” Meadlo angrily denied their claim. “It hurts all the time. I got to work eight hours a day up on my foot, and at the end of the day I can’t hardly stand it. But I gotta work because I gotta make a living. And the V.A. don’t give me enough money to live on as it is.”
“Did you feel any sense of retribution to yourself the day after?”
“Well, I felt that I was punished for what I’d done, the next morning. Later on in that day, I felt like I was being punished.”
Wallace finally asked the question the answer to which everyone wanted to hear: “Why did you do it?”
“Why did I do it? Because I felt like I was ordered to do it, and it seemed like that, at the time I felt like I was doing the right thing, because like I said I lost buddies. I lost a damn good buddy, Bobby Wilson, and it was on my conscience. So after I done it, I felt good, but later on that day, it was gettin’ to me.”
Asked whether he was married and had children, Meadlo said yes and that he and his wife had a two-and-a-half-year-old boy and a year-and-a-half-old girl. “Obviously,” Wallace noted, “the question comes to my mind … the father of two little kids like that … how do you shoot babies?”
“I don’t know. It’s just one of them things.”
“How many people would you imagine were killed that day?”
“I’d say about 370.”
When asked again how many he killed, Meadlo replied, “I couldn’t say … just too many.”
“And how many men did the actual shooting?”
“Well, I really couldn’t say that, either. There was other … there was another platoon in there and … but I just couldn’t say how many.”
“But these civilians were lined up and shot? They weren’t killed by crossfire?”
“They weren’t lined up … they [were] just pushed in a ravine or just sitting, squatting … and shot.”
“What did these civilians—particularly the women and children, the old men—what did they do? What did they say to you?”
“They weren’t much saying to them,” Meadlo declared. “They [were] just being pushed and they were doing what they was told to do.”
“They weren’t begging or saying, ‘No … no,’ or—”
“Right,” Meadlo interjected. “They was begging and saying, ‘No, no.’ And the mothers was hugging their children and, but they kept right on firing. Well, we kept right on firing. They was waving their arms and begging …”
“Was that your most vivid memory of what you saw?”
“Right.”
“And nothing went through your mind or heart?”
“Not while I was doing it. It just seemed like it was the natural thing to do at the time… . I was getting relieved from what I’d seen earlier over there … my buddies getting killed or wounded… . It was just mostly revenge.”
“We’ve raised such a dickens about what the Nazis did, or what the Japanese did,” Wallace observed, “but particularly what the Nazis did in the Second World War, the brutalization… . It’s hard for a good many Americans to understand that young, capable, American boys could line up old men, women and children and babies and shoot them down in cold blood. How do you explain that?”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“Did you ever dream about all of this that went on in Pinkville?”
“Yes, I did … and I still dream about it.”
“What kind of dreams?”
“I see the women and children in my sleep. Some days … some nights, I can’t even sleep. I just lay there thinking about it.”55
Meadlo had stunned a national television audience by confessing to murder, accusing Calley of murder, and claiming he had followed Calley’s orders in gathering and shooting groups of Vietnamese civilians, including, as Wallace repeatedly emphasized, old men, women, children—and babies. And Meadlo aroused more outrage than sympathy when he complained about his injury and the problems he had with the Veterans Administration.56
The next night, Meadlo’s parents lashed out at both the army and Calley for putting their son in this position. In a CBS Evening News interview, his mother bitterly remarked, “I raised him to be a good boy,” and the army “made a murderer out of him.” Meadlo’s father, Tony, a retired coal miner who had lost a leg in a mining accident, was more direct: “If it had been me out there,” he remarked in his Polish accent, “I would have swung my rifle around and shot Calley instead—right between the God-damned eyes. Then there would have been only one death.”57
Meadlo made no money from his TV appearance and thought this unfair. When someone asked an employee of the Dispatch News Service in Washington how much CBS paid for the interview rights, he replied that it was an amount “in five figures.” How much had Meadlo received? “The kid is getting absolutely zero,” replied a spokesman for Hersh. Meadlo told a reporter that he knew nothing about any financial arrangements made by Hersh. “I’ve already told my story. I feel I should be getting something out of it.”58
Meadlo’s TV interview did of course far more than any newspaper article or photograph to convince the American people that what had taken place was a war crime. “It was the CBS interview,” declared Hersh. And for those who missed the TV show, the New York Times ran a story the following day on the spectacle and reprinted the entire transcript of the exchanges between Wallace and Meadlo. This “incredible interview,” Hersh concluded, “turned the corner” on showing the public that its boys in uniform had murdered hundreds of helpless human beings. Ridenhour likewise praised the media. The interviews with Meadlo, Terry, and other soldiers appearing on national TV over the next few days made it clear that “these young men were painfully telling the truth” about what they had seen.59
Two senators, however, publicly blasted CBS for televising such an interview. The day afterward, Republican Peter Dominick of Colorado upbraided the news network for hosting a soldier suspected of shooting defenseless people during a combat assault. Meadlo had endangered the legal rights of both himself and Calley by alleging that they had participated in killing hundreds of Vietnamese civilians—including women and children. “What kind of country have we got when this kind of garbage is put around?” Democrat Ernest Hollings of South Carolina asked what would happen if every soldier who made “a mistake in judgment” while in combat went to trial “as common criminals, as murderers?” Meadlo, he angrily declared, “was obviously sick” and “ought not to be exposed to the entire public.”60
The Nixon administration immediately proclaimed that it had nothing to do with what happened at My Lai, which, after all, had taken place on LBJ’s watch. That same day the New York Times published Laird’s responses to seven hours of questions about My Lai posed a week earlier by the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Democrat J. William Fulbright, which hardly seems like a coincidence. Asked about the delay, the defense secretary explained that he had preferred to send Fulbright a written reply for the historical record and that he had just approved it for public release. Laird declared that he was “shocked and sick” to learn of the alleged massacre. No one in the White House had heard about these events until Ridenhour’s letter reached the president’s desk the previous April, more than a full year after it had taken place. The administration, he assured the committee, was “determined to insure absolute compliance with our orders and with the laws of war.”61
The army also denied any responsibility for the alleged massacre. In a statement given to the Foreign Relations Committee, it declared that the issue “was not brought to the attention of the Department of the Army, there being no apparent requirement for doing so.” Colonel Oran Henderson had concluded in his report to the division commander that no massacre had occurred and no war crimes had been committed. Thus he had complied with MACV Directive 20-4, which declared it “the responsibility of all military personnel having knowledge or receiving a report of an incident or of an act thought to be a war crime to make such incident known to his commanding officer as soon as practicable.” The divisional commander was not required to take further action, meaning that Henderson’s report never went above division level and hence never came before the Department of the Army in Washington.62
The key question remained: How could there have been no war crime when photographs of the victims and a steady stream of public statements by American witnesses and Vietnamese survivors strongly suggested otherwise? The army could not deny what Meadlo had asserted on nationwide television—that a massacre had occurred and that he and Calley were two of its chief perpetrators. But the army had to show that the responsibility went no higher than the division level and that what Meadlo and others had done was an isolated incident, an aberration that resulted from rogue soldiers acting on their own and not on the basis of orders from above.
In the midst of the nationwide clamor over Meadlo’s interview, Hersh published his third article, “Ex-GI Tells of Killing Civilians at Pinkville,” which highlighted another interview with Meadlo that included an allegation not mentioned on television that night—that Captain Ernest Medina also bore responsibility for the massacre. “I don’t know if the C.O. [Commanding Officer] gave the order to kill or not,” Hersh quoted Meadlo as saying in the article, “but he was right there when it happened. Why didn’t he stop it? He and Calley passed each other quite a few times that morning, but didn’t say anything. Medina just kept marching around. He could’ve put a stop to it anytime he wanted.” Medina and Calley had prepared for civilian casualties by having a plan of deception in place. They warned their soldiers before the operation that if they “ever shoot any civilians,” they had to make sure they were identifiable as Viet Cong. To do that, “we should go ahead and plant a hand grenade on them.”63
With timing that seemed almost surreal to many, on the same day the New York Times published the story of the Meadlo TV interview and the transcript, it ran a front-page story on the U.S. Army’s decision to court-martial Calley on charges of premeditated murder. According to the findings of the Article 32 investigation, Calley came under indictment for violating Article 118 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which defined the crimes for which a person could stand trial for “unlawfully” and “without justification or excuse” killing a human being.64
The murder charges fell into six specifications totaling at least 109 victims: the first for killing four persons; the second for “not less than 30” civilians; the third for three persons; the fourth for “an unknown number of Oriental human beings, not less than 70, males and females of various ages, whose names are unknown, occupants of the village of My Lai 4 by means of shooting them with a rifle”; the fifth for one male; and the sixth for a two-year-old child “whose name and sex is unknown.”65
Major General Orwin Talbott at Fort Benning had made the decision that Calley must stand trial for murder. After heading the Article 32 investigation, Lieutenant Colonel Duane Cameron, who had commanded infantry forces during two tours in Vietnam, concluded that the evidence warranted a court martial. He had reviewed the testimonies of several former soldiers, including Meadlo, SP4 Charles Sledge, and SP4 Greg Olsen from Calley’s 1st Platoon, and he had held a three-day hearing in late October in which PFC Michael Bernhardt from the 2nd Platoon and 1st Platoon sergeant Isaiah Cowan provided valuable information on the case. Cameron had also summoned 2nd Platoon sergeant Lawrence LaCroix and Sergeant David Mitchell of Calley’s platoon, but they refused to testify for fear of saying something detrimental to their own cases if brought to court. Medina had testified for the defense, but other than talking about the operation, he chose not to answer the question of whether he had ordered Calley to kill civilians.66
Cameron had sent his report to the commanding general on November 6, recommending that Calley stand trial by “General Court Martial.” Major General Talbott discussed the matter extensively with the staff judge advocate and realized that the case “was so serious that it could only be determined by a court of law.”67
Talbott doubtless came under great pressure—from both the army and the public—in making a decision that he insisted was his own. He staunchly denied that anyone had tried to influence his decision and maintained that he had acted “solely on the Article 32 investigation.”68
Lieutenant Colonel Tucker read the court-martial decision at a news conference at Fort Benning on November 24. The trial would take place on the base, the date depending on the time needed by the defense and the prosecution to make preparations. “It is anticipated that this will require at least a month.” The trial would be open to the public, except during discussions of “classified security information.” In the meantime, Calley would remain in his position at the post, free to leave for visits to nearby Columbus or, if elsewhere, after receiving permission. Was this unusual in a case involving a capital offense? Tucker emphasized that “incarceration is only used to protect a man or to make sure he’s available for trial.”69
The army’s charges against Calley meant that he faced life imprisonment or death if found guilty. According to the army, he had been a chief architect of a war crime that it had initially concluded had not taken place. Not by coincidence did the army announce on that same day, November 24, that it had appointed a three-star general, Lieutenant General William R. Peers, to lead an investigation into the Henderson report.70
Peers was a veteran of three wars, having served in World War II as a commander of the Office of Strategic Services in China, in the Korean War in army intelligence in China after a two-year stint in the CIA, and, after serving in the Pentagon, in the Vietnam War as a field commander. At the time of the Pinkville operation, he was acting commander of I Field Force and had no connection with the Americal Division in I Corps. In a memo he wrote to Westmoreland, he admitted that all his wartime experience could not have prepared him for what lay ahead—an outcome that, regardless of which way things went, meant victory for no one.71
Further complicating the Peers Inquiry’s work was the competition between the Senate and House over who would launch a separate congressional investigation—a contest won by the hawkish chair of the House Armed Services Committee, Democrat L. Mendel Rivers of South Carolina. On the same day General Westmoreland and Secretary of the Army Stanley Resor revealed the Peers appointment, Rivers announced that his investigative subcommittee would examine the charges of massacre and cover-up. Two days later, the entire Armed Services Committee opened a series of hearings.72
Other heavyweights were chiming in. Pulitzer Prize–winning columnist James Reston of the New York Times challenged Nixon and Vice President Spiro Agnew—a notable hawk and detractor of those who criticized American foreign policy—to deal with the question of culpability raised by Meadlo and others. “The main facts of this tragedy are not in dispute.” The central issue now was who was at fault—the soldiers who killed the villagers, the officers who ordered the killing, or the “system” of war that prescribed the roles for both? The army had long treated My Lai 4 as a “free-fire zone,” which meant the enemy controlled the village, making it open to B-52 bombing and artillery fire. The critical difference in the assault by Charlie Company was that its soldiers “saw the human beings in the village and killed them with their M-16s anyway, and then told their story on TV.”73
Who was responsible? asked Reston. Meadlo, a “tragic and limited human being?” Calley, “the hard-faced lieutenant, who gave the orders?” The higher-ranking officers “who watched the carnage and let it go on?” Or “the system” for the deaths caused from afar by the B-52 bombardier and the artillery officer, who never see the faces of the men, women, and children they kill? The “big difference” in this case, Reston maintained, was that the soldier behind the M-16 “sees the human agony before he fires and the other doesn’t.” And yet “the end for the villagers is the same.”74
Hersh’s detailed articles based on eyewitness accounts and a confession to murder; Haeberle’s graphic photos in the press and on TV; Meadlo’s haunting appearance on 60 Minutes; the news of Calley’s court martial; the imminent Peers investigation—all these combined to divide Americans over what their soldiers had allegedly done at My Lai 4 and whether the U.S. Army had tried to cover it up. Meadlo’s confirmation of a massacre received further support on the day after his TV interview when ex-serviceman Varnado Simpson admitted on NBC-TV that he was “personally responsible” for killing ten Vietnamese civilians at My Lai 4. The New York Times showed that U.S. Army publications shortly after the March 1968 assault had fabricated accounts of a great victory by American forces that resulted in 128 Viet Cong killed in action. The Americal Division’s weekly newsletter, the Southern Cross, and the Pacific edition of Stars and Stripes had praised the GIs’ performance in this Viet Cong stronghold without mentioning either Calley or any civilian casualties. The New York Times repeated these battle accounts in a front-page story, not knowing that the army reporter, Sergeant Jay Roberts, had come under great pressure from the task force commander, Lieutenant Colonel Barker, to carefully construct these highly favorable accounts.75
The Nixon administration nonetheless continually denounced the news coverage of the war, insisting that the antiwar demonstrations did not express the will of most Americans and encouraged the enemy by undermining the war effort. The U.S. Information Agency sent a film called The Silent Majority to more than one hundred countries, urging foreign observers to recognize that “the loudest sound is not the only one that should be listened to.” Agnew attacked the American press for its alleged leftist leanings, which, he asserted, stemmed from the Boston Globe, New York Times, Washington Post, and other eastern establishment news outlets, including all three national television networks—ABC, CBS, and NBC. Postmaster General Winton Blount had just returned from Vietnam to proclaim that the antiwar protests had encouraged the enemy and were therefore “killing American boys.”76
The controversy over the alleged massacre brought a mixed reaction in Vietnam. The North Vietnamese Foreign Ministry accused the United States of genocide, claiming that the mass murder was part of its policy toward all Southeast Asia and not the actions of a single military unit. To end this “war of aggression,” the United States must totally withdraw its forces. South Vietnam, like the American public, was divided in its reactions. The Saigon government under President Nguyen Van Thieu declared the massacre charges “totally false” and attributed the civilian deaths to “a normal and unavoidable act of war during a battle with the enemy.” The leader of the opposition, Senator Tran Van Don, was a retired general and former chief of staff and defense minister who had been involved with Thieu and others in toppling Premier Ngo Dinh Diem in the early 1960s. But Don now blasted his former co-conspirator as “the valet of the Americans, who are his sole support.” As chair of South Vietnam’s Senate Defense Committee, he intended to ask his colleagues to appoint a panel to investigate the incident and expressed his willingness to serve on it. According to many South Vietnamese political leaders, Thieu had acted too hastily in denying there had been a massacre. How could he insist that no murder had occurred at the same time the country’s ally was prosecuting one of its own army officers for murder?77
Two days later, the South Vietnamese Senate in Saigon approved two three-member committees to jointly inquire into the massacre, with Don heading the investigation. A great issue was at stake, he declared—the relationship between South Vietnam and the United States. Deputy Tran Ngoc Chau, a retired ARVN officer and staunch critic of Thieu, remarked that his denial of the massacre proved himself to be America’s puppet. Three Vietnamese newspapers that day praised the United States for taking these deaths seriously, with one of them castigating the Thieu government’s refusal to act as “cowardice and worthy of contempt.”78
Time magazine also confirmed “the My Lai massacre”—which appears to be the earliest known use of the phrase—in its own story, based on Haeberle’s grisly photos and quotes from witnesses, including Vietnamese survivors. Haeberle again described what he witnessed, as did Michael Terry and other GIs. Especially moving was the personal experience of a father, Do Chuc, whose son and daughter were killed. “My family was eating breakfast when the Americans came… . Nothing was said to us. No explanation was given.”79
Hersh meanwhile came under fire from across the political spectrum. Critics warned that his news stories had hurt the war effort and damaged the nation’s influence throughout the world. Hadn’t Hersh worked for Senator Eugene McCarthy’s antiwar campaign for the presidency in 1968?
Hersh maintained that he was unconcerned about the charges. Years afterward he declared, “If I’m publishing something in the belief that what I’m doing is helping my country, it’s going to be hard to convict me of treason.” And to those military figures who urged him not to publish the story, he asserted, “It’s your job to keep it secret and my job to find it out… . If it’s a just war and it makes sense, it’s going to be reflected in the coverage.” He then added, “There was something wrong with that war.”80
By late November 1969, the U.S. Army itself appeared to be on public trial. It had aroused widespread suspicions of concealing the truth by refusing to make Henderson’s April 1968 report available to the public, defending its stand by arguing that it might “be introduced into evidence in the Calley case and other proceedings.” Republican senator Charles Percy of Illinois called for investigations by both the Pentagon and the Senate and accused the Defense Department of undermining the public’s confidence in the Pentagon by attempting to hide a massacre that took place almost two years earlier.81
The Pentagon prepared for lengthy sessions, defending itself before congressional committees as increasing numbers of Americans demanded the full story about their military’s actions. On November 24, Mendel Rivers of the House of Representatives took the lead in announcing that the Armed Services Investigative Subcommittee would examine the allegations of a massacre. A strong supporter of the war, Rivers knew the nation’s prestige was on the line, as was the Nixon administration’s peace efforts with North Vietnam. And the antiwar movement posed a major challenge. The most recent Gallup poll in late September 1969 showed that the majority of Americans thought the troop involvement was a mistake by 58 percent to 32 percent—a jump from a ratio of 54 percent to 37 percent a year earlier.82
Resor found it nearly impossible to ease the growing public suspicion that Washington’s leaders were covering up mass murders, especially when he had himself recently seen a secret staff memorandum of November 24 that raised some highly embarrassing questions. According to its findings, numerous witnesses attested that Charlie Company had met no ground resistance and yet continued firing on defenseless noncombatants, leaving about 350 victims who were primarily women and children gathered into groups. He also learned that “responsible individuals” were aware of these actions and made every effort “to conceal that information.”83
On November 26, the army’s defense strategy became clear when Resor, accompanied by army counsel Robert Jordan and General Richard Stillwell, deputy chief of staff for military operations, answered the summons of the Armed Services Committees in both the Senate and House to testify in separate and closed hearings about the alleged massacre. The secretary of the army first read a lengthy statement detailing what his department knew about the operation in Pinkville, including a helicopter pilot’s claim—Thompson’s, of course—that American soldiers were mercilessly killing Vietnamese civilians.84
The result, Resor continued, was an investigation by the brigade commander into the accusation, an investigation that concluded that no massacre or war crimes had occurred. Artillery preparation or cross fires during the battle had accidentally killed about twenty noncombatants, meaning that Viet Cong propaganda was responsible for the charge of mass murder and no war crime had occurred. The report of that investigation therefore stayed on the divisional level without reaching either MACV or the USARV (United States Army Republic of Vietnam).
The Department of the Army had moved quickly on first hearing of the incident through Ridenhour’s letter of late March 1969. After a preliminary inquiry justified decisive action, the chief of staff directed the inspector general to launch a full-scale investigation of Ridenhour’s allegations. A number of American soldiers remained under investigation for their roles in the alleged massacre, Resor noted, but the army had already filed murder charges against two of them, Calley and Mitchell. Article 32 proceedings had uncovered sufficient evidence to order Calley to face a court martial, while Mitchell still awaited the outcome of the investigation that would determine whether he too would stand trial in a military court.
Resor declared that he had discussed this incident with several officers who had served in Vietnam. “It is their judgment—a judgment which I personally endorse and share—that what apparently occurred at My Lai is wholly unrepresentative of the manner in which our forces conduct military operations in Vietnam.”85
For the first time, the army had admitted to mass murder being perpetrated by its soldiers at My Lai 4.
In both the Senate and House meetings, Resor assured legislators that he had provided everything the army knew “about the tragic events that took place in the hamlet.” In covering many details, however, he did not mention the estimated 350 Vietnamese civilians who had died in the assault. But he then had both committee rooms darkened to facilitate showing slides of Haeberle’s photographs in color. A number of congressional members had seen the black-and-white pictures on television or perhaps in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, but the impact of the color images was much stronger. The piles of bodies torn to pieces by M-16s and machine guns left a gory picture of blood and body matter that sickened even the hardest of viewers—including those who had refused to believe what Hersh had written or what Meadlo had claimed.86
Resor did not soften the impact of the hard truths told by these photographs by calling the incident at My Lai 4 an aberration. Democratic senator Daniel Inouye of Hawaii walked out of the committee meeting. He had seen tragedy in World War II, but even his loss of an arm in that conflict could not prepare him for what he saw that day. “Having been in combat myself, I thought I would be hardened, but I must say I am a bit sickened.” In the House committee meeting, Republican Leslie Arends of Illinois likewise left the room. “The pictures were pretty gruesome,” he explained to newsmen. “That’s why I walked out. I have one of those queasy stomachs.” The chair of the Senate’s Armed Services Committee, Democrat John Stennis of Mississippi, emphasized that what happened “was contrary to every rule and instruction the Army has issued in connection with the conduct of the South Vietnamese operation.”87
Democratic senator Stephen Young of Ohio was the only member of the Armed Services Committee to express concern for those who had died at My Lai 4. “It’s really terrifying and horrible, looking at a Vietnam woman—a young woman—standing up and begging, with young people all about her, and knowing that she would be killed an instant later by American bullets. No one can question there was an atrocious slaughter of from 200 to 300 civilians.”88
no longer could one ask whether a massacre had occurred; the questions now were how it could have happened, who was responsible, and why it had taken so long to become public knowledge. The answers to these three queries together raised this further question: Had there been a cover-up?