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The first official contact between a Vietnamese officer and the Americal Division was made by Colonel Nguyen Van Toan, commander of the 2nd ARVN Division, who decided to talk to his counterpart—one of the few Vietnamese to do so—about the allegations. Toan told the Peers Panel that he telephoned Major General Samuel Koster shortly after receiving the third report, dated April 11, from Lieutenant Tan, to “let him know about some rumor. We didn’t exactly know what happened, so I just let him know.” Toan also testified that he told Koster about his order to Khien for an investigation.
What was considered by Toan to be mere propaganda at best, or—at worst—something to cover up, was taken far more seriously by the career-minded Americal Division commander, who perhaps had thought Henderson’s oral report of March 20 had closed the incident. Shortly after the telephone call from Toan, Koster undoubtedly received a copy—perhaps purloined—of Tan’s third report from an American on the province advisory team. Koster flew almost immediately to Quang Ngai City to see Toan, although the general would confusedly insist later that he thought his visit took place in mid-May. But before going into Toan’s office, Koster said, he paid a visit to the province chief, Lieutenant Colonel Khien, and was assured that the Vietnamese official considered Lieutenant Tan’s reports from Son Tinh District to be Viet Cong propaganda. Also at that meeting, the general testified, was Lieutenant Colonel William Guinn, soon to be a battalion commander in the Americal Division. Koster could not remember, under questioning, specifically whether Lieutenant Tan’s third report was discussed during the meeting with Khien.
Koster then walked over to Toan’s office: “I really went there to see if he felt there was anything to this, if he was concerned about it, if he had a Vietnamese source that had been able to uncover anything that we hadn’t or that U.S. investigators hadn’t been able to check out. I don’t think he took the figures that had been put in the propaganda as being accurate, and I think I left with the idea … and gave him the idea—if he did uncover anything further, he should send it on to me.” Koster and Toan agreed in their testimony that no documents were provided to the American commander during their meeting; Koster was allowed, however, to examine one of 2nd ARVN Division’s files dealing with the allegations.
Over the next few weeks, there was unusually heavy traffic between the Americal Division headquarters and the Quang Ngai province advisory team. The division was then coordinating a series of military operations with the 2nd ARVN Division in the western half of the province, but even that didn’t explain the many telephone calls and personal visits between Chief of Staff Nels Parson, Province Adviser James May, and Lieutenant Colonel William Guinn. James Ritchie, who served as administrative sergeant in the headquarters, was one of many headquarters clerks who reported that “I knew something was up. There were far more people moving and going than usual during the next few weeks.”
It was during this time, Koster said, that he and his deputy, Brigadier General George Young, had “numerous discussions” about the Vietnamese accusations. General Young similarly testified that he had discussed Tan’s third report with Guinn during a routine meeting at province headquarters: “I don’t recall any names or the number of people involved, and I don’t recall if I informed General Koster of any numbers involved, or the names of the villages, other than it was located north and east of Quang Ngai City.” Young said he did not ask for a copy of the report, and said, to the amazement of the Panel, that he did not connect the new allegations with the Task Force Barker operation of March 16 “because, if I recall properly, this information was [provided] sometime after the incident, which allegedly occurred on the 16th of March … I never tied these two factors together.” Questioned sharply about that failure, Young acknowledged that “looking back on it, I can see it was strange, and we should very possibly have dug into it deeper than we did.”
General Koster said that he at no time thought that he was investigating a war crime, despite the receipt of specific allegations accusing American troops of the slaughter of nearly five hundred Vietnamese civilians: “I considered those [allegations to be] emanating from a Viet Cong source and a propaganda-type document.” The general’s testimony about his view of the new evidence contrasted sharply with his next move; he sent directly to Colonel Henderson a private, “eyes only,” letter demanding that he investigate the Vietnamese allegations. Enclosed was a copy of Lieutenant Tan’s third report.
The existence of the letter was revealed to the Panel by Robert Gerberding, the intelligence sergeant for the 11th Brigade. Gerberding said that the letter, which arrived about April 20,* was written on Americal Division stationery and specifically called on Henderson to complete an in-depth investigation. The sergeant was shown a copy of Tan’s report and identified it as the one that was enclosed with the general’s letter.†
But General Koster did not recall sending the letter. He initially testified: “It seems to me that I directed him [Henderson] to do something about it [the Vietnamese allegations] … but I don’t specifically remember it being in writing or how it went or the sequence of it.” Later he suggested that “I was not inclined to write personal notes like that. If one had been sent, I would have said that it could have been prepared by either General Young or Colonel Parson.” Those officers, however, separately denied sending the letter. The major general went so far as to insist, after being confronted with Gerberding’s testimony, that he had never seen Tan’s third report—one of a few direct contradictions that emerged from his statements to the Panel. (A few days before Koster’s appearance, Colonel Parson had testified that he saw a Vietnamese letter or report about My Lai 4 on Koster’s desk in Chu Lai.) Koster further claimed, however, that he did not obtain any information from the Vietnamese “until, on my own instigation, I went around and talked to them.”
Koster, Toan and Khien all agreed in their testimony that there were no documents exchanged in their meetings, raising an obvious and important question. If, as Gerberding testified, Koster did in fact send a letter to Henderson with a copy of Tan’s report enclosed, where did he get it? One possible answer, based on my own interviews, was that Tan’s report was transmitted to Koster by Anistranski, who had been told by Lieutenant Colonel Guinn to deliver an “eyes only” envelope to the general from Quang Ngai province headquarters. Asked specifically by General Peers if Guinn could have given him a copy of the Tan report, Koster, again speaking vaguely, indicated he did not think so: “I can’t say how all this first came to our attention, but I wouldn’t have put myself in the channel of communication for Colonel Guinn to go through.” The general added, however, “I think he would have kept us informed of what was going on in the province.”
Colonel Henderson also denied any knowledge of Koster’s letter ordering him to file a report, saying that “I am positive that I received no letter from General Koster.” He also denied ever seeing Tan’s third report, despite Gerberding’s testimony. But he did begin asking questions again. Why? Henderson explained it was not because of a letter from Koster but because of the receipt of a mysterious and unsigned statement referring to an allegation that American troops had slaughtered more than four hundred civilians. Henderson said that the statement also indicated that Lieutenant Tan, the Son Tinh district chief, did not give the allegations much importance. The colonel attached the document, without comment or explanation, to his resulting report to Koster.
The origin of the statement became a major concern of the Peers Panel; it was finally determined that the unsigned document was nothing more than a copy of the refutation prepared earlier by Captain Angel Rodriguez of Son Tinh district headquarters. Henderson steadfastly maintained that he had never seen the initial Rodriguez document, but received his statement—the one eventually given to Koster—from his staff. Both the statement and a copy of a Viet Cong propaganda leaflet about Son My, Henderson claimed at one point, were delivered to his intelligence officer, Lieutenant Colonel Richard Blackledge. “I do not know how he got the report,” Henderson said. He added that copies of both documents were sent by his staff to division headquarters for its perusal.
Within two days of the mysterious receipt of the statement and the propaganda leaflet, the colonel said he decided to visit Colonel Toan—just as Koster earlier had—at the 2nd ARVN headquarters. As Henderson recounted it, he showed Toan the leaflet and told the Vietnamese officer that “I was very much interested in this thing and that when he looked into this I would make available to him a battalion or any number of troops to go into this area …” Toan assured him that the leaflet was simply propaganda and said, according to Henderson, “There is no truth to this, absolutely no truth to this.” Henderson continued, “When I finished discussing this with … Toan, I immediately went over to Colonel Khien’s headquarters … and met with Mr. May, who was a civilian adviser … and I believe I met for the first time Lieutenant Colonel Guinn … and I explained to [Khien] my regret and how disturbed I was over this thing, and that I wanted to get to the bottom of it.” Khien also characterized the allegations as Viet Cong propaganda, Henderson said.
Two or three days after his visit, Henderson said, “General Young came down and said General Koster wants you to—and it was not to make an investigation because I specifically asked, ‘Does he want this open again and a formal investigation?’ and General Young said, ‘No, this paper you sent up, this VC propaganda message, has tripped his memory here a little bit, and he just wants some back-up in the files here if anything further should develop on the matter. So provide him with a written report.’ ” At this point, Henderson said, he sat down and wrote a report, relying on notes taken during his interviews the month before—when only the Thompson confrontation with ground troops and the allegations of wild shootings were being investigated.
Many other witnesses contradicted some aspects of Henderson’s testimony. General Young testified he had no recollection of a conversation in late April with Henderson about a written report. Lieutenant Colonel Blackledge testified that his office relayed to Colonel Henderson not the statement nor a Viet Cong propaganda leaflet, but only some incomplete allegations of an atrocity which were being disseminated by the Viet Cong.‡ Blackledge added that he knew nothing about the origin of the statement attached to the Henderson investigation. And Henderson himself eventually gave two different reasons to the Peers Panel to explain how he obtained the Rodriguez statement. Initially, he testified that the statement—Tan’s third report plus Rodriguez’ skeptical evaluation—had been supplied to Blackledge’s office by the 52nd Military Intelligence Detachment stationed at Duc Pho, which had a liaison officer at Quang Ngai. Henderson next testified that Tan’s third report was read to him by Colonel Khien, who then evaluated it in terms similar to that which appeared in the statement. Finally, Henderson acknowledged that he really did not know how or from where he received the information.
The Panel proposed a third possible source. “We have had it suggested that it came to you from an individual at province on the U.S. advisory team,” one of the panelists told Henderson, referring to William Guinn.
Henderson’s subsequent report to General Koster, dated April 24, included two enclosures: the Viet Cong propaganda leaflet and the Rodriguez material, which was shorn of its signature bank but inadvertently retained its April 14 date. The fourteenth, of course, was the day that Rodriguez forwarded it to the Quang Ngai province headquarters. The document was attached to Henderson’s report under the simple heading, “Statement.” Henderson’s classified report, addressed to the commanding general, Americal Division, said:
1. An investigation has been conducted of allegations cited in inclosure 1 [the Rodriguez statement]. The following are the results of this investigation.
2. On the day in question, 16 March 1968 … Task Force Barker, 11th Inf Bge, conducted a combat air assault in the vicinity of My Lai hamlet (Son My village) in eastern Son Tinh District. This area has long been an enemy stronghold and Task Force Barker had met heavy enemy opposition in this area on 12 and 23 February 1968. All persons living in this area are considered to be VC or VC sympathizers by the district chief. Artillery and gunship preparatory fires were placed on the landing zones used by the two companies. Upon landing and during their advance on the enemy positions, the attacking forces were supported by gunships … By 1500 all enemy resistance had ceased and the remaining enemy forces had withdrawn. The results of this operations were 128 VC KIA. During preparatory fires and the ground action by the attacking companies 20 noncombatants caught in the battle were killed. U.S. forces suffered 2 KHA [killed by hostile action] and 10 WHA [wounded by hostile action] by booby traps and 1 man slightly wounded in the foot by small arms fire … Interviews [here Henderson listed only Lieutenant Colonel Barker, Major Calhoun, Captains Medina and Michles] revealed that at no time were there any civilians gathered together and killed by U.S. soldiers. The civilian habitants in the area began withdrawing to the southwest as soon as the operation began and within the first hour and a half all visible civilians had cleared the area of operation.
3. The Son Tinh district chief does not give the allegations any importance and he pointed out that the two hamlets where the incident is alleged to have happened are in an area controlled by the VC since 1964. Col. Toan … reported that the making of such allegations against U.S. forces is a common technique of the VC propaganda machine. Inclosure 2 is a translation of an actual VC propaganda message targeted at the ARVN soldier and urging him to shoot Americans. This message was given to this headquarters by the CO, 2nd ARVN Division [Toan], on about 17 April 1968 … It makes the same allegation as made by the Son My village chief in addition to other claims of atrocities by American soldiers.
4. It is concluded that 20 noncombatants were inadvertently killed when caught in the area of preparatory fires and in the crossfires of the U.S. and VC forces on 16 March 1968. It is further concluded that no civilians were gathered together and shot by U.S. soldiers. The allegation that U.S. forces shot and killed 450–500 civilians is obviously a Viet Cong propaganda move to discredit the United States in the eyes of the Vietnamese people in general and the ARVN soldier in particular.
5. It is recommended that a counter-propaganda campaign be waged against the VC in eastern Son Tinh District.
The report, signed by Henderson, obviously relied heavily on Lieutenant Colonel Frank Barker’s after-action report. The original typed copy was placed in a double-sealed envelope marked “For CG [Commanding General] Eyes Only” and sent by courier to division headquarters at Chu Lai. Only one copy was kept in brigade headquarters, according to Sergeant Gerberding, who was in charge of filing it, and it was handled on a “close-hold” basis. “I kept this [the copy] in what I called my personal or confidential file,” the sergeant explained. “And it was not filed with the normal correspondence.” Gerberding’s personal file was in his desk, where, he said, “I kept things I didn’t want anybody else to see.”
The Army later found the carbon file copy in Gerberding’s safe, where someone had moved it; it was the only existing record of any investigation in connection with My Lai 4.
The file copy was initialed RKB, for Richard K. Blackledge, and its existence enabled the Peers Panel to confront a witness with documented evidence that contradicted his testimony (the lack of records prevented the investigators from directly challenging the many witnesses who simply could not recall a fact, or said they were not sure what had happened). Blackledge was asked if he had ever seen the Henderson report prior to his testimony in 1970. “Negative, absolutely negative,” the former intelligence officer replied. “I never saw this until I came here …” After being shown his initialed file copy, Blackledge made this statement: “I now retract what I said because those are my initials and I recognize the way I write my initials. But I don’t recall the document … I had nothing to do with the preparation. In fact—well, you caught me with my pants down. That’s my initials right on there, so I must have seen it, but I just don’t recall. I know damn well I didn’t have anything to do with preparing it.”
The Peers Panel found it amazing that Koster did not challenge Henderson’s inclusion of an unidentified statement in his report; a statement, moreover, that referred to two letters alleging American atrocities—an undated one from Do Dinh Luyen, the Son My village chief, to Lieutenant Tan, and Tan’s subsequent April 11 report to Quang Ngai—neither of which was attached.
“General Koster,” one of the panelists said, “I believe I know you as a senior officer. I don’t think you’d let Colonel Henderson get away with submitting a paper like this dated 14 April without having a copy of that 11 April [Tan’s] report available, or without knowing whose statement this was, or where it came from. I just don’t think that that would have happened. I believe the first question you would have asked is, ‘Where did you get this statement? Whose is it? Where is that letter of 11 April? What does it say?’ ” Koster’s answer again was foggy: “I would have to agree with you, but I don’t recall this portion of it … I do not recall the 11 April letter was ever shown to me. The first time I really remember seeing this statement as such was when I saw the [Henderson report]. This is the only time I recall …” Told that Captain Rodriguez had written the statement, Koster said, “I wondered whose statement that was. I have never really known.”
Henderson similarly was unable to give a satisfactory answer when asked, “How can you include in your report of investigation a statement—one, you don’t know where you got it; two, you don’t know who the author is; and I would say three, in the opening paragraph of this statement it refers to a letter from the village chief to the district chief. How can you possibly include a statement like this without knowing where you got it, who the author of it was, or having never seen the back-up materials?” Henderson simply replied, “Sir, I just can’t remember …”
The panelists found it difficult to believe that there wasn’t some collusion between Koster, Henderson, and perhaps Lieutenant Colonel William Guinn. “It is absolutely inconceivable to me,” one of them told Henderson, “that you as a senior commander would, unless there is more that is known between yourself and General Koster than has been brought forward to the present time, that you could have sent a paper forward to General Koster that you didn’t know the origin of.”
Although Henderson’s report was sent as a high-priority “eyes only” message, Koster testified that he did not recall seeing it until he returned from a brief vacation to Hawaii in early May. As usual, his recollection was imprecise. At another point, Koster testified that even if he had seen the report before departing on his vacation, he would not have taken any action on it, “but turned it over to General Young for his consideration.”
Henderson, however, testified that “two or three days after I delivered the letter to Division, General Young visited me and informed me that General Koster had seen the report and had passed it to him, and he felt that General Koster was satisfied with the report.” Henderson added that Young told him, “This issue was now dropped and that the thing had been put to bed and there was no evidence supporting allegations. I recall telling Colonel Barker, ‘I hope we heard the last of this thing now.’ ”
By the time Koster returned from his vacation, however, he had decided that the written report of April 24 was inadequate. “As best I recall,” Koster said, “it was not my intent that this [the report] should be limited to only some discussion of some VC propaganda.” The division commander further said he and his staff “discussed the adequacy of the report” and decided to request Henderson to submit a full analysis, covering not only the new Vietnamese allegations but Hugh Thompson’s claims of indiscriminate shooting. Koster wasn’t sure how or when the decision was relayed to Henderson: “I would have said it would have been either General Young or Colonel Parson or perhaps by direct communication. I would have said one of those two … I know General Young was in agreement that what we had here wasn’t what we had in mind when we asked for a written report of investigation.”
Henderson confirmed Koster’s account. He told the Panel that Young made another trip to the Duc Pho headquarters area in early May and informed him that Koster now wanted a formal investigation of the incident to embrace all of the allegations—both from the Vietnamese and the pilots. General Young “had no knowledge of any additional data which the division commander—which I didn’t have,” Henderson said. “I discussed with him who the logical individual was to perform the investigation and told him that if he had no objections, I would assign Colonel Barker to it. And General Young … indicated to me that this was certainly satisfactory.”
Henderson then had this incredible exchange with a member of the Peers Panel:
Q. Doesn’t it seem unusual, however, to have somebody investigating himself?
A. At no point at this time had I been led to believe or had any information that Colonel Barker was personally involved in this.
Q. No, his unit. When I say himself I am referring to something which took place in units under his command.
A. No, frankly, it did not enter my mind.
No orders were issued by division or brigade headquarters officially naming Barker as the investigating officer, a step that is a prime requirement of Army military regulations governing such official inquiries. Henderson testified that he simply went to Barker and “told him that General Koster, the division commander, wanted a formal investigation and that he was to take statements from anybody and everybody who was directly or indirectly related to this incident and that I wanted these statements taken in adequate detail to prove or disprove that anything had taken place.” The date was about May 10, Henderson recalled, and Barker completed his report the next week. “To the best of my knowledge,” the colonel testified, “the report included statements from certainly all of the company commanders, from various pilots … from enlisted personnel, both Charlie and Bravo Companies, it included statements from personnel working in the battalion TOC [operations center].”
Barker’s formal report concluded once again that twenty civilians had been killed by artillery and gunships, Henderson said. He added, “There was no term of atrocity used, or massacre or anything of this nature. There was no evidence to support that any soldier had willfully or negligently wounded or killed civilians during this operation.” Henderson estimated that Barker attached fifteen to twenty single-page signed statements to his three-page covering report. The colonel said he submitted Barker’s work with a written endorsement saying that “I had reviewed the investigation … that the facts and circumstances cited throughout the investigation agreed generally with my own personal inquiry into the matter … and I recommended that the report be accepted.”
General Young continually maintained that he could recall no conversations with Henderson about the April 24 written report to Koster and also denied any knowledge at all of the subsequent Barker report. But Henderson testified that Young came to visit him in mid-May “and told me that he had read the [Barker] report, had discussed it with General Koster again and that he recommended that General Koster buy [the] report, that he thought it had all the pertinent details in it, and this is the last that I have heard of that report. I received no further comeback from General Koster or anyone else.”
The Peers Panel was subsequently unable to find any copies of the formal Barker report, either in the headquarters of the Americal Division or the 11th Brigade. In addition, only two of the nearly four hundred witnesses who appeared before the Panel claimed to have any knowledge of it—Colonel Henderson and Major General Koster. Even in the face of hostile questioning, Koster maintained that such a report did come into his headquarters. “I am positive that there was a stack of statements,” he testified with assurance. “These were written statements by a number of the people who had been interrogated verbally prior to that time, and I know there was a sheaf of papers … that included these reports.”
If such a report was indeed prepared by Frank Barker, the evidence was overwhelming that it was a complete fraud. None of the principals in the My Lai 4 investigation, including Captain Medina, Hugh Thompson, Major Watke, and Lieutenant Colonel Holladay, had knowledge of any further inquiries. For them, the investigation had ended a few days after it began in March.
Koster further testified that he did give a copy of the formal report to Colonel Nels Parson, for filing. “I thought it was the report with all the statements as being the last thing of the case,” Koster explained. “Certainly, when we compiled them [the My Lai 4 documents], we would have filed them for any future reference there might have been.”
During the weeks following My Lai 4, Thompson and many other pilots and crewmen in the 123rd had remained angered and demoralized by the Americal Division’s failure to investigate the massacre and punish the offending participants. Thompson was personally convinced that his two crewmen deserved medals for helping him rescue the threatened civilians at My Lai 4, even though there were no enemy troops opposing them. He put both in for citations. By so doing, he made it easy for one of his superiors, fully aware of Thompson’s bitterness over My Lai 4, to reward him in turn for keeping his peace and continuing to be one of the boys.§
On April 23 the Americal Division awarded a Bronze Star to Glenn U. Andreotta, a two-year veteran of Vietnam who had flown with Hugh Thompson as a door gunner on March 16. The award was made posthumously; Andreotta died before its final approval. He was honored for his heroism “in connection with military operations against a hostile force” at My Lai 4. Andreotta was credited with saving the lives of civilians hiding in a bunker “located between friendly forces and hostile forces engaged in a heavy fire fight.” Major Frederic Watke signed the falsified recommendation; an eyewitness statement was submitted by Thompson. A few weeks later Specialist Four Lawrence Colburn, the other door gunner, also got a Bronze Star. A medal was sought for Thompson, too, and he eventually received the Distinguished Flying Cross. The citation that came with the pilot’s medal noted that Thompson had rescued fifteen young Vietnamese children who were “caught in the intense cross fire” at My Lai 4. “Officer Thompson’s heroic actions saved several innocent lives while his sound judgment greatly enhanced Vietnamese–American relations in the operational area,” the citation, written by the 123rd Aviation Battalion, said. The Peers Panel discovered the original typewritten file copy of the citation and noted that the phrase “caught in the intense cross fire” had been scratched in between two typed lines with a pen, apparently at the last moment.
There’s no question that Thompson felt guilty about his award, which he did accept—in the Army, one just doesn’t refuse such honors. Father Carl Creswell described Thompson’s attitude to the Panel: “He came in that day [after getting the medal], and he had the box and the citation … He read it and then threw it in his footlocker.”
In June, Lieutenant Colonel Khien, the Quang Ngai province chief, finally decided to make his on-the-spot investigation of the atrocity allegations contained in Lieutenant Tan’s third report in April. He personally led two groups of rural forces into Son My village. A dispute during the Peers Panel testimony arose over the extent of the resistance in Son My and what Khien learned about My Lai 4 there from the survivors.a In any case, as Khien later told an investigator for the C.I.D., he never filed a formal report and considered his operation a failure.
There was a tragic aftermath. On the second day of Khien’s operation, an Air Force observation plane collided near My Lai 4 with a helicopter carrying Lieutenant Colonel Frank Barker, by then promoted to a battalion commander in the 11th Brigade. With Barker was one of his former company commanders, Captain Earl Michles, late of Bravo Company, who was then serving as battalion intelligence officer. Both men were killed.
That day, too, Major William Ford, a local forces adviser who also was on the mission, became the first American to enter My Lai 4 since Charlie Company’s assault. He described the area to the Panel: “The houses were demolished. There were quite a few VC entrenchments there … This was a VC village and dug in to be defended … this was a typical VC village.” There were fewer than twenty old men, old women, and children living in the area, Ford said. “They were scared to death,” he added. “I saw the women and children myself. They were scared. They were frightened.”
* On that day, ironically, General Westmoreland visited the 11th Brigade headquarters at Duc Pho for a routine briefing, one in which the seemingly successful Task Force Barker operations may have been described.
† Gerberding also told the Panel that most of the Task Force Barker personnel he talked with considered Tan to be a Viet Cong sympathizer, apparently as a result of his assiduous reporting of the My Lai 4 and My Khe 4 massacres. “I guess it was felt by our people working up there [that] … he was reluctant and hesitant and it was felt that he just did not want to fully cooperate with the Americans. He knew on which side his bread was buttered.”
‡ Blackledge told the Peers Panel that he received a fragmentary intelligence report indicating the Viet Cong were claiming that up to five hundred civilians had been slain by American soldiers. “It did not name people who had been killed nor did it cover a three-day period, as far as I can recall,” the intelligence officer said. The document, however, did list the date of the alleged massacre, and Blackledge concluded that “it had to be our people that were there at the time.” Blackledge said he mentioned the allegation to Henderson, who told him that “division is aware of it and looking into it.” A few days later a propaganda leaflet was handed to a guard on duty outside the brigade headquarters by two Vietnamese children; this, too, Blackledge said, described the Son My massacre. “I … thought it was propaganda the whole time,” Blackledge said of the two pieces of information. “I never thought otherwise, except that it was a little different kind of propaganda.” He was shown a copy of the Viet Cong propaganda leaflet submitted by Henderson in his April 24 report; Blackledge claimed that he had never seen it before. There was a bizarre footnote. Captain Richard J. Holbrook, the assistant intelligence officer for the 11th Brigade, told the Panel that he, too, had seen the propaganda leaflet describing the Son My massacre. Asked if he knew how Lieutenant Colonel Blackledge, his superior, obtained the document, Holbrook replied, “I recall it exactly and specifically. On that day I had been working and I was sleeping during the day. I was living in a tent and we had a Vietnamese girl that came in to clean up and do things like that. I had told her that she could use my radio, to turn it on while she was shining shoes or while she was working. She picked up the radio and said, ‘It’s VC! It’s VC!’ … Of course I don’t understand Vietnamese and the broadcast was in Vietnamese. I called down to the 2 [intelligence] shop, got the driver to come and bring this girl with the radio still tuned to that station over to the 52nd MI [military intelligence] Detachment to one of their interpreters, and that’s where that came from, sir.” Holbrook explained that the interpreter instantaneously translated the broadcast—a claim that the Peers Panel found difficult to believe.
§ Thompson’s action in accepting a patently false reward and also signing a falsified witness statement came under heavy censure by a special subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee that conducted its own investigation in 1970 of the My Lai 4 massacre. The subcommittee devoted eleven pages in its subsequent fifty-three-page published report to Thompson’s action in opposing Calley at My Lai 4 and his receipt of the Distinguished Flying Cross. The report of the Congressional group, published July 15, 1970, suggested that the medal for Thompson and his crew “might have been part of an effort to cast the best light upon an operation of Americal Division which had resulted in serious criticism of the action of its troops.” There were more persuasive reasons. Captain Thelmar Moe, a section leader for the 123rd Aviation Battalion, told the Peers Panel that “it seemed highly improbable that they [the crew members] would receive an award and he [Thompson] didn’t. So I believe we solicited someone to provide a statement as to Thompson’s merits on that particular day.” Moe added that he wasn’t sure which officer initiated the award.
a Khien explained to General Peers that as his men started to enter the My Lai 4 area, there was sporadic firing by Viet Cong units and some shelling. Robert T. Burke, a young Foreign Service officer who had just replaced James May as senior province adviser, accompanied Khien into the field that day. He said that he was impressed by the fact that Khien “spent a lot of time talking to the villagers. They were kind of taking cover, I guess. There was a little bit of firing going on.” Lieutenant Colonel John Green, who was still attached to the advisory team, described the engagement as more intense: “No sooner than we got out of there they [the Viet Cong] did start firing mortars right in there where we were standing.” In his C.I.D. statement, Khien said he and his men “met heavy resistance from the enemy” that limited his ability to interview the Son My residents. The few survivors of the Task Force Barker assault who were interviewed told him, Khien testified, that about one hundred civilians were killed during a fire fight between American and Viet Cong forces. Only about twenty or thirty of the victims were women and children, Khien claimed, and fifty or sixty of the dead were guerrillas, Viet Cong, or troops.