American Experience (1988–…): Season 22, Episode 6 - My Lai - full transcript
American Experience investigates the My Lai massacre an atrocity during the Vietnam War that killed more than 300 unarmed civilians.
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Someone needs to stop Clearway Law.
Public shouldn't leave reviews for lawyers.
It was the summer of 1969.
I was an Army prosecutor
at Fort Benning, Georgia.
I was sitting in my office
and my supervisor walked in,
closed the door, looked at me
and said,
"Have you ever heard
of Pinkville?"
And I said, "No, I haven't."
And he briefly described
what Pinkville was.
It was a place
on a map of Vietnam,
and there had been
an operation there.
Charges have been made
that troops killed
as many as 567
South Vietnamese civilians
during a sweep in March 1968.
A lieutenant has been charged
with murder
and a staff sergeant with
assault with intent to murder.
By that point the Army had
conducted an investigation.
Quite a record had been
established.
A lot of people had been
interviewed.
Did Captain Medina say anything
about what the company should
do in the village?
He said that there wasn't going
to be anything left alive
in the village.
It was clear that many, many
people had died.
Old men, women with children
in their arms, and babies.
And they had been unarmed,
they had been unresisting,
and they had been,
in my judgment, massacred.
Lt. Calley came back and he
said, "Take care of 'em."
When they were all just lined
up and shot like that,
it sort of reminded me
of newsreels of Hitler.
There certainly appeared that
there had been an effort
to cover up what happened
at My Lai.
Did Mr. Thompson mention
anything to you
about landing alongside
of a ditch
that contained a large number
of bodies?
No, sir, he did not report
to me any instance
of a U.S. soldier firing
into a ditch.
To bring a case like this,
given its potential magnitude,
it had to be solid.
It had to be very strong.
It had to be believable.
And it had to make believable
an event
which nobody would ever want
to believe.
The question was, what was the
scale that we were dealing with?
How big was this and who did it?
Who killed these people?
Charlie Company was
a cross-section
of just your general,
basic young people
at that point in time.
We were from all over
the country.
You know, East Coast, West
Coast, blacks, whites, Mexicans.
There was nothing special
about us.
We were just your common,
ordinary teen.
I'd gone to college for a couple
of semesters after high school.
I wasn't cut out for college.
I went to be a teacher
and it was like no,
Having grown up with parents
that came from World War II
and people that were in
the Korean War and everything,
being exposed to their
generations,
yeah, you felt it was
basically your duty
to go ahead and go to war.
LAWRENCE La CROIX:
My father was a battalion
commander in World War II.
I considered him
kind of a cross between
John Wayne and Steve McQueen
or something.
I did have a notion of what
it was going to be like,
that it was patriotic,
that it was the thing to do.
I was born in Utah.
Pretty typical Mormon family.
I went into the army
right out of high school.
In the Vietnam War, U.S. Marines
battled North Vietnamese
Vietnam was all around us.
You know, it was in the press
and talking about it in school,
and we had a real strong
curiosity.
We wanted to see it
for ourselves.
The artillery is trying to
suppress a Communist attack
on Baker Company, which is about
5,000 meters to our front.
Aside from just a sense
of adventure,
I was caught up a little bit
in the domino theory,
that it truly was
a necessary war.
You know, when I first went,
I was into the idea
that I was going to free
these people
and stop Communists
from spreading.
I didn't go over there to be
a hero or nothing.
I went over there to do my job.
When I first landed in Hawaii,
I thought I was in paradise.
I mean, 70-some degrees
at 3:00 in the morning
and then they bused us south
to Schofield barracks
and there's banana trees
and everything,
so I thought it was paradise.
It didn't take long
for that to end.
The east range, where we did
most of our training,
it was straight up and down
and it was a real jungle.
It's quite clear that in Hawaii,
they excelled themselves
in the jungles.
Charlie Company was voted
the best company
in the First 20th Battalion.
Their captain was almost
a folk hero.
Medina had come up
through the ranks
from a Mexican-American
background.
He related to the men.
He was a hard man... you didn't
give them an easy time...
But they respected him,
and many of them loved him.
The motto of the Army
is "Follow Me"
and he was the type
of individual
you would follow anywhere
and do anything for.
La CROIX:
I found Captain Medina to be
a very tough individual,
very demanding.
He wanted us to be something
unique and different
and strong and capable
and a force to deal with.
Captain Medina came up
with the idea
that we were going to be called
"The Death Dealers."
He wanted us to carry
aces of spades,
and every time we killed
a Viet Cong,
we were to leave the ace
of spades on it
so that they knew that it was
from the Death Dealers.
Lt. Calley was the platoon
leader of the first platoon.
Young lieutenants are not liked
very well.
Some are quite gung-ho,
some are quite interested in
making a name for themselves.
Calley was sort of a mixture;
he wanted to fit in.
I think when he found
the military
he thought he found his calling,
he found a place to fit in.
My first impression
of Lieutenant Calley
was he was always trying
to please Captain Medina.
He'd go out of his way to do
things that were not called for
and, you know,
trying to please Captain Medina
and that, to me, it made...
in my mind it made Captain
Medina resent him even more.
Captain Medina would just
call him
a little shit or something.
And he ridiculed Calley.
He made Calley feel inadequate,
and Calley was always trying
to do things
to show that he was
a real officer.
By asserting his rank,
he basically shielded himself
from his men,
he'd isolate himself.
Rank went to his head.
And that's... that's a no-no.
For the first month, it was,
like, "Where's the war?"
We had a lot of free time.
The lounges, you know,
the bars... it was really nice.
We said, "Hey, I could do this
for a year."
We'd walk through the villages,
mostly women, children,
older people.
We really didn't encounter
anything when we went.
It didn't seem like there was
a war going on over there.
You would go to a village,
set up a perimeter.
Medics and doctors would come
in, treat the civilians,
and we'd sit there and
play with the kids and...
There was nothing else to do.
We always had fun with the kids.
When I was young,
I saw American soldiers.
Whenever they came, they would
gather up everyone.
They would bring cake and candy
for the children.
Everyone would have some and
then they would let us go home.
I never would have imagined,
never would have thought
Americans would kill us.
When my children came home
and asked
if American soldiers were
killers, I said, "No.
Americans don't kill."
Task Force Barker was set up
around February.
Its real function
was to try and break
the infrastructure
of the North Vietnamese Army
and the Viet Cong
in that central plain
of Quang Ngai Province.
Quang Ngai province has had
a reputation for 300 years
for hating foreign
occupying forces,
whether they were Chinese,
French,
Japanese or Americans.
They just did not like strangers
coming in among them
and then exercising
military power.
Great areas of the province had
been declared "free fire zones."
What that meant was you just
kept up a constant round
of the bombing of villages.
The U.S. military loved to quote
from Mao Zedong,
especially the saying that
"The guerrillas are the fish
and the people are the sea."
But their solution to that
problem was to drain the sea.
Bullets can kill the enemy,
but bullets can also make
an enemy.
They can manufacture an enemy.
And I felt at times during
my stay there
that we were cranking out enemy
soldiers or sympathizers
by the way we treated the place.
Soldiers had thought they were
gonna go in there
and be welcomed by the people
whom they were going to save.
Some of them thought it was
going to be like
going into Paris after D-Day.
What they encountered instead
was hostility.
Outright hostility and
resentment from these people.
When I was eight years old,
I realized the war had come.
There were many times when
the American soldiers
would set up operations around
this area and raid and shoot.
So my mother brought me
and my siblings together
Every night we had to crawl
into the shelter to sleep.
We had to avoid the American
bombs and shootings.
That was our misery:
war from the Americans.
We started pulling regular
patrols end of January,
beginning of February.
Once we started down
to the Pinkville area,
we started to lose people.
They were being
picked off one by one.
This is when we got our
initiation into the realities
of Vietnam with booby traps,
mines, snipers.
Over here!
The Quang Ngai area was called
Pinkville
because on the military maps
it was shaded
a bright kind of
shimmering pink.
The color pink took on
associations for us
that went way beyond anything
you'll find on some color chart.
It meant... it meant
the prospect of death.
Weber was the first member
that we lost.
That had a real impact
on the whole company
because we actually
had somebody killed now.
We were down by a river and
walking on the rice paddies,
and we were going down
to this village
that was kind of in a corner
of the river
and we started taking
sniper fire.
Lieutenant Calley wanted us
to go across the river
to where that sniper fire
was coming from.
Well, we hadn't hardly
got started
and there was a sniper round
and it got Bill Weber.
He pretty well died on the scene
but not without a lot
of anguish.
He was a good guy to everybody.
When he got killed,
it's just like part
of your family,
they destroyed part
of your family.
But that... I considered Charlie
Company part of my family.
It wasn't long after that
we started taking
more casualties.
We're in the process
of crossing,
receiving sporadic sniper fire,
over.
When you're dealing
with snipers,
it's like a roulette wheel.
You know, there's 30 or 40 of us
out there walking around.
Which one of us
is going to get it?
You know, you...
it's-it's a roll of the dice.
And the same thing
with the booby traps.
The infantryman lives
on the ground.
He walks on the ground,
he sleeps on the ground,
he eats on the ground.
When you've got booby traps
and land mines,
all of a sudden the earth
becomes the enemy, in a way,
because you don't know
what it may conceal.
Where do you sit,
and where do you put your feet?
There or there?
And that choice
is life or death.
Keith, speak to me.
Yeah, I'm still alive.
Speak to me... what's your name,
tell me what your name is.
Where are you from?
Seattle, Washington.
Seattle, Washington?
It's a good town.
Good town, good town.
Can I go to sleep, Doc?
No, don't go to sleep.
I don't want you
going to sleep at all.
You can't fight;
there's nothing to fight.
I need a knife, I need a knife.
You can't fight a mine.
You can't fight a booby trap.
You can't fight a sniper.
You can try and find that sniper
and eliminate him,
but they hit and run.
Get me out of here.
You just wanted to get up
and yell,
and we did.
You know, we yelled,
"Come on out," you know,
but... they wouldn't,
you know, they were snipers,
they were probably over there
laughing at us, you know.
They wouldn't come out.
They wouldn't come out.
This went on for several weeks.
They're gradually losing
more and more wounded
until they came to a minefield.
Our second platoon
was in one area
and first platoon was ahead
of us in another area,
but we walked into minefields
almost simultaneously.
Once the first mine was tripped,
anybody who moved was setting
off booby traps.
It was like nonstop.
Somebody would go to try
to help somebody
they would hit a booby trap;
they'd get blown up.
I could see 'em going off
and I heard people screaming
"Medic, medic."
You lay there for a minute,
then you know you gotta get up,
you gotta go.
We were a close-knit group.
We were there for each other,
and that was the problem.
Somebody got hurt, you went
to help them, regardless.
You didn't care about
the other mines;
you went to help somebody.
And in the end it cost more
individuals getting hurt.
Bobby Wilson was in my squad.
We were in single file and there
was other guys behind us,
and we were walking along and
this huge explosion went off
and it knocked me to the ground,
and Bobby Wilson had tripped
a Bouncing Betty.
Bobby was pretty well
split in half,
right up the middle.
And Medina was running
through the minefield,
barking out orders.
He seemed to be fearless.
He was split as if somebody
had taken a cleaver
right up from his crotch all
the way up to his chest cavity.
I've never seen anything
that looked so unreal
in my entire life.
We took a poncho
and we spread it out.
The medic started to pick him
up by the legs.
I reached underneath his arms
to place him onto the poncho
and we set him on top
another mine.
My company by this time had
suffered approximately
25 to 28 casualties.
I was down somewhere to
the vicinity of 105 men.
I believe the month of February
was our most devastating month
for Charlie Company.
It drove us to the ground.
It's just like
if you had a wound,
and they would stick something
in that wound
and go a little bit deeper.
Every time somebody else got
killed, you know,
it was like that wound,
and-and it would go
a little deeper.
You know, and the hurt
never stopped.
Down.
Get down.
Over to the left.
Your mindset has to change
and you got to somehow
figure out how to adapt.
Hands down!
Your attitude towards
the villagers...
Now everybody's an enemy.
You don't know who to trust.
You don't know who is a friend,
who is a foe.
You don't have a scorecard
to tell you,
well, this village over here
is friendly to you,
Or this village over here is
sympathetic to the Communists.
And you start to wonder
who's who.
La CROIX:
They know where the mines
and booby traps are.
They have to or they can't work
in the fields,
they can't move between
villages.
So they know
where everything is.
But they're not gonna tell you.
They're gonna let you
blow your leg off.
You began to hate,
and the hatred becomes
very intense and very real.
Finally, you just throw
the rulebook away.
The rules of the game
have changed.
Instead of just going
through villages...
Casually going through them...
You went into villages,
started ripping apart.
That became the standard now.
We're not nice guys anymore.
Individuals would just
come out of nowhere
and do things that you just
find hard to believe.
I remember one guy that held
a young girl at gunpoint
and made her perform oral sex
on him.
And then he cut off her ponytail
and stuck it in his helmet.
And... and it always
mystified me
how somebody could walk around
with that ponytail
and not get questioned about it.
I don't think Medina had
any interest in knowing
all the details of what's
going on out there.
If officers and NCOs start
behaving badly,
then there is absolutely
nothing...
where young men are feeling
frightened for their lives,
they expect to be shown what
is right and what is wrong
by the officers, by the NCOs.
And when that discipline
has fallen apart,
then they were on the road
to hell, frankly.
"Dear Dad: How's everything
with you?
"One of our platoons went out
on a routine patrol today
"and came across
a 155-millimeter round
that was booby-trapped."
"Killed one man, blew the legs
off two others,
and injured two more."
"On their way back to the LZ,
"they saw a woman working
in the fields.
"They shot and wounded her,
then they kicked her to death
"and emptied their magazines
into her head.
"It was murder.
"I'm ashamed of myself for not
trying to do something about it.
"This isn't the first time, Dad;
I've seen it many times before.
"My faith in my fellow men
is all shot to hell.
I just want the time to pass,
and I just want to come home."
"Saturday, we're being dropped
in by air in an MVA stronghold.
"Don't expect any letters
for a while,
"but please keep writing them.
I love and miss you and Mom."
By the time it got
to the 15th of March,
Charlie Company were
pretty well wound up.
But they were told
that there was a very good
opportunity in the next day
that they would meet
the enemy head on.
There was a lot of talk about
a battalion,
the 48th VC infantry battalion.
They were thought to be
a pretty crack outfit,
and they were said to be housed
in and around the My Lai area.
The brigade commander, a man
called Colonel Oran Henderson,
wanted his battalions to be much
more aggressive with the enemy.
And it's fair to say
Henderson wound up Medina,
and Medina wound up
Charlie Company.
I told them this would give
them a chance
to engage the 48th VC battalion,
that the 48th VC battalion
is the one that we had been
chasing around the Task Force
Barker area of operation
and that we would finally
get a chance to destroy
the 48th VC battalion.
Because here's our chance
to confront the enemy.
We're getting our revenge
on you.
We're going to tear
your ass apart
for what you've done to us.
La CROIX:
We were to shoot literally
anything that moved.
If it was growing, cut it down.
If it was a building, burn it;
if it was a well, poison it;
if it was alive, kill it.
I remember him telling us
that the villagers have been
warned out,
there shouldn't be any
innocents there.
And I think there was even
questions asked,
'cause how would we know
if they're innocent or not?
And he said something
to the effect,
"If they're there, you got
to assume they're the enemy."
There were no civilians.
See, that-that is the crux
of what was told to us.
There are no civilians.
You know, these are Viet Cong,
Viet Cong sympathizers,
it's a Viet Cong stronghold,
they are all Viet Cong.
Medina, I believe, was very
clear that they were facing
the 48th Viet Cong infantry
battalion.
That was the intelligence
he had been given
and he had no reason
to question it.
The problem was that
the information was wrong.
Their 48th infantry battalion
were 150 miles away
on the other side of Quang Ngai
province.
And so the entire premise
for going to My Lai
was entirely false.
The morning of
the 16th started early.
The mood was sort of somber,
but there was an edge
of excitement.
We know that we're going
into something big
and we're going to deal
with them.
A little fear, anticipation.
This was our chance to prove
ourselves as a fighting unit.
We were instructed to pack a
triple basic load of ammunition.
Whereas a rifleman would
carry 180 rounds,
So we were expecting great
resistance in that village.
La CROIX:
I would say that probably most
of us didn't eat very much.
We were all anxious,
concerned about what was going
to be happening.
This was going to be
an all-out war.
This was going to be
shades of Iwo Jima.
The helicopters would ferry them
in three groups
and drop them
in the paddy fields
about 200 meters
from the village.
The first group of men would
go through, led by Calley.
The second platoon
would come in next.
They would follow up
with the third platoon
and Medina's group.
This was the order
that came down from on high.
They would have to move forward
quickly and very aggressively.
I was on the lead helicopter
and there's probably nine
helicopters and six gunships
on the side of us.
And I remember making
the big turn
and heading back north,
straight for My Lai.
- Receiving fire, yellow smoke,
- 200 meters,
automatic weapons, over.
We began hearing radio chatter
that the helicopters
were fired on.
The helicopter pilot turned
to us and told us
that we were coming
into a hot LZ.
The meaning, which was
quite clear, we were under fire.
As we touched down,
the door gunners were firing.
There were rounds zinging
kind of all around.
It was hard to tell where they
were coming from at that point.
We hit the ground and almost
immediately started firing
into the village area.
The squad leaders...
Myself and others...
Are instructing their soldiers,
"Let's get up on line,
"let's move it, let's move it,
you gotta get in position,
we're gonna move out."
I remember somebody yelling,
"There's people moving
in the village,"
and then we could see
people running,
and so we all opened up.
I think we had it in our minds
that we were not gonna get
pinned down out there.
There's a whole lot of movement
out to the southwest.
We assumed that we were going
to hit VC only,
that the civilians would be gone
from that entire village.
When we went in further,
we did start finding people.
Like they started coming out
of their house.
And we're saying,
"Wait a minute.
"What the hell is this?
They're not supposed
to be in here."
At first nobody did anything.
Then a couple of crazy guys
said, "Hey, they must be VC."
Some of the guys started
shooting.
Once the first civilian was
killed, it was too late.
Whoever killed the first
civilian, that was the end of...
end of the situation.
It went out of control.
It was just shoot, shoot, shoot
at anything.
I don't care what moved.
The person would come out
of a hut... bang, shoot.
It was just complete carnage
there that day.
La CROIX:
We did see bunkers and we did
start throwing grenades
into the bunkers.
That we started hearing
the screaming from inside.
Around 8:30, three Americans
soldiers came to my house.
They pushed six of us down
into the shelter
and threw a hand grenade
in behind us.
And then they used their machine
guns to shoot us down.
My entire family was blown
into pieces.
The only person left alive
was me.
Suddenly, an American soldier
came in carrying a gun.
I saw my father collapse,
and then my mother,
my grandfather
and my grandmother.
They all continued to fall.
My brother, younger than me,
only three years old,
suddenly they blasted
his head open.
One shot and his head blasted
onto the floor.
We were a until that was
full of anger, frustration.
We wanted contact,
we wanted to fight the enemy,
and we were told
we were doing it.
I am a soldier and I receive
and obey the orders
that are issued to me
by my superiors.
Their order was to kill
or destroy
everything in the village.
The children happened
to be there.
The people of that village
were Viet Cong
or Viet Cong sympathizers.
Maybe some see it differently.
That's the way I see it.
I was the photographer
on the operation that day.
I just photographed everything
that I came upon.
I was coming up to a group
of people who were huddled
and they had some, you know,
American GIs surrounding them.
One soldier spoke up and said,
"Hey! Here's a person
with a camera!"
And, sure enough,
the soldiers backed off
and I moved up and I took
a photograph of these people.
You can see the fear
in the faces on there,
especially the small children,
and the older woman trying
to protect the daughter.
Then, all of a sudden, that next
instant, automatic fire.
They were all shot
and they all dropped.
I saw them drop to the ground.
As I recall of that particular
day, I was flying a gunship,
tagging along behind the OH-23
flown by Hugh Thompson.
We were told it was
a typical combat assault,
near an area called Pinkville
on the map.
It was a strange-looking map
for that particular area
because it looked like
there should be
but when you get out there it
was really not much of anything,
just small hamlets
scattered about.
The OH-23 flown by Hugh Thompson
had a door gunner
on either side,
and he would fly low,
treetop level, basically,
trying to draw fire
or make somebody run.
It's pretty much a bait type
operation.
Hugh Thompson's job was
supremely dangerous.
The kill rate was
something like 40% or 50%.
I think that what motivated
Hugh to join the Army
was just his patriotism,
his love for his country.
He was a soldier's soldier.
He was a... very much
of a military mentality.
His father was a lifer
in the Navy.
His brother joined the Air Force
and served two or three tours
of duty in Vietnam.
He also thought that
flying a helicopter
would be a very exciting
profession.
The morning of My Lai,
Hugh Thompson and I came
on station at about 7:30.
And it was crystal clear.
We came in at altitude
and dropped down
and started flying low level.
We thought that we were really
helping the men on the ground
and that was our main objective.
We came in and strafed
the tree line on either side
of the landing zone
to suppress anybody
that might want to jump up
and shoot.
We got no fire.
We were never fired upon.
We started to just check
the perimeter.
We saw people leaving the area,
which was not unusual.
It was a Saturday morning.
People would go to market
on Saturday morning.
We thought, "Wonderful,
they're getting out of the way.
Let's continue our recon."
We were off... or out of that
particular area
for ten, 15, maybe 20 minutes.
Those same people were dead
or dying on the road.
At some point during the day,
we started seeing bodies
accumulate in the village.
Women, kids.
I'd never seen anything
like that.
It was bad.
We lingered by one of the bodies
that we'd marked.
It was a young female
with a chest wound,
but she was still alive.
Mr. Thompson decided he'd move
back, stay at a hover and watch.
And we saw a captain
approach the woman,
look down at her,
kick her with his foot,
step back and just blew her away
right in front of us.
Later on we found that it was
Captain Medina,
Ernest Medina, who did this.
La CROIX:
As we got deeper
into the village,
we were given more or less
a change of orders.
We were to stop firing
and to start moving people
that we found
over toward the center
and pushing them into the center
of the village,
and they were being picked up
by Calley's platoon more or less
and moved onward.
They started to take us
all away.
Everyone in the house,
they took us to leave.
All of us were taken away.
I held one of my children
and led the other one.
I walked with them until
they told us to stop.
They made us walk
from inside the village
across the rice fields.
I pulled my kids to go with me.
I dragged my kids, but they
still hit us, kicked us.
By the time they'd got out
to the other side,
they'd gathered together about
170 old men, elderly women,
mothers with small children
and pushing them, herding them,
across to the eastern side
of the village
near to where a big drainage
ditch was situated.
And they were all standing
around on the edge of the ditch.
Calley was there
with his platoon.
And Hugh Thompson was
flying around
in his small scout helicopter.
There's a ditch right where
the red smoke is.
We continued to recon;
checked on some of the people
we'd marked earlier with smoke.
They were gone.
At that point
Mr. Thompson noticed
there was a irrigation ditch
that he saw people in,
so he landed the aircraft.
He approached the soldier that
was near the ditch and said,
"These are civilians.
We gotta help them out."
And the soldier said,
"Yeah, we'll help them
out of their misery."
Mr. Thompson went through
every scenario he could
to give benefit of the doubt
to the men on the ground.
He did not want to believe that
our people were doing this.
And he came back,
got in the aircraft.
We lifted off and we were
15, 20 feet off the ground
and we heard automatic
weapons fire.
Suddenly Calley gave the order
to start firing,
and Calley and a young man
called Meadlo
turned their rifles,
their M16 rifles,
on this group
and began shooting.
Mothers started diving with
their children into the ditch.
One mother described it later
as like ducks going
into the water.
Lieutenant Calley told me,
"Meadlo, we got
another job to do."
So, we started pushing them off
and, uh... we started
shooting them.
So then all together,
we just pushed them all off
and, uh, just started using
automatics on them.
It didn't surprise me
that Paul Meadlo was one
of the participants with Calley
in shooting down
that group of people.
Paul did have
a strong sense of duty.
He just did what he was told.
I've thought about what I would
have done many times
if Calley would have put me
in the position he did Paul,
and I would like to think
I would have just said,
"You got to be kidding me,"
and-and walked away
and taken my chances
that he wouldn't have shot me.
I don't think I could
have done it.
I just really don't think
I could have done it.
Calley yelled at me
to come help him
and I just kept walking;
I didn't even turn around
and answer him.
And I thought at the time,
"Well, you know, that's
disobeying an order.
He could do anything
he wants to me."
I wasn't going to help him kill
people in the ditch.
To this day
I always think to myself,
what could I have done
to stop it?
And I don't know
the answer to that.
They started to push all the
people down into the ditch,
including my family.
And they started shooting
at will.
After the first round, my mother
and I were still alive.
So were my two younger siblings.
After the second, my two younger
siblings died,
but my mother was still alive.
At the third shooting,
my mother died.
To survive, I lay
under my mother's stomach
as the ditch filled with blood.
My daughter, Lien...
I used my breast to cover her
mouth so she wouldn't cry.
I saw my father walking around.
I wanted to tell him,
"Please lie down, Dad.
If you do, you will live."
But I didn't dare say it.
I just let my father
walk around there
and they went over there
and shot him.
Half of his head blew away.
I was coming out of the other
end of the village
and Calley was standing
at a low point,
and he was waving us and
directing us across the ditch.
And I got to the ditch, and...
it was full of bodies.
And that's when your senses
just shut down.
To this day, I don't know
how I walked across that ditch.
I remember looking down
and making eye contact
with somebody in the ditch,
and it was like I was looking
at a mannequin.
Mr. Thompson was just
beside himself.
He got on the radio and just
said, "This isn't right.
There's people killing civilians
down here."
And that's when he decided
to intervene.
And you have 15 Victor
Charlies...
He said, "We've got to do
something about this.
Are you with me?"
And we said yes.
Thompson now sees a small group
of Vietnamese people
running along a hedgerow,
running for their lives,
And in hot pursuit of them are
the men from Charlie Company.
Mr. Thompson calculated they had
less than 30 seconds to live.
He told us, "I'm going to go
over to the bunker
"and get these people out
myself.
"And if these American soldiers
fire on these people or me
when I'm getting them out
of the bunker, shoot 'em."
I remember thinking,
how did we get into this?
I was probably less than 50
yards from this helicopter,
and I remember the door gunners
of that helicopter
pointing their machine guns
directly at me and thinking,
"Oh, my God,
what are they gonna do?"
Three people came out,
six people came out,
12 people came... 11 or 12
people came out
of this little bunker.
That's when he got on the radio
and called a friend of his,
Dan Millians, a gunship pilot.
And he said,
"Danny, I need a favor."
Hugh and his crew had a group
of people gathered up
to be taken out.
And I landed the helicopter,
put them on,
and we left with them.
A gunship just never landed
out in the boonies like that
to pick up somebody.
It was just not done.
I don't know why we did it,
other than the fact
that those people needed to be
out of there.
We went back to the ditch
and I saw some some motion
down in the ditch.
I saw this child move.
I lifted my head up
and saw a helicopter landing
in the rice fields.
I was really scared, wasn't sure
if they would shoot again.
But when I lifted my head,
I saw three American soldiers
approach,
so I pretended to be dead.
But the Americans, the three of
them came down into the ditch.
I looked up a second time and
they came and pulled me out.
I remember taking the boy
in my left hand
by the back of his shirt
thinking,
"I hope these buttons
are sewn on,
or I'm... if the shirt lets go,
I'm going to lose the boy."
Mr. Thompson knew
that Quang Ngai hospital
wasn't too far away.
We left the boy
with a nun at the hospital,
told the nun he probably
doesn't have any family.
Time just seemed like to go on.
An hour could have passed, or
five minutes could have passed.
After we got in so far,
we did get
a "Cease fire, cease fire!"
And then you'd still hear
a couple of guns shoot off
and then you hear
the "Cease fire!" again.
And then it was quiet.
They left my village
in blood and fire.
Wives lost husbands,
and children lost fathers
and our homeland and village
were destroyed.
When there were no more
sounds of guns,
they came home to bury the dead.
I ran home
and there was nothing left.
My house was burned
and destroyed.
I couldn't recognize
my relatives.
They were all burned.
There was nothing left.
My grandmother, I called to her,
"Grandma, Grandma."
I thought she was almost dead.
She raised her hand up.
She said, "Grandma's here,
dear, lying here.
They shot me right in my arm."
When I called to my sister,
she was outside.
She just lay there unconscious.
But when she heard me call,
she woke up
and crawled over.
The three of us hugged
each other and cried.
We were covered in blood.
The cover-up of My Lai
began immediately.
As soon as they got back
to their base,
too many people knew that
something odd had gone on.
Already, Captain Medina had
radioed to the headquarters,
giving false figures
for how many enemy killed
in action there had been.
The official count was that
123 Viet Cong had been killed.
So that cover-up was constituted
within hours, really,
of them arriving home.
After the My Lai operation
and we returned to base camp,
Captain Medina told us,
"Do not answer any questions
from anyone...
News reporters or anybody else...
About this last mission."
We all thought that we were
going to get in big trouble.
And so we didn't talk
much about it.
The rest of that day,
we just started moving on
deeper into the peninsula.
We were told to... to take
the high ground.
And Medina specifically said,
"Don't go past the wire,
"because there's an old Korean
compound up there
and it's heavily mined."
We got to the wire,
and Calley said,
"Okay, you, you, you and you...
we're going up the top."
And Calley took Meadlo
as the point man.
They just barely got
out of sight,
and Meadlo stepped on a mine
and blew his foot off.
And, uh, when they were
medevacking him out,
the last thing he yelled at
Calley was: "God got me.
He'll get you for what we did."
I don't remember if it was
that day or the next day,
all I remember is I was wearing
the same fatigues
and they were covered in blood.
Mr. Thompson wanted me
to come up and meet him
and report what we'd seen
to Colonel Henderson.
Hugh went in first, came out,
didn't say anything,
just showed me the door.
I went in and told
Colonel Henderson
exactly that there was
unnecessary killing of civilians
going on that day,
a lot of civilians.
He made a couple notes
on a legal pad,
didn't really react to it
in any particular way.
Dismissed me and I left.
I met Hugh
outside the command bunker.
He was having a fit.
I think he broke
the flight helmet.
He threw it on the ground.
He wanted to tear his wings
off his uniform,
said he'd never fly again.
Thompson reported this
to his commanding officer
in hopes of getting action,
there was no word,
there was no buzz, no nothing.
After My Lai, they sent him
out by himself
in very dangerous areas.
He crashed four
or five helicopters
within a two-, three-month
period
and he was beginning to think...
And I don't think
he was being irrational...
He thought that someone was
trying to make him go away.
The higher-ups in the Army
understood
that something like this could
get them court-martialed,
could get the men under them
court-martialed.
So, the picture that the
military publicity machine
attempted to put out was that
there was no My Lai massacre...
That American soldiers
were not involved
in the killing and the slaughter
of women and children
This is simply Communist
propaganda and it's not true.
This is 1968.
Killing civilians,
by that time in Vietnam,
was an issue because, of course,
all the way up to Johnson,
they were trying to calm people
down in the United States.
So there wasn't any doubt
about the reason
for their wanting
to cover it up.
Following the My Lai incident,
Charlie Company was sent
out into the jungle
for over two months straight.
We were isolated and put out
in the mountains.
You know, it was like somebody
putting us out there
so we wouldn't talk to anybody.
54 days.
54 days we were out, no change
of clothes hardly.
We were sick;
we all got dysentery.
I truly believe that we were
sent there to never return.
That we were never going
to make it out of there.
And that just stuck in my mind,
"Why are they doing this?
Why are they sending
us out at night?"
You know, to get rid
of these 12 people here?
And then the next night
they send another 12
and get them?
The company changed after that.
And it was like...
nobody cared anymore.
That, you know, it was...
It was all...
It had all been a game
and the game was over,
and we got whooped.
I had been told of the incident
several times
by several different people
and it became evident to me
that there was a very real
amount of truth
behind the stories
I had been told.
Ron Ridenhour was
an aspirant journalist.
He had gone out to Vietnam
to do his time there
and had formed some
very close friendships
with members of Charlie Company.
They were sitting down one day,
telling war stories,
and his friend said to him,
"Hey, did you hear what happened
at Pinkville?"
And he said, "No, what happened
at Pinkville?"
He said,
"Well, we went in there,
and we just killed everybody."
Ridenhour made a promise
to himself that he would see
if he could get some more
evidence of this
and bring it to the attention
of the authorities.
After my return from Vietnam,
I wrote a letter... a long,
definitive letter...
Which explained what the
situation was as I knew it
and exactly how I came across
the information
and what information I had, and
I called for an investigation.
I made 30 copies of this letter
and sent out 30 copies to
various Congressional leaders
and the administration.
Inquiries start to be made
of the American military.
Where is this place Pinkville?
What has happened here?
One of the investigators of
the inspector general's corps
is sent out to interview members
of Charlie Company
who are still in the military
and subject to military
discipline.
And in very short order,
the information goes
up the chain of command.
And people in the Pentagon know
that something pretty awful
has happened.
The machinery of justice
starts moving,
and so it's not going to be kept
inside the Army,
and finally Haeberle decides
to sell those pictures.
The Cleveland Plain Dealer
printed today
a series of photographs
it says it got
from an Army combat
photographer,
and it says the pictures show
the bodies
of South Vietnamese killed
by the Americans.
Everybody saw those pictures.
The pictures appeared
in LIFE magazine
and on nightly news stories
over and over again.
We'll now show the pictures
published in the Plain Dealer
and photographed
from the newspaper,
accounting for the poor quality.
They were taken
by Ronald Haeberle
while on a combat assignment
for the Army.
The pictures become
almost ubiquitous
and they symbolize evil.
And the more that they're shown,
the more difficult it is
to kind of defend
what happened at My Lai
or even to look at whatever
extenuating circumstances
Survivors have claimed that
an American infantry patrol
sweeping through their village
in March last year
executed more than 500 unarmed
men, women and children.
It still isn't known
exactly what happened
in the Vietnamese village
of My Lai,
the scene of multiple killings
of civilians
about 18 months ago.
There are numerous charges...
I got off work and I stopped
at a bar to have a beer.
And the news was on.
And they flashed a picture
of Calley.
And I thought...
"My God, that's my unit."
You know, and they brought up
Medina's name
and then I'm listening to people
at the bar...
"Ah, them f-ing baby killers
just this and that.
I just... kind of sipped
my beer.
I was going to junior college,
and over breakfast I heard
on the radio
that the Army was investigating
a massacre in Vietnam.
"I hope that's not the one
that I was involved in."
Do you believe
that there was a cover-up
of this incident
in South Vietnam,
of the incident at My Lai 4?
I have no reason to believe
there was...
There was a huge uproar
in the country.
The top of the Army were
absolutely furious
that something like this
could have happened
two years before, nearly,
and been held so that they
knew nothing about it.
So they really wanted
to find out
what had happened
and who had covered it up.
They had to look for somebody
who was a member of the team
but was not necessarily
going to be accused
of covering up a cover-up.
And the person they fell upon
was Ray Peers.
Peers had been
a corps commander in Vietnam.
He'd had a very distinguished
military career,
and he was a deeply, deeply
honorable and decent man.
General, is there any
doubt in your mind now
that a massacre did take place
at My Lai on March 16, 1968?
That's one of the things
we're trying to determine.
Peers made the decision,
"Look, before I can decide
"what's been covered up, I got
to know what happened.
"And the only way we're going
to know what happened
is to talk to everybody that was
there that will talk to us."
There were maybe 800 people
in this battalion,
and we had to contact
every one of them
and try to arrange for them to
come to Washington and testify.
When it finally registers
and sinks in
that there's something going on
was when you actually started
getting subpoenaed
to the Peers Committee.
What kind of trouble were we in?
We don't know.
We were picked up in a military
limousine, unmarked,
and taken to the Pentagon,
and I don't know how
many levels down we went,
but we went down...
We went into what somebody
referred to as a war room,
and there were gigantic maps
of My Lai
all the way around the room.
And they set us down
at the end of the table
with a microphone
in front of us, feeling...
feeling pretty small.
- The next witness is
- Sergeant Gregory T. Olsen.
Good morning, Sergeant Olsen.
Good morning.
I'll show you also
a 1:25,000 scale map
which has been introduced
into evidence as Exhibit Map 4.
Would you take us through
the village, step by step?
Well, I seen some of my friends
shoot women, children, babies.
After you'd gotten
out of the helicopter
here in the landing zone,
could you tell us the first
thing that happened?
- I was in the second lift.
- We landed here.
Could you mark about the
location on there of the CP
and just put a figure 1
and circle it?
And which side
of the village were you on?
Were you on the left
or the right?
Who was on your right?
Who was on your left?
Who was in front of you?
Who was on the side of you?
What happened?
What time was this?
Trying to, I am assum...
At that time, I didn't realize,
you know,
that they were trying to
synchronize, "Are you lying?"
Peers was distressed.
Terribly distressed.
The accumulation
of all these things
over the weeks of testimony
really got to him, I think.
And when he then
would come across
someone like Hugh Thompson,
the helicopter pilot,
it was almost a, uh...
a relief to him to realize
that there are still
really good Americans.
I would like you to repeat
what you told the Colonel
at that particular
interrogation.
I told him about seeing
the wounded Vietnamese.
I told him that a captain had
came over and shot one of them.
Told him about seeing
the bodies in the ditch.
How many bodies did you tell
him were in the ditch?
I think I said
about a hundred, sir.
How did you feel
at this particular time?
I felt like there'd been
a massacre.
Thompson had done just what
you'd want a soldier to do.
And almost nobody else ever had,
and nothing happened
as a result of it.
What shocked Peers was that
people who were in a position
to prevent it happening
had not done so,
that something had gone wrong,
had actually then covered it up.
Did Mr. Thompson mention
anything to you
about landing alongside
of a ditch
that contained a large number
of bodies?
Did he mention to you seeing
a sergeant point his weapon
in the direction of a ditch
which contained some
dead noncombatants?
No, sir, he did not report to me
any incident of a U.S. soldier
firing into a ditch
filled with noncombatants
or with anybody.
I think General Peers was
frustrated by his inability
to get any kind of sensible
explanations from Henderson
and concluded that Henderson...
well, he was both incompetent
and lying.
And I feel that the public
is entitled to know
that our inquiry
clearly established
that a tragedy
of major proportions
occurred there on that date.
Peers knew that his report
should be completely truthful,
and it resulted
in some 30 people,
from up through the ranks
from lieutenant,
all the way up
to a two-star general,
being charged with offenses
involved in the cover-up itself.
At Fort Benning, Georgia, today
the prosecution opens its case
against First Lieutenant
William Calley, Jr.,
of more than 100 South
Vietnamese civilians at My Lai.
I was an Army prosecutor
at Fort Benning, Georgia.
The first case was going to be
against Lieutenant Calley
because he was to be discharged
from the service
in September of that year,
and under the law,
once he was discharged,
the Army would no longer have
jurisdiction to prosecute him.
So there were some
time constraints.
He was not charged
with the massacre.
He was charged with what he did.
That was not everything
that was done in that operation,
but I will say this:
that the evidence
clearly demonstrated
that he was responsible for more
killing than anybody else there
by a long shot.
Gentlemen, the accused stands
here before you today
charged with four specifications
of premeditated murder
alleged to have taken place
in the village of My Lai 4,
16 March, 1968.
This was going to be
the first case
in which the story, in its
entirety, would be told.
So I wanted to tell the story
in such a way
for the jury to know, both
circumstantially and directly,
all of the evidence to
demonstrate quite clearly
that what those charges said had
occurred had, in fact, occurred.
These people were murdered as
we allege they were murdered.
They were unarmed,
they were unresisting,
they were children,
and they were babies.
I will ask you whether,
in your opinion,
you were acting rightly and
according to your understanding
of your directions and orders.
I felt then and I still do
that I acted as I was directed,
and I carried out the orders
that I was given,
and I do not feel wrong
in doing so, sir.
If the orders
for that operation included
unarmed, unresisting men, women,
children and babies,
it was illegal.
And a soldier has a duty
to disobey such an order.
A lot of people talk about
My Lai and they say,
"Well, you know, yeah,
but you can't follow
an illegal order."
Trust me, there is no such
thing, not in the military.
If I go into a combat situation
and I tell them,
"No, I'm not going,
I'm not going to do that,
I'm not going to follow
that order,"
they'd put me up against
the wall and shoot me.
You train a man to soldier, you
take him out of civilian life,
you teach him to be a soldier,
you train him to kill,
you train him to follow orders,
you express to him the
importance of following orders,
True, we kill our enemies,
but there comes a point in time
at which you don't kill
your enemy.
He's entitled to be treated
humanely.
The most serious offense
outside of war
is the taking of a human life.
And in war there has
to be limits.
I told the jury, finally, I
wanted to speak for the victims.
And I reminded them
they did not receive any trial.
And I said, "What were
their crimes, these victims?
"Was it the crime of an infant
simply to have been born
in My Lai?
What were their crimes?"
And I said to them,
"At the end of the day, you are
the conscience of our country
when you render this verdict."
If I have committed a crime,
the only crime
that I have committed
is in judgment of my values.
Apparently, I valued
my troops' lives
more than I did
that of the enemy.
When my troops were getting
massacred and mauled
by an enemy I couldn't see,
I couldn't feel
and I couldn't touch, that was
my enemy out there,
and when it became between me
and that enemy,
I had to value the lives
of my troops,
and I feel that is the only
crime I have committed.
Lieutenant William Calley
has been found guilty.
A jury that deliberated
a record 13 days
after the longest court martial
in American military history
found Calley guilty
on all four counts
arising from the killing
of innocent, unarmed South
Vietnamese civilians
I don't think there
has ever been a verdict
which has been more
controversial
or generated a greater public
outcry of opposition
than the verdict in that case.
Free Calley, Free Calley,
Free Calley!
There were mass protests
around the country.
Draft boards were resigning.
Veterans were turning in
their medals.
It was enormous, overwhelming.
- Free Calley! Free Calley!
- Free Calley!
♪ My name is William Calley,
I'm a soldier of this land ♪
♪ I've tried to do my duty
and to gain the upper hand ♪
♪ But they've made me out
a villain ♪
♪ They have stamped me
with a brand ♪
♪ As we go marching on. ♪
It was a country that wanted
this war to end
and a country which didn't
want to believe
that this had happened,
but if it did, wanted to say
that it's our fault collectively
and not his fault.
Calley's been used.
All the wars we've had
in the United States
we pick one man
out of all them wars
and say he committed atrocities
against the enemy.
♪ Still all of us are soldiers,
we're too busy to complain ♪
♪ As we go marching on. ♪
Good evening.
President Nixon has ordered
Lieutenant William Calley
released from the stockade
and confined to his quarters
pending review of his conviction
of life sentence
for the My Lai massacre.
The announcement came amid
a deluge of telegrams
to the White House...
25,000 today...
Called the greatest expression
of public sentiment by far
on any issue
of the Nixon presidency.
Within a very short space
of time,
President Nixon, trying to cope
with some of the political
fallout from this,
had decided that while his
appeal hearings were being held,
Lieutenant Calley should not
be imprisoned
but he could be out on bail.
Mr. President, you said
that you intervened
in the Calley case
in the national interest.
I wonder if you could define
for us in greater detail
how you feel it was served by
your intervention in the case.
I felt that it was proper
for me to indicate
because there was great concern
expressed throughout the country
as to whether
or not this was a case,
involving as it did so many
complex factors,
in which Captain Calley was
going to get a fair trial.
Ultimately, he had to serve,
in total, about four months
in the stockade
at Fort Leavenworth,
and by that time it was deemed
that he had served enough time
and he was released.
I think that Nixon's
intervention passed the word
that nobody is going to get
punished for what happened here
and so don't worry
about it, people.
And the result of this
was to completely undermine
any further prosecutions
of other officers.
Get out of the way, please.
Calley got away with it.
And all the other people
who were involved
got away with it also.
Did you ever have any doubts?
No, I never had
that actually feeling
I always thought that my
innocence would be proven
I've always maintained
that position,
and, uh... I'm glad
it's over with.
I finally decided I had
to say something.
I wanted to make the president
aware of my feelings
about the case
and, uh, the jurors and the
victims and the rule of law.
"I truly regret having to have
written this letter
"and wish that no innocent
person had died at My Lai
"on March 16, 1968.
"But innocent people were killed
"under circumstances that will
always remain abhorrent
"to my conscience.
"While in some respects,
what took place at My Lai
"has to be considered
a tragic day
"in the history of our nation,
"the greatest tragedy of all
will be if political expediency
"dictates the compromise of such
a fundamental moral principle
"as the inherent unlawfulness of
the murder of innocent persons,
"making the action
and the courage
"of six honorable men who served
their country so well
meaningless."
If you take the total number
of people who died at My Lai,
and put that alongside the two
million civilians who died,
it doesn't seem very much.
But in terms of impact
on America
and on the rest of the world
about how they conducted
that war,
clearly it changed people's
opinions towards the war.
It was too big a price to pay,
that if you were going to have
to win this war
by this kind of conduct, then it
wasn't a price worth paying.
People had been saying
to themselves,
"Well, what are we doing
to these people?
What are we doing to them?"
And then with My Lai,
people began to say,
"What is it doing to us?"
Oh, it hurts me thinking
about the innocent people
that got killed.
It hurts me now.
It hurts me now
more than it did then,
'cause then you're thinking
about living.
You get out and you're a
civilian, you think about dying.
It's been a while.
Now I can sleep, but every once
in a while, I dream again
about how my father died,
how my sister died,
how they died next to me.
I saw it all.
I remember all the time.
I could go back and remember
those... all those sleepless
nights that we had...
everything that went on.
My Lai, all the people
who were killed there.
Every day I try to...
try to make it easy.
That I could make it easy
and make it go away.
I'd lay down at night.
Still the same thing,
whether I drank,
whether I didn't drink.
It's the memories, it kept
coming back, kept coming back.
I will never forget.
When I'm reminded, I suddenly
remember the pain.
A chapter in the book opens.
There is no way
I will ever forget.
I will never forget.
As far as living with the shame
of My Lai, I have no shame.
I did what I was supposed
to be doing.
The shame rests with the
politicians and the military.
Not with me, the other members
of Charlie Company,
Lieutenant Calley
or Captain Medina.
The shame lays with them.
It's a national shame.
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It was the summer of 1969.
I was an Army prosecutor
at Fort Benning, Georgia.
I was sitting in my office
and my supervisor walked in,
closed the door, looked at me
and said,
"Have you ever heard
of Pinkville?"
And I said, "No, I haven't."
And he briefly described
what Pinkville was.
It was a place
on a map of Vietnam,
and there had been
an operation there.
Charges have been made
that troops killed
as many as 567
South Vietnamese civilians
during a sweep in March 1968.
A lieutenant has been charged
with murder
and a staff sergeant with
assault with intent to murder.
By that point the Army had
conducted an investigation.
Quite a record had been
established.
A lot of people had been
interviewed.
Did Captain Medina say anything
about what the company should
do in the village?
He said that there wasn't going
to be anything left alive
in the village.
It was clear that many, many
people had died.
Old men, women with children
in their arms, and babies.
And they had been unarmed,
they had been unresisting,
and they had been,
in my judgment, massacred.
Lt. Calley came back and he
said, "Take care of 'em."
When they were all just lined
up and shot like that,
it sort of reminded me
of newsreels of Hitler.
There certainly appeared that
there had been an effort
to cover up what happened
at My Lai.
Did Mr. Thompson mention
anything to you
about landing alongside
of a ditch
that contained a large number
of bodies?
No, sir, he did not report
to me any instance
of a U.S. soldier firing
into a ditch.
To bring a case like this,
given its potential magnitude,
it had to be solid.
It had to be very strong.
It had to be believable.
And it had to make believable
an event
which nobody would ever want
to believe.
The question was, what was the
scale that we were dealing with?
How big was this and who did it?
Who killed these people?
Charlie Company was
a cross-section
of just your general,
basic young people
at that point in time.
We were from all over
the country.
You know, East Coast, West
Coast, blacks, whites, Mexicans.
There was nothing special
about us.
We were just your common,
ordinary teen.
I'd gone to college for a couple
of semesters after high school.
I wasn't cut out for college.
I went to be a teacher
and it was like no,
Having grown up with parents
that came from World War II
and people that were in
the Korean War and everything,
being exposed to their
generations,
yeah, you felt it was
basically your duty
to go ahead and go to war.
LAWRENCE La CROIX:
My father was a battalion
commander in World War II.
I considered him
kind of a cross between
John Wayne and Steve McQueen
or something.
I did have a notion of what
it was going to be like,
that it was patriotic,
that it was the thing to do.
I was born in Utah.
Pretty typical Mormon family.
I went into the army
right out of high school.
In the Vietnam War, U.S. Marines
battled North Vietnamese
Vietnam was all around us.
You know, it was in the press
and talking about it in school,
and we had a real strong
curiosity.
We wanted to see it
for ourselves.
The artillery is trying to
suppress a Communist attack
on Baker Company, which is about
5,000 meters to our front.
Aside from just a sense
of adventure,
I was caught up a little bit
in the domino theory,
that it truly was
a necessary war.
You know, when I first went,
I was into the idea
that I was going to free
these people
and stop Communists
from spreading.
I didn't go over there to be
a hero or nothing.
I went over there to do my job.
When I first landed in Hawaii,
I thought I was in paradise.
I mean, 70-some degrees
at 3:00 in the morning
and then they bused us south
to Schofield barracks
and there's banana trees
and everything,
so I thought it was paradise.
It didn't take long
for that to end.
The east range, where we did
most of our training,
it was straight up and down
and it was a real jungle.
It's quite clear that in Hawaii,
they excelled themselves
in the jungles.
Charlie Company was voted
the best company
in the First 20th Battalion.
Their captain was almost
a folk hero.
Medina had come up
through the ranks
from a Mexican-American
background.
He related to the men.
He was a hard man... you didn't
give them an easy time...
But they respected him,
and many of them loved him.
The motto of the Army
is "Follow Me"
and he was the type
of individual
you would follow anywhere
and do anything for.
La CROIX:
I found Captain Medina to be
a very tough individual,
very demanding.
He wanted us to be something
unique and different
and strong and capable
and a force to deal with.
Captain Medina came up
with the idea
that we were going to be called
"The Death Dealers."
He wanted us to carry
aces of spades,
and every time we killed
a Viet Cong,
we were to leave the ace
of spades on it
so that they knew that it was
from the Death Dealers.
Lt. Calley was the platoon
leader of the first platoon.
Young lieutenants are not liked
very well.
Some are quite gung-ho,
some are quite interested in
making a name for themselves.
Calley was sort of a mixture;
he wanted to fit in.
I think when he found
the military
he thought he found his calling,
he found a place to fit in.
My first impression
of Lieutenant Calley
was he was always trying
to please Captain Medina.
He'd go out of his way to do
things that were not called for
and, you know,
trying to please Captain Medina
and that, to me, it made...
in my mind it made Captain
Medina resent him even more.
Captain Medina would just
call him
a little shit or something.
And he ridiculed Calley.
He made Calley feel inadequate,
and Calley was always trying
to do things
to show that he was
a real officer.
By asserting his rank,
he basically shielded himself
from his men,
he'd isolate himself.
Rank went to his head.
And that's... that's a no-no.
For the first month, it was,
like, "Where's the war?"
We had a lot of free time.
The lounges, you know,
the bars... it was really nice.
We said, "Hey, I could do this
for a year."
We'd walk through the villages,
mostly women, children,
older people.
We really didn't encounter
anything when we went.
It didn't seem like there was
a war going on over there.
You would go to a village,
set up a perimeter.
Medics and doctors would come
in, treat the civilians,
and we'd sit there and
play with the kids and...
There was nothing else to do.
We always had fun with the kids.
When I was young,
I saw American soldiers.
Whenever they came, they would
gather up everyone.
They would bring cake and candy
for the children.
Everyone would have some and
then they would let us go home.
I never would have imagined,
never would have thought
Americans would kill us.
When my children came home
and asked
if American soldiers were
killers, I said, "No.
Americans don't kill."
Task Force Barker was set up
around February.
Its real function
was to try and break
the infrastructure
of the North Vietnamese Army
and the Viet Cong
in that central plain
of Quang Ngai Province.
Quang Ngai province has had
a reputation for 300 years
for hating foreign
occupying forces,
whether they were Chinese,
French,
Japanese or Americans.
They just did not like strangers
coming in among them
and then exercising
military power.
Great areas of the province had
been declared "free fire zones."
What that meant was you just
kept up a constant round
of the bombing of villages.
The U.S. military loved to quote
from Mao Zedong,
especially the saying that
"The guerrillas are the fish
and the people are the sea."
But their solution to that
problem was to drain the sea.
Bullets can kill the enemy,
but bullets can also make
an enemy.
They can manufacture an enemy.
And I felt at times during
my stay there
that we were cranking out enemy
soldiers or sympathizers
by the way we treated the place.
Soldiers had thought they were
gonna go in there
and be welcomed by the people
whom they were going to save.
Some of them thought it was
going to be like
going into Paris after D-Day.
What they encountered instead
was hostility.
Outright hostility and
resentment from these people.
When I was eight years old,
I realized the war had come.
There were many times when
the American soldiers
would set up operations around
this area and raid and shoot.
So my mother brought me
and my siblings together
Every night we had to crawl
into the shelter to sleep.
We had to avoid the American
bombs and shootings.
That was our misery:
war from the Americans.
We started pulling regular
patrols end of January,
beginning of February.
Once we started down
to the Pinkville area,
we started to lose people.
They were being
picked off one by one.
This is when we got our
initiation into the realities
of Vietnam with booby traps,
mines, snipers.
Over here!
The Quang Ngai area was called
Pinkville
because on the military maps
it was shaded
a bright kind of
shimmering pink.
The color pink took on
associations for us
that went way beyond anything
you'll find on some color chart.
It meant... it meant
the prospect of death.
Weber was the first member
that we lost.
That had a real impact
on the whole company
because we actually
had somebody killed now.
We were down by a river and
walking on the rice paddies,
and we were going down
to this village
that was kind of in a corner
of the river
and we started taking
sniper fire.
Lieutenant Calley wanted us
to go across the river
to where that sniper fire
was coming from.
Well, we hadn't hardly
got started
and there was a sniper round
and it got Bill Weber.
He pretty well died on the scene
but not without a lot
of anguish.
He was a good guy to everybody.
When he got killed,
it's just like part
of your family,
they destroyed part
of your family.
But that... I considered Charlie
Company part of my family.
It wasn't long after that
we started taking
more casualties.
We're in the process
of crossing,
receiving sporadic sniper fire,
over.
When you're dealing
with snipers,
it's like a roulette wheel.
You know, there's 30 or 40 of us
out there walking around.
Which one of us
is going to get it?
You know, you...
it's-it's a roll of the dice.
And the same thing
with the booby traps.
The infantryman lives
on the ground.
He walks on the ground,
he sleeps on the ground,
he eats on the ground.
When you've got booby traps
and land mines,
all of a sudden the earth
becomes the enemy, in a way,
because you don't know
what it may conceal.
Where do you sit,
and where do you put your feet?
There or there?
And that choice
is life or death.
Keith, speak to me.
Yeah, I'm still alive.
Speak to me... what's your name,
tell me what your name is.
Where are you from?
Seattle, Washington.
Seattle, Washington?
It's a good town.
Good town, good town.
Can I go to sleep, Doc?
No, don't go to sleep.
I don't want you
going to sleep at all.
You can't fight;
there's nothing to fight.
I need a knife, I need a knife.
You can't fight a mine.
You can't fight a booby trap.
You can't fight a sniper.
You can try and find that sniper
and eliminate him,
but they hit and run.
Get me out of here.
You just wanted to get up
and yell,
and we did.
You know, we yelled,
"Come on out," you know,
but... they wouldn't,
you know, they were snipers,
they were probably over there
laughing at us, you know.
They wouldn't come out.
They wouldn't come out.
This went on for several weeks.
They're gradually losing
more and more wounded
until they came to a minefield.
Our second platoon
was in one area
and first platoon was ahead
of us in another area,
but we walked into minefields
almost simultaneously.
Once the first mine was tripped,
anybody who moved was setting
off booby traps.
It was like nonstop.
Somebody would go to try
to help somebody
they would hit a booby trap;
they'd get blown up.
I could see 'em going off
and I heard people screaming
"Medic, medic."
You lay there for a minute,
then you know you gotta get up,
you gotta go.
We were a close-knit group.
We were there for each other,
and that was the problem.
Somebody got hurt, you went
to help them, regardless.
You didn't care about
the other mines;
you went to help somebody.
And in the end it cost more
individuals getting hurt.
Bobby Wilson was in my squad.
We were in single file and there
was other guys behind us,
and we were walking along and
this huge explosion went off
and it knocked me to the ground,
and Bobby Wilson had tripped
a Bouncing Betty.
Bobby was pretty well
split in half,
right up the middle.
And Medina was running
through the minefield,
barking out orders.
He seemed to be fearless.
He was split as if somebody
had taken a cleaver
right up from his crotch all
the way up to his chest cavity.
I've never seen anything
that looked so unreal
in my entire life.
We took a poncho
and we spread it out.
The medic started to pick him
up by the legs.
I reached underneath his arms
to place him onto the poncho
and we set him on top
another mine.
My company by this time had
suffered approximately
25 to 28 casualties.
I was down somewhere to
the vicinity of 105 men.
I believe the month of February
was our most devastating month
for Charlie Company.
It drove us to the ground.
It's just like
if you had a wound,
and they would stick something
in that wound
and go a little bit deeper.
Every time somebody else got
killed, you know,
it was like that wound,
and-and it would go
a little deeper.
You know, and the hurt
never stopped.
Down.
Get down.
Over to the left.
Your mindset has to change
and you got to somehow
figure out how to adapt.
Hands down!
Your attitude towards
the villagers...
Now everybody's an enemy.
You don't know who to trust.
You don't know who is a friend,
who is a foe.
You don't have a scorecard
to tell you,
well, this village over here
is friendly to you,
Or this village over here is
sympathetic to the Communists.
And you start to wonder
who's who.
La CROIX:
They know where the mines
and booby traps are.
They have to or they can't work
in the fields,
they can't move between
villages.
So they know
where everything is.
But they're not gonna tell you.
They're gonna let you
blow your leg off.
You began to hate,
and the hatred becomes
very intense and very real.
Finally, you just throw
the rulebook away.
The rules of the game
have changed.
Instead of just going
through villages...
Casually going through them...
You went into villages,
started ripping apart.
That became the standard now.
We're not nice guys anymore.
Individuals would just
come out of nowhere
and do things that you just
find hard to believe.
I remember one guy that held
a young girl at gunpoint
and made her perform oral sex
on him.
And then he cut off her ponytail
and stuck it in his helmet.
And... and it always
mystified me
how somebody could walk around
with that ponytail
and not get questioned about it.
I don't think Medina had
any interest in knowing
all the details of what's
going on out there.
If officers and NCOs start
behaving badly,
then there is absolutely
nothing...
where young men are feeling
frightened for their lives,
they expect to be shown what
is right and what is wrong
by the officers, by the NCOs.
And when that discipline
has fallen apart,
then they were on the road
to hell, frankly.
"Dear Dad: How's everything
with you?
"One of our platoons went out
on a routine patrol today
"and came across
a 155-millimeter round
that was booby-trapped."
"Killed one man, blew the legs
off two others,
and injured two more."
"On their way back to the LZ,
"they saw a woman working
in the fields.
"They shot and wounded her,
then they kicked her to death
"and emptied their magazines
into her head.
"It was murder.
"I'm ashamed of myself for not
trying to do something about it.
"This isn't the first time, Dad;
I've seen it many times before.
"My faith in my fellow men
is all shot to hell.
I just want the time to pass,
and I just want to come home."
"Saturday, we're being dropped
in by air in an MVA stronghold.
"Don't expect any letters
for a while,
"but please keep writing them.
I love and miss you and Mom."
By the time it got
to the 15th of March,
Charlie Company were
pretty well wound up.
But they were told
that there was a very good
opportunity in the next day
that they would meet
the enemy head on.
There was a lot of talk about
a battalion,
the 48th VC infantry battalion.
They were thought to be
a pretty crack outfit,
and they were said to be housed
in and around the My Lai area.
The brigade commander, a man
called Colonel Oran Henderson,
wanted his battalions to be much
more aggressive with the enemy.
And it's fair to say
Henderson wound up Medina,
and Medina wound up
Charlie Company.
I told them this would give
them a chance
to engage the 48th VC battalion,
that the 48th VC battalion
is the one that we had been
chasing around the Task Force
Barker area of operation
and that we would finally
get a chance to destroy
the 48th VC battalion.
Because here's our chance
to confront the enemy.
We're getting our revenge
on you.
We're going to tear
your ass apart
for what you've done to us.
La CROIX:
We were to shoot literally
anything that moved.
If it was growing, cut it down.
If it was a building, burn it;
if it was a well, poison it;
if it was alive, kill it.
I remember him telling us
that the villagers have been
warned out,
there shouldn't be any
innocents there.
And I think there was even
questions asked,
'cause how would we know
if they're innocent or not?
And he said something
to the effect,
"If they're there, you got
to assume they're the enemy."
There were no civilians.
See, that-that is the crux
of what was told to us.
There are no civilians.
You know, these are Viet Cong,
Viet Cong sympathizers,
it's a Viet Cong stronghold,
they are all Viet Cong.
Medina, I believe, was very
clear that they were facing
the 48th Viet Cong infantry
battalion.
That was the intelligence
he had been given
and he had no reason
to question it.
The problem was that
the information was wrong.
Their 48th infantry battalion
were 150 miles away
on the other side of Quang Ngai
province.
And so the entire premise
for going to My Lai
was entirely false.
The morning of
the 16th started early.
The mood was sort of somber,
but there was an edge
of excitement.
We know that we're going
into something big
and we're going to deal
with them.
A little fear, anticipation.
This was our chance to prove
ourselves as a fighting unit.
We were instructed to pack a
triple basic load of ammunition.
Whereas a rifleman would
carry 180 rounds,
So we were expecting great
resistance in that village.
La CROIX:
I would say that probably most
of us didn't eat very much.
We were all anxious,
concerned about what was going
to be happening.
This was going to be
an all-out war.
This was going to be
shades of Iwo Jima.
The helicopters would ferry them
in three groups
and drop them
in the paddy fields
about 200 meters
from the village.
The first group of men would
go through, led by Calley.
The second platoon
would come in next.
They would follow up
with the third platoon
and Medina's group.
This was the order
that came down from on high.
They would have to move forward
quickly and very aggressively.
I was on the lead helicopter
and there's probably nine
helicopters and six gunships
on the side of us.
And I remember making
the big turn
and heading back north,
straight for My Lai.
- Receiving fire, yellow smoke,
- 200 meters,
automatic weapons, over.
We began hearing radio chatter
that the helicopters
were fired on.
The helicopter pilot turned
to us and told us
that we were coming
into a hot LZ.
The meaning, which was
quite clear, we were under fire.
As we touched down,
the door gunners were firing.
There were rounds zinging
kind of all around.
It was hard to tell where they
were coming from at that point.
We hit the ground and almost
immediately started firing
into the village area.
The squad leaders...
Myself and others...
Are instructing their soldiers,
"Let's get up on line,
"let's move it, let's move it,
you gotta get in position,
we're gonna move out."
I remember somebody yelling,
"There's people moving
in the village,"
and then we could see
people running,
and so we all opened up.
I think we had it in our minds
that we were not gonna get
pinned down out there.
There's a whole lot of movement
out to the southwest.
We assumed that we were going
to hit VC only,
that the civilians would be gone
from that entire village.
When we went in further,
we did start finding people.
Like they started coming out
of their house.
And we're saying,
"Wait a minute.
"What the hell is this?
They're not supposed
to be in here."
At first nobody did anything.
Then a couple of crazy guys
said, "Hey, they must be VC."
Some of the guys started
shooting.
Once the first civilian was
killed, it was too late.
Whoever killed the first
civilian, that was the end of...
end of the situation.
It went out of control.
It was just shoot, shoot, shoot
at anything.
I don't care what moved.
The person would come out
of a hut... bang, shoot.
It was just complete carnage
there that day.
La CROIX:
We did see bunkers and we did
start throwing grenades
into the bunkers.
That we started hearing
the screaming from inside.
Around 8:30, three Americans
soldiers came to my house.
They pushed six of us down
into the shelter
and threw a hand grenade
in behind us.
And then they used their machine
guns to shoot us down.
My entire family was blown
into pieces.
The only person left alive
was me.
Suddenly, an American soldier
came in carrying a gun.
I saw my father collapse,
and then my mother,
my grandfather
and my grandmother.
They all continued to fall.
My brother, younger than me,
only three years old,
suddenly they blasted
his head open.
One shot and his head blasted
onto the floor.
We were a until that was
full of anger, frustration.
We wanted contact,
we wanted to fight the enemy,
and we were told
we were doing it.
I am a soldier and I receive
and obey the orders
that are issued to me
by my superiors.
Their order was to kill
or destroy
everything in the village.
The children happened
to be there.
The people of that village
were Viet Cong
or Viet Cong sympathizers.
Maybe some see it differently.
That's the way I see it.
I was the photographer
on the operation that day.
I just photographed everything
that I came upon.
I was coming up to a group
of people who were huddled
and they had some, you know,
American GIs surrounding them.
One soldier spoke up and said,
"Hey! Here's a person
with a camera!"
And, sure enough,
the soldiers backed off
and I moved up and I took
a photograph of these people.
You can see the fear
in the faces on there,
especially the small children,
and the older woman trying
to protect the daughter.
Then, all of a sudden, that next
instant, automatic fire.
They were all shot
and they all dropped.
I saw them drop to the ground.
As I recall of that particular
day, I was flying a gunship,
tagging along behind the OH-23
flown by Hugh Thompson.
We were told it was
a typical combat assault,
near an area called Pinkville
on the map.
It was a strange-looking map
for that particular area
because it looked like
there should be
but when you get out there it
was really not much of anything,
just small hamlets
scattered about.
The OH-23 flown by Hugh Thompson
had a door gunner
on either side,
and he would fly low,
treetop level, basically,
trying to draw fire
or make somebody run.
It's pretty much a bait type
operation.
Hugh Thompson's job was
supremely dangerous.
The kill rate was
something like 40% or 50%.
I think that what motivated
Hugh to join the Army
was just his patriotism,
his love for his country.
He was a soldier's soldier.
He was a... very much
of a military mentality.
His father was a lifer
in the Navy.
His brother joined the Air Force
and served two or three tours
of duty in Vietnam.
He also thought that
flying a helicopter
would be a very exciting
profession.
The morning of My Lai,
Hugh Thompson and I came
on station at about 7:30.
And it was crystal clear.
We came in at altitude
and dropped down
and started flying low level.
We thought that we were really
helping the men on the ground
and that was our main objective.
We came in and strafed
the tree line on either side
of the landing zone
to suppress anybody
that might want to jump up
and shoot.
We got no fire.
We were never fired upon.
We started to just check
the perimeter.
We saw people leaving the area,
which was not unusual.
It was a Saturday morning.
People would go to market
on Saturday morning.
We thought, "Wonderful,
they're getting out of the way.
Let's continue our recon."
We were off... or out of that
particular area
for ten, 15, maybe 20 minutes.
Those same people were dead
or dying on the road.
At some point during the day,
we started seeing bodies
accumulate in the village.
Women, kids.
I'd never seen anything
like that.
It was bad.
We lingered by one of the bodies
that we'd marked.
It was a young female
with a chest wound,
but she was still alive.
Mr. Thompson decided he'd move
back, stay at a hover and watch.
And we saw a captain
approach the woman,
look down at her,
kick her with his foot,
step back and just blew her away
right in front of us.
Later on we found that it was
Captain Medina,
Ernest Medina, who did this.
La CROIX:
As we got deeper
into the village,
we were given more or less
a change of orders.
We were to stop firing
and to start moving people
that we found
over toward the center
and pushing them into the center
of the village,
and they were being picked up
by Calley's platoon more or less
and moved onward.
They started to take us
all away.
Everyone in the house,
they took us to leave.
All of us were taken away.
I held one of my children
and led the other one.
I walked with them until
they told us to stop.
They made us walk
from inside the village
across the rice fields.
I pulled my kids to go with me.
I dragged my kids, but they
still hit us, kicked us.
By the time they'd got out
to the other side,
they'd gathered together about
170 old men, elderly women,
mothers with small children
and pushing them, herding them,
across to the eastern side
of the village
near to where a big drainage
ditch was situated.
And they were all standing
around on the edge of the ditch.
Calley was there
with his platoon.
And Hugh Thompson was
flying around
in his small scout helicopter.
There's a ditch right where
the red smoke is.
We continued to recon;
checked on some of the people
we'd marked earlier with smoke.
They were gone.
At that point
Mr. Thompson noticed
there was a irrigation ditch
that he saw people in,
so he landed the aircraft.
He approached the soldier that
was near the ditch and said,
"These are civilians.
We gotta help them out."
And the soldier said,
"Yeah, we'll help them
out of their misery."
Mr. Thompson went through
every scenario he could
to give benefit of the doubt
to the men on the ground.
He did not want to believe that
our people were doing this.
And he came back,
got in the aircraft.
We lifted off and we were
15, 20 feet off the ground
and we heard automatic
weapons fire.
Suddenly Calley gave the order
to start firing,
and Calley and a young man
called Meadlo
turned their rifles,
their M16 rifles,
on this group
and began shooting.
Mothers started diving with
their children into the ditch.
One mother described it later
as like ducks going
into the water.
Lieutenant Calley told me,
"Meadlo, we got
another job to do."
So, we started pushing them off
and, uh... we started
shooting them.
So then all together,
we just pushed them all off
and, uh, just started using
automatics on them.
It didn't surprise me
that Paul Meadlo was one
of the participants with Calley
in shooting down
that group of people.
Paul did have
a strong sense of duty.
He just did what he was told.
I've thought about what I would
have done many times
if Calley would have put me
in the position he did Paul,
and I would like to think
I would have just said,
"You got to be kidding me,"
and-and walked away
and taken my chances
that he wouldn't have shot me.
I don't think I could
have done it.
I just really don't think
I could have done it.
Calley yelled at me
to come help him
and I just kept walking;
I didn't even turn around
and answer him.
And I thought at the time,
"Well, you know, that's
disobeying an order.
He could do anything
he wants to me."
I wasn't going to help him kill
people in the ditch.
To this day
I always think to myself,
what could I have done
to stop it?
And I don't know
the answer to that.
They started to push all the
people down into the ditch,
including my family.
And they started shooting
at will.
After the first round, my mother
and I were still alive.
So were my two younger siblings.
After the second, my two younger
siblings died,
but my mother was still alive.
At the third shooting,
my mother died.
To survive, I lay
under my mother's stomach
as the ditch filled with blood.
My daughter, Lien...
I used my breast to cover her
mouth so she wouldn't cry.
I saw my father walking around.
I wanted to tell him,
"Please lie down, Dad.
If you do, you will live."
But I didn't dare say it.
I just let my father
walk around there
and they went over there
and shot him.
Half of his head blew away.
I was coming out of the other
end of the village
and Calley was standing
at a low point,
and he was waving us and
directing us across the ditch.
And I got to the ditch, and...
it was full of bodies.
And that's when your senses
just shut down.
To this day, I don't know
how I walked across that ditch.
I remember looking down
and making eye contact
with somebody in the ditch,
and it was like I was looking
at a mannequin.
Mr. Thompson was just
beside himself.
He got on the radio and just
said, "This isn't right.
There's people killing civilians
down here."
And that's when he decided
to intervene.
And you have 15 Victor
Charlies...
He said, "We've got to do
something about this.
Are you with me?"
And we said yes.
Thompson now sees a small group
of Vietnamese people
running along a hedgerow,
running for their lives,
And in hot pursuit of them are
the men from Charlie Company.
Mr. Thompson calculated they had
less than 30 seconds to live.
He told us, "I'm going to go
over to the bunker
"and get these people out
myself.
"And if these American soldiers
fire on these people or me
when I'm getting them out
of the bunker, shoot 'em."
I remember thinking,
how did we get into this?
I was probably less than 50
yards from this helicopter,
and I remember the door gunners
of that helicopter
pointing their machine guns
directly at me and thinking,
"Oh, my God,
what are they gonna do?"
Three people came out,
six people came out,
12 people came... 11 or 12
people came out
of this little bunker.
That's when he got on the radio
and called a friend of his,
Dan Millians, a gunship pilot.
And he said,
"Danny, I need a favor."
Hugh and his crew had a group
of people gathered up
to be taken out.
And I landed the helicopter,
put them on,
and we left with them.
A gunship just never landed
out in the boonies like that
to pick up somebody.
It was just not done.
I don't know why we did it,
other than the fact
that those people needed to be
out of there.
We went back to the ditch
and I saw some some motion
down in the ditch.
I saw this child move.
I lifted my head up
and saw a helicopter landing
in the rice fields.
I was really scared, wasn't sure
if they would shoot again.
But when I lifted my head,
I saw three American soldiers
approach,
so I pretended to be dead.
But the Americans, the three of
them came down into the ditch.
I looked up a second time and
they came and pulled me out.
I remember taking the boy
in my left hand
by the back of his shirt
thinking,
"I hope these buttons
are sewn on,
or I'm... if the shirt lets go,
I'm going to lose the boy."
Mr. Thompson knew
that Quang Ngai hospital
wasn't too far away.
We left the boy
with a nun at the hospital,
told the nun he probably
doesn't have any family.
Time just seemed like to go on.
An hour could have passed, or
five minutes could have passed.
After we got in so far,
we did get
a "Cease fire, cease fire!"
And then you'd still hear
a couple of guns shoot off
and then you hear
the "Cease fire!" again.
And then it was quiet.
They left my village
in blood and fire.
Wives lost husbands,
and children lost fathers
and our homeland and village
were destroyed.
When there were no more
sounds of guns,
they came home to bury the dead.
I ran home
and there was nothing left.
My house was burned
and destroyed.
I couldn't recognize
my relatives.
They were all burned.
There was nothing left.
My grandmother, I called to her,
"Grandma, Grandma."
I thought she was almost dead.
She raised her hand up.
She said, "Grandma's here,
dear, lying here.
They shot me right in my arm."
When I called to my sister,
she was outside.
She just lay there unconscious.
But when she heard me call,
she woke up
and crawled over.
The three of us hugged
each other and cried.
We were covered in blood.
The cover-up of My Lai
began immediately.
As soon as they got back
to their base,
too many people knew that
something odd had gone on.
Already, Captain Medina had
radioed to the headquarters,
giving false figures
for how many enemy killed
in action there had been.
The official count was that
123 Viet Cong had been killed.
So that cover-up was constituted
within hours, really,
of them arriving home.
After the My Lai operation
and we returned to base camp,
Captain Medina told us,
"Do not answer any questions
from anyone...
News reporters or anybody else...
About this last mission."
We all thought that we were
going to get in big trouble.
And so we didn't talk
much about it.
The rest of that day,
we just started moving on
deeper into the peninsula.
We were told to... to take
the high ground.
And Medina specifically said,
"Don't go past the wire,
"because there's an old Korean
compound up there
and it's heavily mined."
We got to the wire,
and Calley said,
"Okay, you, you, you and you...
we're going up the top."
And Calley took Meadlo
as the point man.
They just barely got
out of sight,
and Meadlo stepped on a mine
and blew his foot off.
And, uh, when they were
medevacking him out,
the last thing he yelled at
Calley was: "God got me.
He'll get you for what we did."
I don't remember if it was
that day or the next day,
all I remember is I was wearing
the same fatigues
and they were covered in blood.
Mr. Thompson wanted me
to come up and meet him
and report what we'd seen
to Colonel Henderson.
Hugh went in first, came out,
didn't say anything,
just showed me the door.
I went in and told
Colonel Henderson
exactly that there was
unnecessary killing of civilians
going on that day,
a lot of civilians.
He made a couple notes
on a legal pad,
didn't really react to it
in any particular way.
Dismissed me and I left.
I met Hugh
outside the command bunker.
He was having a fit.
I think he broke
the flight helmet.
He threw it on the ground.
He wanted to tear his wings
off his uniform,
said he'd never fly again.
Thompson reported this
to his commanding officer
in hopes of getting action,
there was no word,
there was no buzz, no nothing.
After My Lai, they sent him
out by himself
in very dangerous areas.
He crashed four
or five helicopters
within a two-, three-month
period
and he was beginning to think...
And I don't think
he was being irrational...
He thought that someone was
trying to make him go away.
The higher-ups in the Army
understood
that something like this could
get them court-martialed,
could get the men under them
court-martialed.
So, the picture that the
military publicity machine
attempted to put out was that
there was no My Lai massacre...
That American soldiers
were not involved
in the killing and the slaughter
of women and children
This is simply Communist
propaganda and it's not true.
This is 1968.
Killing civilians,
by that time in Vietnam,
was an issue because, of course,
all the way up to Johnson,
they were trying to calm people
down in the United States.
So there wasn't any doubt
about the reason
for their wanting
to cover it up.
Following the My Lai incident,
Charlie Company was sent
out into the jungle
for over two months straight.
We were isolated and put out
in the mountains.
You know, it was like somebody
putting us out there
so we wouldn't talk to anybody.
54 days.
54 days we were out, no change
of clothes hardly.
We were sick;
we all got dysentery.
I truly believe that we were
sent there to never return.
That we were never going
to make it out of there.
And that just stuck in my mind,
"Why are they doing this?
Why are they sending
us out at night?"
You know, to get rid
of these 12 people here?
And then the next night
they send another 12
and get them?
The company changed after that.
And it was like...
nobody cared anymore.
That, you know, it was...
It was all...
It had all been a game
and the game was over,
and we got whooped.
I had been told of the incident
several times
by several different people
and it became evident to me
that there was a very real
amount of truth
behind the stories
I had been told.
Ron Ridenhour was
an aspirant journalist.
He had gone out to Vietnam
to do his time there
and had formed some
very close friendships
with members of Charlie Company.
They were sitting down one day,
telling war stories,
and his friend said to him,
"Hey, did you hear what happened
at Pinkville?"
And he said, "No, what happened
at Pinkville?"
He said,
"Well, we went in there,
and we just killed everybody."
Ridenhour made a promise
to himself that he would see
if he could get some more
evidence of this
and bring it to the attention
of the authorities.
After my return from Vietnam,
I wrote a letter... a long,
definitive letter...
Which explained what the
situation was as I knew it
and exactly how I came across
the information
and what information I had, and
I called for an investigation.
I made 30 copies of this letter
and sent out 30 copies to
various Congressional leaders
and the administration.
Inquiries start to be made
of the American military.
Where is this place Pinkville?
What has happened here?
One of the investigators of
the inspector general's corps
is sent out to interview members
of Charlie Company
who are still in the military
and subject to military
discipline.
And in very short order,
the information goes
up the chain of command.
And people in the Pentagon know
that something pretty awful
has happened.
The machinery of justice
starts moving,
and so it's not going to be kept
inside the Army,
and finally Haeberle decides
to sell those pictures.
The Cleveland Plain Dealer
printed today
a series of photographs
it says it got
from an Army combat
photographer,
and it says the pictures show
the bodies
of South Vietnamese killed
by the Americans.
Everybody saw those pictures.
The pictures appeared
in LIFE magazine
and on nightly news stories
over and over again.
We'll now show the pictures
published in the Plain Dealer
and photographed
from the newspaper,
accounting for the poor quality.
They were taken
by Ronald Haeberle
while on a combat assignment
for the Army.
The pictures become
almost ubiquitous
and they symbolize evil.
And the more that they're shown,
the more difficult it is
to kind of defend
what happened at My Lai
or even to look at whatever
extenuating circumstances
Survivors have claimed that
an American infantry patrol
sweeping through their village
in March last year
executed more than 500 unarmed
men, women and children.
It still isn't known
exactly what happened
in the Vietnamese village
of My Lai,
the scene of multiple killings
of civilians
about 18 months ago.
There are numerous charges...
I got off work and I stopped
at a bar to have a beer.
And the news was on.
And they flashed a picture
of Calley.
And I thought...
"My God, that's my unit."
You know, and they brought up
Medina's name
and then I'm listening to people
at the bar...
"Ah, them f-ing baby killers
just this and that.
I just... kind of sipped
my beer.
I was going to junior college,
and over breakfast I heard
on the radio
that the Army was investigating
a massacre in Vietnam.
"I hope that's not the one
that I was involved in."
Do you believe
that there was a cover-up
of this incident
in South Vietnam,
of the incident at My Lai 4?
I have no reason to believe
there was...
There was a huge uproar
in the country.
The top of the Army were
absolutely furious
that something like this
could have happened
two years before, nearly,
and been held so that they
knew nothing about it.
So they really wanted
to find out
what had happened
and who had covered it up.
They had to look for somebody
who was a member of the team
but was not necessarily
going to be accused
of covering up a cover-up.
And the person they fell upon
was Ray Peers.
Peers had been
a corps commander in Vietnam.
He'd had a very distinguished
military career,
and he was a deeply, deeply
honorable and decent man.
General, is there any
doubt in your mind now
that a massacre did take place
at My Lai on March 16, 1968?
That's one of the things
we're trying to determine.
Peers made the decision,
"Look, before I can decide
"what's been covered up, I got
to know what happened.
"And the only way we're going
to know what happened
is to talk to everybody that was
there that will talk to us."
There were maybe 800 people
in this battalion,
and we had to contact
every one of them
and try to arrange for them to
come to Washington and testify.
When it finally registers
and sinks in
that there's something going on
was when you actually started
getting subpoenaed
to the Peers Committee.
What kind of trouble were we in?
We don't know.
We were picked up in a military
limousine, unmarked,
and taken to the Pentagon,
and I don't know how
many levels down we went,
but we went down...
We went into what somebody
referred to as a war room,
and there were gigantic maps
of My Lai
all the way around the room.
And they set us down
at the end of the table
with a microphone
in front of us, feeling...
feeling pretty small.
- The next witness is
- Sergeant Gregory T. Olsen.
Good morning, Sergeant Olsen.
Good morning.
I'll show you also
a 1:25,000 scale map
which has been introduced
into evidence as Exhibit Map 4.
Would you take us through
the village, step by step?
Well, I seen some of my friends
shoot women, children, babies.
After you'd gotten
out of the helicopter
here in the landing zone,
could you tell us the first
thing that happened?
- I was in the second lift.
- We landed here.
Could you mark about the
location on there of the CP
and just put a figure 1
and circle it?
And which side
of the village were you on?
Were you on the left
or the right?
Who was on your right?
Who was on your left?
Who was in front of you?
Who was on the side of you?
What happened?
What time was this?
Trying to, I am assum...
At that time, I didn't realize,
you know,
that they were trying to
synchronize, "Are you lying?"
Peers was distressed.
Terribly distressed.
The accumulation
of all these things
over the weeks of testimony
really got to him, I think.
And when he then
would come across
someone like Hugh Thompson,
the helicopter pilot,
it was almost a, uh...
a relief to him to realize
that there are still
really good Americans.
I would like you to repeat
what you told the Colonel
at that particular
interrogation.
I told him about seeing
the wounded Vietnamese.
I told him that a captain had
came over and shot one of them.
Told him about seeing
the bodies in the ditch.
How many bodies did you tell
him were in the ditch?
I think I said
about a hundred, sir.
How did you feel
at this particular time?
I felt like there'd been
a massacre.
Thompson had done just what
you'd want a soldier to do.
And almost nobody else ever had,
and nothing happened
as a result of it.
What shocked Peers was that
people who were in a position
to prevent it happening
had not done so,
that something had gone wrong,
had actually then covered it up.
Did Mr. Thompson mention
anything to you
about landing alongside
of a ditch
that contained a large number
of bodies?
Did he mention to you seeing
a sergeant point his weapon
in the direction of a ditch
which contained some
dead noncombatants?
No, sir, he did not report to me
any incident of a U.S. soldier
firing into a ditch
filled with noncombatants
or with anybody.
I think General Peers was
frustrated by his inability
to get any kind of sensible
explanations from Henderson
and concluded that Henderson...
well, he was both incompetent
and lying.
And I feel that the public
is entitled to know
that our inquiry
clearly established
that a tragedy
of major proportions
occurred there on that date.
Peers knew that his report
should be completely truthful,
and it resulted
in some 30 people,
from up through the ranks
from lieutenant,
all the way up
to a two-star general,
being charged with offenses
involved in the cover-up itself.
At Fort Benning, Georgia, today
the prosecution opens its case
against First Lieutenant
William Calley, Jr.,
of more than 100 South
Vietnamese civilians at My Lai.
I was an Army prosecutor
at Fort Benning, Georgia.
The first case was going to be
against Lieutenant Calley
because he was to be discharged
from the service
in September of that year,
and under the law,
once he was discharged,
the Army would no longer have
jurisdiction to prosecute him.
So there were some
time constraints.
He was not charged
with the massacre.
He was charged with what he did.
That was not everything
that was done in that operation,
but I will say this:
that the evidence
clearly demonstrated
that he was responsible for more
killing than anybody else there
by a long shot.
Gentlemen, the accused stands
here before you today
charged with four specifications
of premeditated murder
alleged to have taken place
in the village of My Lai 4,
16 March, 1968.
This was going to be
the first case
in which the story, in its
entirety, would be told.
So I wanted to tell the story
in such a way
for the jury to know, both
circumstantially and directly,
all of the evidence to
demonstrate quite clearly
that what those charges said had
occurred had, in fact, occurred.
These people were murdered as
we allege they were murdered.
They were unarmed,
they were unresisting,
they were children,
and they were babies.
I will ask you whether,
in your opinion,
you were acting rightly and
according to your understanding
of your directions and orders.
I felt then and I still do
that I acted as I was directed,
and I carried out the orders
that I was given,
and I do not feel wrong
in doing so, sir.
If the orders
for that operation included
unarmed, unresisting men, women,
children and babies,
it was illegal.
And a soldier has a duty
to disobey such an order.
A lot of people talk about
My Lai and they say,
"Well, you know, yeah,
but you can't follow
an illegal order."
Trust me, there is no such
thing, not in the military.
If I go into a combat situation
and I tell them,
"No, I'm not going,
I'm not going to do that,
I'm not going to follow
that order,"
they'd put me up against
the wall and shoot me.
You train a man to soldier, you
take him out of civilian life,
you teach him to be a soldier,
you train him to kill,
you train him to follow orders,
you express to him the
importance of following orders,
True, we kill our enemies,
but there comes a point in time
at which you don't kill
your enemy.
He's entitled to be treated
humanely.
The most serious offense
outside of war
is the taking of a human life.
And in war there has
to be limits.
I told the jury, finally, I
wanted to speak for the victims.
And I reminded them
they did not receive any trial.
And I said, "What were
their crimes, these victims?
"Was it the crime of an infant
simply to have been born
in My Lai?
What were their crimes?"
And I said to them,
"At the end of the day, you are
the conscience of our country
when you render this verdict."
If I have committed a crime,
the only crime
that I have committed
is in judgment of my values.
Apparently, I valued
my troops' lives
more than I did
that of the enemy.
When my troops were getting
massacred and mauled
by an enemy I couldn't see,
I couldn't feel
and I couldn't touch, that was
my enemy out there,
and when it became between me
and that enemy,
I had to value the lives
of my troops,
and I feel that is the only
crime I have committed.
Lieutenant William Calley
has been found guilty.
A jury that deliberated
a record 13 days
after the longest court martial
in American military history
found Calley guilty
on all four counts
arising from the killing
of innocent, unarmed South
Vietnamese civilians
I don't think there
has ever been a verdict
which has been more
controversial
or generated a greater public
outcry of opposition
than the verdict in that case.
Free Calley, Free Calley,
Free Calley!
There were mass protests
around the country.
Draft boards were resigning.
Veterans were turning in
their medals.
It was enormous, overwhelming.
- Free Calley! Free Calley!
- Free Calley!
♪ My name is William Calley,
I'm a soldier of this land ♪
♪ I've tried to do my duty
and to gain the upper hand ♪
♪ But they've made me out
a villain ♪
♪ They have stamped me
with a brand ♪
♪ As we go marching on. ♪
It was a country that wanted
this war to end
and a country which didn't
want to believe
that this had happened,
but if it did, wanted to say
that it's our fault collectively
and not his fault.
Calley's been used.
All the wars we've had
in the United States
we pick one man
out of all them wars
and say he committed atrocities
against the enemy.
♪ Still all of us are soldiers,
we're too busy to complain ♪
♪ As we go marching on. ♪
Good evening.
President Nixon has ordered
Lieutenant William Calley
released from the stockade
and confined to his quarters
pending review of his conviction
of life sentence
for the My Lai massacre.
The announcement came amid
a deluge of telegrams
to the White House...
25,000 today...
Called the greatest expression
of public sentiment by far
on any issue
of the Nixon presidency.
Within a very short space
of time,
President Nixon, trying to cope
with some of the political
fallout from this,
had decided that while his
appeal hearings were being held,
Lieutenant Calley should not
be imprisoned
but he could be out on bail.
Mr. President, you said
that you intervened
in the Calley case
in the national interest.
I wonder if you could define
for us in greater detail
how you feel it was served by
your intervention in the case.
I felt that it was proper
for me to indicate
because there was great concern
expressed throughout the country
as to whether
or not this was a case,
involving as it did so many
complex factors,
in which Captain Calley was
going to get a fair trial.
Ultimately, he had to serve,
in total, about four months
in the stockade
at Fort Leavenworth,
and by that time it was deemed
that he had served enough time
and he was released.
I think that Nixon's
intervention passed the word
that nobody is going to get
punished for what happened here
and so don't worry
about it, people.
And the result of this
was to completely undermine
any further prosecutions
of other officers.
Get out of the way, please.
Calley got away with it.
And all the other people
who were involved
got away with it also.
Did you ever have any doubts?
No, I never had
that actually feeling
I always thought that my
innocence would be proven
I've always maintained
that position,
and, uh... I'm glad
it's over with.
I finally decided I had
to say something.
I wanted to make the president
aware of my feelings
about the case
and, uh, the jurors and the
victims and the rule of law.
"I truly regret having to have
written this letter
"and wish that no innocent
person had died at My Lai
"on March 16, 1968.
"But innocent people were killed
"under circumstances that will
always remain abhorrent
"to my conscience.
"While in some respects,
what took place at My Lai
"has to be considered
a tragic day
"in the history of our nation,
"the greatest tragedy of all
will be if political expediency
"dictates the compromise of such
a fundamental moral principle
"as the inherent unlawfulness of
the murder of innocent persons,
"making the action
and the courage
"of six honorable men who served
their country so well
meaningless."
If you take the total number
of people who died at My Lai,
and put that alongside the two
million civilians who died,
it doesn't seem very much.
But in terms of impact
on America
and on the rest of the world
about how they conducted
that war,
clearly it changed people's
opinions towards the war.
It was too big a price to pay,
that if you were going to have
to win this war
by this kind of conduct, then it
wasn't a price worth paying.
People had been saying
to themselves,
"Well, what are we doing
to these people?
What are we doing to them?"
And then with My Lai,
people began to say,
"What is it doing to us?"
Oh, it hurts me thinking
about the innocent people
that got killed.
It hurts me now.
It hurts me now
more than it did then,
'cause then you're thinking
about living.
You get out and you're a
civilian, you think about dying.
It's been a while.
Now I can sleep, but every once
in a while, I dream again
about how my father died,
how my sister died,
how they died next to me.
I saw it all.
I remember all the time.
I could go back and remember
those... all those sleepless
nights that we had...
everything that went on.
My Lai, all the people
who were killed there.
Every day I try to...
try to make it easy.
That I could make it easy
and make it go away.
I'd lay down at night.
Still the same thing,
whether I drank,
whether I didn't drink.
It's the memories, it kept
coming back, kept coming back.
I will never forget.
When I'm reminded, I suddenly
remember the pain.
A chapter in the book opens.
There is no way
I will ever forget.
I will never forget.
As far as living with the shame
of My Lai, I have no shame.
I did what I was supposed
to be doing.
The shame rests with the
politicians and the military.
Not with me, the other members
of Charlie Company,
Lieutenant Calley
or Captain Medina.
The shame lays with them.
It's a national shame.
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Someone needs to stop Clearway Law.
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