Meanwhile, according to a Houston soldier named Herbert Carter, “We went through the village. We didn’t see any VC. People began coming out of their hootches and the guys shot them down and then burned the hootches or burned the hootches and shot the people when they came out. Sometimes they would round up a bunch and shoot them together. It went on like this all day.”
Sergeant Michael Bernhardt, whose comrades said he refused to participate, called it “point-blank murder.” He said, “Only a few of us refused. I told them the hell with this, I’m not doing it. I didn’t think this was a lawful order.” Most of the firing had died away before Private Richard Pendleton reached My Lai, “but,” he later said, “some guys were still shooting people…. There were big groups of bodies lying on the ground, in gullies and in the paddies.” Only one American was a casualty—a soldier who had shot himself in the foot rather than take part in the killings.
Among the witnesses were two soldiers whose recollections would later carry special weight. Ronald Haeberle, an Army photographer, recorded the My Lai carnage on film with three cameras. One was official; he turned that in. The other two were his personal property, and he kept them. The second soldier was Warrant Officer Hugh C. Thompson Jr., a helicopter pilot. Thompson saw the L-shaped gully from the air and alerted his commanding officer. “I thought something was wrong out there,” he said later, “because I couldn’t foresee any way of how the bodies got in the ditch.” Thompson returned to the village and rescued sixteen children there. The Army awarded him the Distinguished Flying Cross for “disregarding his own safety.”
That was the only sign of official awareness that anything unusual had happened at My Lai. Twelve days later Colonel Barker filed a combat action report describing the attack as “well-planned, well-executed, and successful.” In the words of a subsequent congressional report, “it can be reasonably concluded that the My Lai matter was ‘covered up’ within the Americal Division.” Long afterward, when the cover-up had failed, the divisional commander, Major General Samuel Koster—who had gone on to become superintendent of West Point—was reduced in rank, and both he and the assistant divisional commander were censured and deprived of their Distinguished Service Medals. This could hardly have been foreseen then or for some time afterward, however. The first man to do something about My Lai hadn’t been there that morning and didn’t even hear about it until a month later. He was Ronald Ridenhour, who had been with Charlie Company earlier, in Hawaii; he learned about the massacre from his former comrades. A year later, as a returned veteran, Ridenhour wrote out an account of what had apparently happened and mailed twenty-three copies of it to President Nixon, key congressmen, and officials in the Pentagon and the State Department. He charged that “something rather dark and bloody did indeed occur sometime in March 1968 in a village called ‘Pinkville’ in the Republic of Vietnam.”
That was on March 29, 1969. Within four weeks the Army opened a full-scale inquiry into the slaughter. Evidence was turned over to the provost marshal general on August 4; that same month the Pentagon received copies of photographer Haeberle’s slides. On September 5, the day before Calley was scheduled to be discharged, he was accused of killing 109 Vietnamese civilians. Others were charged, including Medina, but only Calley was later found guilty, after a four-month trial which sent a shudder through the nation. Asked about the incident at a news conference when the story first broke, President Nixon said that it “was certainly a massacre,” and that “under no circumstances was it justified.” He continued: “One of the goals we are fighting for in Vietnam is to keep the people… from having imposed upon them a government which has atrocity against civilians as one of its policies.”
When Calley was convicted in 1971 of murdering twenty-two Vietnamese and sentenced to life, however, an astonishing change swept the country, and the President’s political antennae were quick to pick it up. A majority of Americans seemed to believe that the verdict was undeserved, either because the lieutenant was innocent or because he was being made a scapegoat. The mood, one observer said sardonically, was, “It didn’t happen, and besides, they deserved it.” Viking Press announced that it had paid $100,000 for Calley’s memoirs, and in the first three days after his conviction a record on the Plantation label, “The Battle Hymn of Lieutenant Calley,” sold 202,000 copies. After a saccharine voice-over about “a little boy who wanted to grow up and be a soldier and serve his country in whatever way he could,” the song began:
My name is William Calley, I’m a soldier of this land,
I’ve vowed 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.
The White House reported that mail was running a hundred to one against the verdict and sentence. President Nixon ordered Calley released from the Benning stockade and moved to house arrest in his post apartment. Two days later the White House announced that “Yesterday the President made the decision that before any final sentence is carried out in the case of Lieutenant Calley the President will personally review the case and finally decide it.” Later Nixon changed his mind, but at the time he seemed to be playing politics with a war crime. Indignant, the lieutenant’s prosecutor, Captain Aubrey M. Daniel III, wrote the President that he was “shocked and dismayed at your decision to intervene in these proceedings in the midst of the public clamor.”
***
Five weeks after Ronald Ridenhour put his My Lai statement in the mail, Secretary of the Navy John H. Chafee announced civilian intervention in the case of another embattled officer—Commander Lloyd M. Bucher of the Pueblo, back in the United States with his crew after the North Koreans had released them in exchange for an official American confession of espionage, an apology, and a promise that it would not happen again. Even as he handed it over at Panmunjom, Major General Gilbert H. Woodward said that the admission was false, that he had signed it “to free the crew, and only to free the crew.” Still, the statement rankled in the Pentagon, and the Navy recommended a court-martial for Bucher. Chafee vetoed it. The commander and his men, he said, “have suffered enough.”
The locust years continued for the military, despite the change in Presidents. Campaigning in 1968, Richard Nixon had said of Bucher’s lost ship, “Unless the United States reacts to these slights, you are bound to encourage bigger slights and you are going to have more Pueblos. In a new administration I say we’ve got to stop that kind of action… before it gets started.” Less than three months after he entered the White House he was confronted by a similar humiliation, and he was as helpless in responding to it as Lyndon Johnson had been. This time the vehicle of mortification was an airborne Pueblo, a converted Lockheed Super Constellation which the Navy called an EC121. Unarmed, the EC121 carried thirty-one crewmen and six tons of electronic gear designed to monitor the communications of a potential enemy. On April 15 the North Koreans shot it down, killing all hands. This time there could be no question about the location of the incident. Russian vessels agreed that it had occurred in international waters, between 100 and 120 miles off the coast.
Nixon’s first impulse had been to retaliate, but the more he pondered his options, the fewer he had. Short of risking nuclear war, there was little he could do. In the end he could only say, “I have today ordered that these flights be continued. They will be protected. This is not a threat. It is simply a statement of fact.”
It was also a statement of frustration, heightened by the year’s events in Vietnam. In Paris American negotiators were telling the North Vietnamese that the United States had ruled out hopes for a military solution in Indochina; in Saigon President Thieu was being told that unilateral American withdrawal, or the acceptance of terms amounting to a disguised U.S. defeat, was also unacceptable. What lay between was impotence.
Human kamikazes—Viet Cong with dynamite lashed to their bodies to blow up barbed wire—led attackers on Fire Base Russell, a Marine position just south of the
demilitarized zone, and savage fighting erupted around the big U.S. base at Bien Hoa, fifteen miles from Saigon. The most controversial action of the year was the American assault on Apbia Mountain, christened Hamburger Hill by the grunts. Continuing its strategy of the Johnson years, the Army was subjecting the Viet Cong to what the Pentagon called “maximum pressure.” Hamburger Hill began as a typical search-and-destroy mission. Nine battalions were set down by helicopters in the A Shau Valley, a corridor for infiltration from Laos. During the subsequent sweep, the 3rd Battalion of the 187th Regiment, 101st Airborne Division, ran into what the divisional commander, Major General Melvin Zais, called “a hornets’ nest” of opposition. Pulling back, the battalion dug in and sent a company up to storm the hill.
The attack failed. Two companies then assaulted the crest. They too were thrown back. The next day the whole battalion charged the defenders and was repulsed. Three more battalions were called in. Meanwhile U.S. artillery and aircraft were battering the top of the hill; 2,000 shells and 155 air sorties defoliated the summit. Still the Viet Cong clung to it, sending the American attackers reeling backward each time in a tempest of rifle fire and exploding grenades. Ten successive U.S. charges were routed. On the eighth day 1,000 grunts and 400 South Vietnamese took the hill. General Zais called it “a great victory by a gutty bunch of guys.” One week later an Army spokesman announced that Hamburger Hill was being abandoned. He said, “We feel we’ve gotten everything out of this mountain that we’re going to get.”
Senators reading the casualty lists—46 Americans had been killed on the slopes of Apbia, and 308 wounded—reacted angrily. Edward M. Kennedy called such assaults “senseless and irresponsible.” He asked, “How can we justify sending our boys up against a hill a dozen times or more, until soldiers themselves question the madness of the action?” Some Republicans were also aroused. Aiken of Vermont, the ranking minority member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, proposed that the White House “immediately” start “an orderly withdrawal,” to turn the war over to “its rightful owners”—the Vietnamese. Scott of Pennsylvania, the GOP whip, urged the withdrawal of “a substantial number” of U.S. soldiers.
Nixon was listening. During his first term he was sensitive to the mood on Capitol Hill. In speeches he remained the irreconcilable cold-warrior, earnestly asserting his belief in a Free Asia, the domino theory, and the rest of it, but his actions were something else. “Vietnam might or might not make us,” one of his aides acknowledged, “but there is no question it could break us.” The Johnsonian strategy was clearly bankrupt. By March 1969 the number of dead Americans had exceeded the 33,639 killed in Korea. The cost of the war, which continued to top 25 billion dollars a year, continued to generate irresistible inflationary pressure; a 1958 dollar was now worth about seventy-five cents, and economist Milton Friedman was predicting what sounded like a politician’s nightmare: an “inflationary recession.”
It was now clear that Nixon’s most influential foreign policy adviser was not Rogers but Kissinger. Writing in Foreign Affairs as a private citizen, Kissinger had proposed two parallel lines of negotiation. Washington and Hanoi, he suggested, might schedule mutual troop withdrawals while the Viet Cong and the South Vietnamese forged a political solution. Now Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird returned from a visit to Saigon with another component of the new President’s war policy. Laird believed that the combat efficiency of Thieu’s troops could be improved to the point where they might be left on their own. The White House seized on this as a way to implement Vietnamization. Breaking the news to Thieu on Midway, Nixon announced the first cut, of 25,000 men, on June 8.
That same month Clark Clifford proposed in Foreign Affairs that the administration “reduce the level of combat” by scheduling the pullout of 100,000 U.S. troops by the end of 1969 and the elimination of “all ground combat forces” by the end of 1970. Clifford wrote: “Nothing we might do could be so beneficial or could so add to the political maturity of South Vietnam as to begin to withdraw our combat troops. Moreover, in my opinion, we cannot realistically expect to achieve anything more through our military force, and the time has come to begin to disengage.” Annoyed, Nixon told a national television audience, “I would hope that we could beat Mr. Clifford’s timetable, just as I think we’ve done a little better than he did when he was in charge of our national defense.” Aides hastily explained that this was not a commitment, but in September the President announced that he expected to bring home all fighting men “before the end of 1970 or the middle of 1971.” A Life writer observed at the end of the year, “Politically there did not seem to be much choice. Nixon had to get the U.S. out of Vietnam or face almost certain defeat in the presidential election of 1972.”
In Vietnam General Creighton Abrams introduced tactics meant to lower U.S. casualties. Instead of large-scale search-and-destroy missions, tactics on a typical day entailed sending out as many as a thousand patrols of from one hundred to two hundred men each; their orders were to destroy enemy troops and supplies if possible, but to avoid bloodlettings. “Maximum pressure” had been replaced by “protective reaction”; an offensive stance had become defensive. This sounded more impressive in Washington than it really was, however. Two great armies remained in the field, each capable of maiming the other and each led by aggressive commanders. Only forty-six skirmishes were announced in the seven days ending Saturday, July 5, a typical week, but 155 U.S. soldiers were killed. And Abrams’s conservative posture did not eliminate the possibility of a big battle, which could flare up at any time.
It happened in late August amid the rolling hills southwest of Da Nang, an area known as the Rice Bowl. A U.S. helicopter crashed there, killing the eight men aboard, and two companies of the 196th Light Infantry Brigade were ordered to recover their bodies. Simultaneously, a thousand North Vietnamese were forming up there to assault the district capital of Hiep Due. The two forces stumbled into one another and the Communist troops withdrew into a labyrinth of bunkers and trench lines. When the Americans went after them, it was Hamburger Hill all over again. Reinforcements were sucked in until about three thousand Americans and South Vietnamese were pitted against the North Vietnamese Second Division. Both sides battled for possession of a hummock called Hill 102. The struggle ended when grunts of the 196th reached the top—and found it deserted. “It’s the old story,” a U.S. officer said. “Five days of fighting like hell and on the sixth day they give it to you for nothing.” But there was a new story from the Rice Bowl, too, and it was ominous. Company A of the 196th had refused to obey direct orders to descend into the labyrinth and bring back the dead from the wrecked helicopter. Eventually the men did move out, but the specter of mutiny remained, one more dissonant note in the Vietnamese din.
***
Speaking of crime at home, the President held his hand at neck level and told reporters that the people “have had it up to here.” It was in fact a lawless time in the United States; the FBI reported an increase in felonies of 10.6 percent over the previous year. Larceny was up 19 percent, forcible rape 16.8 percent, robbery 12.5 percent, and one offense went right off the chart: skyjacking, the hijacking of airplanes. Between 1950 and 1967 the airlines had reported an average of 2.3 attempted skyjacks a year. In 1969 there were 71, of which 58 went to Cuba—three times as many as the year before. On NBC-TV’s Tonight Show Johnny Carson said, “There are so many hijackings that one airline changed its slogan to ‘Up, up, and olé.’”
The airlines did try a lot of things. Signs in terminals warned that skyjacking was punishable by death, that passengers could be imprisoned just for carrying weapons aboard, and that they could be searched. The public was invited to offer some suggestions. Some memorable ones came in: stewardesses could be trained to seduce skyjackers, passengers should be required to travel naked, trapdoors could be built where the skyjackers would stand, the crew should play the Cuban national anthem over the public address system and then arrest everyone who stood up. Only one innovation worked. Al
though no U.S. airline scheduled regular flights to Cuba, every pilot flying over the South carried approach maps for Havana’s José Martí Airport. With dismal regularity they were billed, through the Swiss government, for Cuban landing fees and incidental expenses.
That year’s skyjacking climax came in November, when Captain Donald Cook of TWA’s Los Angeles to San Francisco Flight 85 switched on the intercom and said, “There’s a man here who wants to go some place, and he’s just chartered himself an airplane. Drinks are on the house.” The man was a twenty-year-old Marine Corps veteran of Vietnam, Raffaele Minichiello, and he was holding a pistol at the flight engineer’s head. Minichiello was cagey about his destination. Cook said later, “Right away I suspected we would be heading south to pick up a few cigars, but that wasn’t the way it was.” The skyjacker ordered him to fly east.
After refueling at Bangor and Shannon, Ireland, they wound up over Leonardo da Vinci Airport in Rome. It seemed that Minichiello, a native Italian, was homesick. He ordered the control tower to park them in a far corner of the field; then he said he wanted an unarmed policeman as a hostage. Rome’s police chief volunteered. The skyjacker made the chief drive him into the country and then released him. Several hours later Minichiello was arrested in a church. “Why did I do it?” he said. “I don’t know.” His sister said, “I think the war damaged my brother’s mind.” The Italian public appeared to regard him as a hero—he had, after all, established a skyjacking record: 17 hours in the air and 6,900 miles—but their government took another view. He was sentenced to six years and five months in prison.
Although the somewhat fey Minichiello was a comet in the world of crime, he was not the year’s most famous miscreant. That distinction went to a motorist charged merely with leaving the scene of an accident without identifying himself. The misdeed became notorious because the culprit was a U.S. senator bearing a famous name—Edward M. Kennedy—and because the accident had tragic consequences. Until the night of July 18–19, 1969, Ted Kennedy had been the front runner for the next Democratic presidential nomination and a probable winner over Nixon and his minority party. Ted’s eulogy at his brother Bob’s funeral had moved the nation, and in January he had displayed his family’s winning ways by blitzing Russell B. Long of Louisiana, beating him in a party caucus and thereby replacing him as the Senate’s Democratic whip. The young Kennedy seemed to be on his way to greatness. Then came Chappaquiddick.
The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972 Page 177