“He knows. I talked it over with him and Barlow both. They was all for me doing it.”
I had a taste in my mouth like cold ashes. The closest thing I had to a brother was being forced to leave his home and family.
“I can’t believe you’re leaving out tonight just like that, G. Dub!” I grabbed him and hugged him tight. “I’m going to miss you like crazy.”
Things were happening too fast all of a sudden. It felt like my whole world had done a 180 in the past few weeks, like a car spinning out on an icy road. I had a bad feeling it wasn’t over yet.
“I’ll miss you too, Cherry-Berry.” He was trying hard not to cry. “You write to me, now, you promise?”
“You know I will. Call collect and let us know where you are when you get there. And drive careful. Don’t get any speeding tickets. Oh, G. Dub, I hate this stupid old war!”
I didn’t want to break down and sob, but tears ran down my cheeks, and I kept wiping them with the back of my hand. It took everything I had to keep from hanging on his leg and begging him not to go. I felt so helpless. But when I thought about Jerry and Bobby, and Tripp’s long red scar, I knew I would do anything to just know G. Dub was alive somewhere on the earth.
We hugged some more and kissed, and he and Baby hugged, then he got in the car and waved as he drove away, leaving us feeling empty. I was thankful, not for the first time, that I was a girl and didn’t have to make this decision or to worry about going to Vietnam.
48.Vietnam
March 18, 1968
Dear Carlene,
I’m still here. Although I’m not sure if I want to be or not. I might as well tell you the whole sorry story of what happened in the last few days. I don’t know how much longer I will be around, and somebody back in the world needs to know about it. I haven’t slept in nearly three days. I don’t know how anybody else has. It’s like my brain is grinding its gears and I am moving in slow motion, so if this letter doesn’t make any sense, then I guess it is just one more thing in this life that doesn’t.
I don’t know if you got my last letter or not, but I said we were going to go in and clean out a nest of VC on Saturday, and we went in to do that, all right, but it didn’t go exactly like I thought it would. I’ll start from the beginning. If I can. My head is pretty jumbled up right now. Just be patient, because I need to tell it all, if only for myself, to try and make some sense out of it.
—
It was cloudy, quite a bit of hot wind when we got up at 5:30 that next morning after I wrote you. It was the kind of weather that unsettles you, not that we weren’t unsettled enough anyhow. By seven, our two platoons were boarding the line of slicks, choking on the cloud of dust their propellers kick up, and getting ready to go up the eleven miles to the target, My Lai 4. We were taking an extra load of ammunition and supplies, because it was going to be the biggest battle we had ever faced. I can’t tell you how scared I was, Carlene. It was like my whole body was quivering. My teeth were chattering, and from the looks on their faces, so were a lot of the other guys’, although they joked around and tried to act tough.
We climbed up in the slicks, two gunners on either side of the open doors, and took off over the most beautiful land you will ever see anywhere. Beautiful and deadly. Under those thick green trees were tunnels full of VC, living like rattlers underground, waiting to pop out and strike at us.
We were as prepared as we could be, though. The artillery was all set to clear out a drop zone for us, and the brown-water swift boats were in position to give us support. We had the whole battle mapped out, with plenty of choppers for scouting and for backup.
We passed right over the field where we were booby-trapped, and on a little farther was the Diem Diem River, where we were hit that time and lost our radioman.
As we got close to the LZ, our machine gunner poured a trail of tracer fire down to clear out anybody who might be waiting for us. We were six feet above the ground when Lieutenant Calley said, “Let’s go!” and we all jumped out and hit the ground running. There was a lot of smoke from the tracer blast, and we couldn’t really see much, but a machine gun off to the right let loose and we saw a man running with a bunch of cows. He was too far away, though, and escaped. Another one stopped and held up his arms to show he wanted to surrender, and he was cut down.
A couple of the Warlord aero scouts took off after two dinks in black pajamas carrying weapons. I didn’t see if they got them or not. All of us spread out and secured defensive positions along the dikes. The rest of our guys landed, and we moved forward “on line,” firing our weapons. Our job was to sweep through the village and take out any enemy opposition. Then the third platoon was supposed to follow and mop up, kill the livestock, and torch the hootches. Search and destroy, emphasis on destroy.
I was braced, waiting for return fire, but there didn’t seem to be any. There were a lot of people in the village who still hadn’t gone off to the market, and most of them were racing around trying to get out of the way, jumping down into their dugouts or hunkering in their huts. A man popped up out of a trench, and I fired off a round at him, but missed, and somebody else got him.
One of the guys shot at a woman running with a baby, and I yelled at him, but he didn’t seem to hear me and kept right on shooting. The two of them fell stone dead, blood pouring out of a dozen wounds. I ran over to see if I could help them, but they were past help. Their eyes were already fixed and staring. It had to be a mistake. I mean, there was so much chaos that you sometimes just reacted when you saw movement and shot before you thought, but it seemed like he would have known they weren’t the enemy after the first shot.
The village was pretty dense with bamboo and banana trees, and you couldn’t always see what was going on fifty feet away. From the minute we landed, there was a constant din of gunfire. Everyone all around me was shooting as hard and fast as they could, at anything that moved—people, pigs, chickens, cows, anything. Guys would yell for people to come out of a hootch, and if they didn’t, they threw a grenade in. Sometimes they didn’t even yell, but just threw one in anyhow. A woman crawled out with a bad chest wound, and one of the guys blew her brains out. It didn’t take long until I realized that they were killing all of the people, not just the men, and there was not one thing I could do about it.
I couldn’t believe what I was seeing, Carlene. As far as I could tell, there were no men of fighting age who could be VC there, and the villagers were offering no resistance. They were mostly old men and women and children. If there had been any VC, they were long gone down the tunnels, but I’m sure they weren’t there, or they would have tried to defend the village. I stood right in the middle of what I can only describe as a slaughterhouse.
It was like they had all gone into some kind of insane frenzy. They pushed gangs of women and children into bunkers, then threw grenades in on them. Pieces of flesh rained down like hail.
It was one big mess of confusion. People were crying and yelling and screaming. I don’t see how we kept from killing each other with all the bullets flying. Anybody that stuck their head out of a tunnel or a hootch was shot down, even if they had their hands up. A woman ran by me with her arm dangling off by a thread of skin, and somebody soon shot her. The ground was churned up in sticky red mud. I had never been so sick in my life, not even when we were burning the bodies.
Three little girls ran by me into a hootch, with my pal Tripp Barlow chasing right behind them. That was too much, and I started to go in after him, until I heard him yelling, “Di di mau, di di mau!”Which means, “Run! Run!” They were scared of him, but he dragged them out and ran with them toward the rice paddy. At the edge of the field, he pushed them, still yelling, “Di di mau,”and they took off. I think they made it, which at least is something. I don’t know what I would have done if Barlow had hurt them. At least he hadn’t gone crazy like some of the rest of the guys.
I followed them to the edge of the rice paddy, where I nearly stepped on a girl about eight or ten laying th
ere with a hole in her chest, white blouse soaked red. She looked up at me and said, “Chop chop,” which was what the kids used to say when they begged for candy. I took my canteen and poured some water into her mouth, but she couldn’t swallow, and it ran out. Carlene, I have never felt more helpless in my life. I didn’t know what to do. I just turned and walked away, and when I did I heard a shot and didn’t even turn back around because I knew somebody had killed her.
A sergeant ran by, one who had always been a pretty good guy, and I grabbed him by the arm and asked him what the hell was going on. He said he didn’t like it, but he had to carry out orders. I said, “Who gave us insane orders to murder all these women and babies?” He said, “Pal, this is war, and war is no place for pussies. If you can’t do it, then don’t get in the way.”
Barlow saw me and came over to where I was, just as the lieutenant yelled and said he needed us to go take care of some prisoners. I was ready to go do that—if they were taking prisoners, at least some of the people were going to be all right. He told us to go over to a ditch where eighty or a hundred people—mostly mothers with kids, and old men and women—were squatting on the ground, and we sat down with a couple of other guys to watch them. After a few minutes, Lieutenant Calley came up and asked us what we thought we were doing. I said we were doing what he said; we were taking care of the people.
He cussed at me and said that what he meant was to kill them. No way, I said. If you want them killed, you can do it yourself. He barked at Barlow and the other guys to start shooting, and Barlow wouldn’t, either, but stood up to him and said, “You can send me to jail or kill me, but you can’t make me do it.” Calley pulled his M-16 on us and I thought for a minute he was going to blow Barlow and me away right then and there, but instead he swung around and turned it on the people in the ditch and started blasting away at them. All of them jerked and danced as the bullets ripped them to pieces. It felt like the whole world had lost its mind. I didn’t know where to put myself.
Carlene, it was the most pitiful thing I have ever seen. One little kid about two years old tried to climb out of the ditch and the lieutenant kicked him back in and shot him in the face. Mothers were throwing themselves on top of their kids, trying to save them. Calley yelled for the two other guys to shoot, and they joined in, firing and kicking people back in when they tried to get out, and in a short time nobody was moving in the ditch. It looked like chopped meat stuck to the edges of the ditch. There was nothing human about it.
Then Barlow and I just walked on off and left it, helpless to do anything. We wandered around the village, looking at the piles of bodies laying around. Some of them were still alive, but most wouldn’t be for long. A little boy about five came out of a hootch with both of his hands and wrists blown off, blood was pouring out of the stumps, and there was a hole in the middle of his face where his nose had been shot off. He looked like some monster from a horror show, like a zombie in a movie. He kept coming toward us with blood dripping off his chin, and just before he got to us, Barlow aimed his gun at him and shot him right in the chest. He fell not five feet in front of us.
“What did you do that for, Barlow?” I asked him. Barlow said, “It was a mercy killing.” I guess it was, because even if somebody else hadn’t killed him, he would have bled to death. Without his hands and nose, he never would have had much of a life.
“We need to help these people out of their misery,” Barlow said, with a fire in his eyes. “That’s the least we can do for them.”
The two of us went around then, like angels of death, him finishing off with a quick shot to the head the ones that were still alive, the ones we judged to be grievously, mortally wounded and were only going to lay there and suffer and die anyhow. I was right there with him, helping him, even though I couldn’t bring myself to pull my own trigger.
Carlene, I felt like I had floated out of my body and was watching someone else down there. This must have been what it was like when the Nazis killed all those millions of Jews back in Germany. It couldn’t have been any worse than this, and this was us doing the killing. Americans. The good guys. We are supposed to be the saviors of these people. Guys I had laughed and played cards with, guys I had been through hell and back with in the booby-trapped fields, guys who had risked their lives for each other were raping and slaughtering unarmed people who were offering no resistance.
After a while, I guess Barlow had all he could stand. I know I had. He threw down his gun and we took our helmets off and sat by a tree. Barlow took out a cigarette and lit up; gave me one. The sun came out, then, hot and sticky. We were covered in blood. Gnats buzzed around us, whining in our ears and noses, lighting on our arms. We sat and smoked and listened to the screams and the gunfire.
—
Not far from us, a bubble ship lit down over by the ditch where the lieutenant and them had killed all those people. The pilot got out, and I recognized Hugh Thompson, a good old boy from Georgia, who I had talked to a time or two, and who I knew was a Baptist. He had a reputation as being tough in battle, but fair. By that I mean he never fired a shot until he saw the man had a weapon, and he always tried to get a clean kill and not leave him wounded.
Barlow and I got up and went on over. I thought I might talk to him and find out if he knew why we had been given the orders to kill all these civilians. He had always been a straight shooter, and if anybody could make sense out of it for us, it would be him.
Before we could get to him, though, a sergeant came up, and I heard Thompson ask him why all those people were dead and if there was anything he could do to help them. The sergeant said the only thing that would help them was to put them out of their misery.
Then Lieutenant Calley came over to see what was going on, and Thompson started asking him questions. The lieutenant said that it was none of Thompson’s business, and that he, Calley, was in charge of the operation.
You could tell Thompson didn’t like it, but he got back in the chopper and they lifted off, and almost immediately, some guys ran by chasing a bunch of people, mostly kids, that were running toward a homemade bomb shelter.
Thompson set the bubble ship down again, between the soldiers and the civilians, and ordered his gunner to turn his guns on the soldiers. We thought for a minute they were going to shoot each other, but the soldiers didn’t fire, and Thompson got out and coaxed the kids out of the bunker while the gunner held the soldiers off and radioed for help to get the civilians airlifted out.
Before too long, some more choppers came and took the people away. Thompson got back in his bubble, and as he made a pass over the ditch, I guess he saw something moving, because he landed for a third time, and covered two of his men while they waded into the knee-deep blood and gore of a hundred or more bodies and pulled out a little boy.
He was covered in filth, but didn’t seem to be hurt at all, although he was in shock, as you might expect. Thompson started to cry then. One boy alive out of a hundred people. One ragged scrap of life. He took the boy up in the bubble ship, holding him in his lap, and left.
Thompson, at least, saved a few of the people. What did I do? Maybe some of the ones Barlow shot could have been saved. Who were we to judge that it was mercy to kill them? My knees almost buckled with the enormity of what we had done, and I laid down in the grass and tried to pray.
I don’t know how long I lay there, but finally somebody came over and nudged me with their foot and said they were bringing out chow.
We stopped and had lunch, just like on any other day. Guys sat right next to piles of corpses, didn’t even wash their hands, and ate, joking around about what they had done, how many they had got, how those little bastards wouldn’t grow up to set mines now.
I began to wonder if I was the weirdo and they were all the sane ones, because I thought the whole thing was so horrifying. This sounds really sick, Carlene, but I wondered if they knew I hadn’t killed any myself, and hoped they didn’t.
I wasn’t hungry, but Barlow came and brought me
a plate and, to my surprise, I dug into it like I was starved. I ate until I couldn’t lift my fork, like I was trying to fill up a hole in my gut that wouldn’t be filled.
—
Then it seemed like it was more or less over. Maybe Thompson called in to the brass what was going on and they stopped it, or maybe Captain Medina thought it was enough. Maybe there wasn’t anybody left to shoot. Whatever, it pretty much stopped. I would estimate that there were between four and five hundred people killed, and countless animals. None of us were even fired on. The only one hurt was a guy who got too excited and shot himself in his own foot. He was medevaced out, and will more than likely get a Purple Heart.
After we ate, Barlow went around with his camera and took pictures of a lot of it. I’m not really sure why. There was also a man from some news outfit taking pictures, and nobody acted like they cared. Guys even posed, like with trophies, and somebody took the camera from Barlow and got a shot of me and him together. For a lot of them, it seemed like they thought of it as just one more day, one more search and destroy, a high body count. But for me, I feel like my life is over. The Jerry Golden who suffered so when you got pregnant seems like somebody else, a long time ago. I can’t even remember those feelings.
The Zippo squad came in to burn the hootches, and we left to make camp a ways away from My Lai, in another abandoned village; dug fox-holes and settled in for the night.
After supper, Barlow and I sat for a long time talking about what had happened. It shouldn’t have been any worse, I guess, than it is for the pilots to fry women and children with napalm, but killing them like this was different. It was intimate, and left a mark on your soul like dropping a bomb on a faceless crowd never would.
I still don’t know if what happened was because it was ordered or if the men just went into some kind of mass hysteria. Seeing something like this, you understand how genocide can take place—after a while, you aren’t killing people, just things. Something in you just snaps. I was part of it. I didn’t have the guts to help any of them. I saw girls with their vaginas torn open, breasts cut off, ears cut off, people scalped, throats cut, and all I did was stand there and watch. I hope they are in heaven now, because they had their hell today.
Windchill Summer Page 36