Miracles and Massacres: True and Untold Stories of the Making of America

by Glenn Beck

  Since their first volley, the GIs had kept up periodic barrages of fire. Their ammunition, which they’d retrieved from homes, hardware stores, and the local armory, seemed endless. In contrast, Cantrell’s men had spent most of their bullets in the first half hour of gunplay. They needed to save the rest to defend against what they believed to be an inevitable storming of the jail.

  The state guard, which was under the command of a politically loyal governor, was the Cantrell machine’s best hope, though many in the jail doubted whether the governor in Nashville would risk his reputation to save a mountain county boss fighting a band of popular and heroic war veterans.

  “Think they’ll come?” asked Wise.

  Cantrell wiped his forehead again and fidgeted with a pipe.

  When he finally looked Wise in the eye, he looked as afraid as his deputies cowering in the jailhouse.

  “No.”

  2:45 A.M.

  Crouched behind a copse of trees he had been using all night for cover, Bill White knew that time was not on his side. The GIs had been winning the battle, but the siege could only last so long. How many armed supporters, brave enough to stand by him in darkness, would cautiously melt away at dawn? And what about the rumors of the National Guard coming to Cantrell’s rescue?

  “There’s an old saying,” Jim Buttram said to Bill. “If you’re gonna shoot at the king . . .” Buttram paused. “Don’t miss.”

  Bill knew he was right. If reinforcements from the governor arrived before Cantrell surrendered the ballot boxes, his regime would somehow survive. And if it did, his vengeance would be sure and swift. Bill White knew that he would likely be the first to experience it.

  “I had a few boys go out and get some dynamite,” Bill said, pulling a couple of sticks of the explosives from his jacket pocket. Then, for the first time that night, he flashed a wide smile. “I think it’s time we end this thing.”

  Buttram nodded in agreement, and within minutes Bill had taped three sticks of dynamite together and heaved the first bundle toward the jail.

  As soon as the dynamite left Bill’s hand, he knew it was going to land short of the jail. It did, sliding under a deputy sheriff’s Chrysler in the no-man’s-land of parked cars separating the jail from the GIs. The massive car lifted into the air, turned over, and crashed back to the pavement, its windows shattering.

  Before the wheels on the upside-down sedan had stopped spinning, White reared back and heaved another bundle of dynamite toward the jail.

  There was another earsplitting explosion, but once again, the dynamite had landed too far short of the jail to seriously damage it.

  “We’re going to have to get some charges up there on the building,” Bill said to Buttram. Both men knew the risks inherent in that proposition. The last time any GIs had exposed themselves in the area near the jail, a single shotgun blast had taken out Edgar Miller and Harold Powers. But compared to what he’d faced in the jungles of Guadalcanal and the beaches of Tarawa, this current mission seemed almost safe.

  Bill put together another bundle and crawled under the cover of the earlier explosions’ smoke. He slid right up to the overturned cars, lit a fuse, and pitched the dynamite onto the jail’s front porch. This time he was plenty close enough. The blast shook the jail to its foundation and wooden porch planks flew into the night sky. Windows in neighboring stores rattled.

  With the floors beneath them shaking and the ceiling above them trembling, the jail’s defenders, except for Sheriff Mansfield, who had previously managed to sneak into an ambulance that had come to carry away wounded deputies, came rushing out of the battered building they had once been so confident would protect them. With smoke in their eyes and white handkerchiefs held high, the once-arrogant group of deputies tumbled out into the street.

  5:45 A.M.

  It would be a day before Paul Cantrell, who skipped town in disguise, conceded defeat. And it would be longer than that before Windy Wise felt safe showing his face again in Athens. Not that he had much choice. Wise was tried and sentenced to one to three years in prison for the shooting of Tom Gillespie.

  It had taken several hours to deal with the other Cantrell deputies who surrendered to Athens’s GIs that morning. Largely for their own protection, the men, most of whom were out-of-towners, had been returned to the jail they’d fled and locked away until it was safe for them to go home.

  Somehow, in a six-hour gunfight involving hundreds of people, no one had died, and in the predawn hours after the shooting stopped, the mature and less vindictive of the GIs made sure it stayed that way.

  Bill White finally headed from the city center to his parents’ farm, past the old sign that read “Welcome to Athens, the Friendly City.” He moved at a slightly quicker pace than normal, even though his body ached from almost twenty-four hours on his feet. Some of the speed came from the adrenaline that still flowed through his body. War was hell, but it also provided an unparalleled rush.

  As the sun rose over the Smoky Mountains and Bill rounded the bend toward home, the tired young man slowed just a bit. He began to wonder what he would do with his life now that the campaign was over. He’d tried the GI Bill for a few months, but college wasn’t for him. He wanted to find something else like the campaign, a corner of the world where he could right wrongs and stand up to crooks and thugs. He wanted a job that came not just with a paycheck, but also with a purpose.

  There was a familiar tune playing in his head as he pondered his prospects; the same melody that had kept coming to mind throughout the night’s battle. It was a song he had heard many times, but one whose title, the “William Tell Overture,” he would never have been able to identify if asked.

  “Maybe I’ll be a lawman,” Bill said to himself, holding his shotgun over one shoulder and resting his rifle on the other. “With a silver star on my shirt and a loaded gun in my holster.”

  He stopped and looked back toward the town he loved.

  After all, Bill thought with a smile, Athens is gonna need some new deputy sheriffs.

  11

  The My Lai Massacre: A Light in the Darkness

  Tuttle-Woods Convalescent Home

  Camden, New Jersey

  March 15, 2008

  Close to midnight, a commotion started halfway down the D-Ward corridor. Though outbursts weren’t all that unusual, this one was different: unceasingly shrill and somewhat violent, like some old codger was trying to raise the dead.

  Sticking to unofficial procedure, Everly Davison ignored the rising clatter and pressed on with his crossword puzzle.

  Everly, who was better known as E-bomb among his off-duty circle of friends, was head of the security shift that night. This temporary promotion had been awarded by default, not by merit. All three of his useless superiors had called in sick on this cold, rainy, late winter evening.

  Not that Everly was complaining. He so rarely got the chance to be the boss that he was making the most of it: feet up on the desk, microwaved hot chocolate with hazelnut Coffee Mate and a secret splash of Jim Beam, and the keys to all the snack machines on his utility belt. Hell, if this was work, he couldn’t wait to see vacation.

  That one disturbed resident down the hall was the only thing keeping this from being a great night. No need to make an issue of it, Everly thought. Not just yet. Even crazy people have to blow off a little steam once in a while. Waiting out his outburst would be safer and simpler for all concerned—and keeping things simple was what Everly did best.

  Following his early release from Riverfront State Prison, Everly had swabbed out a few thousand of the world’s nastiest porta-johns, manned a medical waste incinerator, delivered pizzas on foot through the worst gang-war hot zones of Newark, washed a nightly truckload of dishes in an institutional kitchen, and spent three bloody weeks as an apprentice on the kill-floor at a slaughterhouse. After all that, he’d finally stuffed enough padding into his ex-con’s résumé to land his first real, full-time job: janitor at Tuttle-Woods.

  Everly was
perfectly happy with the work—climate control was a wonderful thing—but a few months later things got even better when he was promoted to security guard. To most people, walking the halls of an old folks’ home on the graveyard shift might not seem that glamorous, but to Everly Davison it was like winning the lottery—even though he knew that lottery ticket was being cashed at someone else’s expense.

  A couple of weeks earlier, one of the guards had called the home’s outside security contractor for help with an elderly lady who’d gotten it into her head that her daughter-in-law was coming to kill her and steal all her money. She’d taken a swing at the doctor who was trying to bring her meds, then she grabbed some silverware and holed up in the public bathroom. The rulebook says to call in reinforcements, so to speak, when things get out of hand, and that’s what the guard on duty had done.

  The rent-a-cops arrived at the home in riot gear and cleared out the regular workers. They hit the old woman with a Taser and a twelve-gauge beanbag gun, and she died right where she fell.

  The security contractors later issued a report saying that the woman had come at them with a butcher knife. The guard who’d called for reinforcements was quickly fired for making noise about what he’d seen, and with nobody else alive willing to say otherwise, that was the end of it. Everly Davison happily accepted his promotion from the janitorial department into his new cushy security job.

  The lady from Human Resources had laid out the requirements for the promotion, adding at the very end that she was specifically looking for someone who understood that discretion was the better part of valor. Whatever that phrase had meant when it was first written down, Everly knew what she was getting at. See nothing; say nothing. He nodded his head in agreement and that was that—Everly Davison was officially a security guard.

  The yelling on D-Ward hadn’t stopped and now it sounded to Everly like somebody down there had started throwing furniture around. A number of orderlies were in sight and Everly motioned for them to handle the disturbance while he went to the front entrance to answer the shrill buzzing of the doorbell.

  The young woman standing outside was not unattractive, though she looked like a drowned rat in the driving rain. She was dressed for business and had an official-looking clipboard in her hand. Everly’s first thought was that she was some kind of a state inspector, which wouldn’t be good at all, but when she pressed her ID against the glass it said she was from the newspaper.

  “Thanks,” she said, after he’d let her inside the foyer. “I’m Julia Geller, from the Courier-Post. I made an appointment a couple of days ago. I’m here to interview one of your residents.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  “Because nobody told me.”

  “Sorry to hear that, mister . . .” She wiped the rainwater from her glasses, and squinted at his name tag. “Mr. Davison.” She replaced her spectacles and made a note on her pad. “Should we call up your boss, because—”

  “No, no,” Everly said. “I believe you, let’s not make any waves. Come on with me, we’ll find whoever you want to talk to.”

  She told him to call her Julie and relayed the name of the resident she’d come to see. When Everly checked the room assignments it was clear that this was more bad news for the trouble-free evening he’d planned. This reporter wanted to talk to that man on D-Ward, the very one who was still down there raging like a lunatic.

  “Do you mind if I slip back there so I can see your screen?” Julie asked, edging past him without really waiting for his answer.

  “I don’t think I’m supposed to—”

  “It’s okay, thanks.” She sat at the computer and started typing and clicking.

  “I don’t want to lose my job,” Everly said quietly.

  “Neither do I.” In a few seconds she’d found the records for room D-31. “Tell you what, there’s a hundred dollars cash in it for you, if I get what I need for my story. How does that grab you?”

  He gave a look around the security station to make sure the coast was clear. “Sounds fine to me, I guess. Just—”

  “Good.” After a bit more searching she seemed to find what she was looking for. “Morgan Campbell, age fifty-nine,” she said to herself, and she began writing again on her pad. “No next of kin . . . VA transfer, diabetes, emphysema, cancer survivor, diagnosed in ’01 with early-onset Alzheimer’s. . . .”

  “Alzheimer’s,” Everly repeated. “So how’re you going to interview him if he can’t remember anything?”

  “Memory’s strange in these patients,” she said, still scrolling through the screens of confidential data. “It’s first-in, last-out. He might not know who the president is, or what day it is, he might not even remember his breakfast this morning. But I’m betting he can tell me all about what happened forty years ago. Tomorrow’s the anniversary.”

  She’d said this as though Everly might know what she meant. “Anniversary of what?” he asked.

  In the silence that followed, Julie looked up from the computer. “Ever met a mass murderer, Mr. Davison?”

  His checkered past being what it was, he had to think about that for a moment. “What do you mean, like three or four people?”

  “Like three or four hundred. Maybe more.”

  The lights flickered for a second as thunder rolled outside, and right then Everly Davison felt the full weight of the gold plastic badge pinned on his chest.

  “No,” he said, “I never have.”

  She nodded. “Then come with me.”

  • • •

  When they got to Morgan Campbell’s room, the old guy was strapped down hand-and-foot and the safety rails on the bed were lifted and locked in place like sideways prison bars. All in all, he didn’t look like much of a threat.

  Campbell watched them intently as they stood in his doorway. Everly had quite an array of guard’s accessories dangling from his belt, but much like his badge, they were largely for show. The most serious weapon allowed in his possession was a sample-size tube of pepper spray, its contents probably about as potent as the hot sauce at Taco Bell.

  “Who is this guy?” Everly whispered.

  “Ever hear of My Lai?”

  “Me lie?”

  “My Lai, Quang Ngai Province, Vietnam. It’s a little town in a region the Americans called Pinkville during the war. That’s where Mr. Campbell was, forty years ago tomorrow.”

  “What did he do?”

  “That’s what I’m here to find out.” She stepped to the side of the bed with Everly behind her. She raised her voice a bit; it had said in his record that he was somewhat hard of hearing. “Mr. Morgan Campbell?”

  The man nodded, his eyes locked on hers. He reached out, to the extent that the straps would allow. There was a tremor in his right hand, and the skin of his palm looked like it had been ravaged by an old burn that had never fully healed.

  “My name is Julia. I’m a reporter. I’d like you to tell me what you remember about March 16, 1968.”

  “Pinkville,” he whispered.

  “That’s right.” She had her pad and pen ready, resting on the bedrail. “I want you to tell me all about it.”

  “Why?” The old man looked at Everly, and then back at the reporter again.

  “Why not?” she replied.

  “Because once you’ve been there,” Morgan Campbell said, “you don’t ever come all the way back.”

  June 1967

  Morgan Campbell was nineteen years old when his number came up in the draft. He knew boys who’d dodged their service one way or another, but that kind of thing wasn’t for him. His dad had been a bombardier in World War II, so going overseas to fight for freedom and stop the spread of communism seemed like the right and natural thing to do.

  Before Morgan knew it he had become a soldier. He was too young to buy a six-pack of beer, but after nine weeks of basic the army suited him up, gave him an M60 machine gun, and put him on a transport bound for the last phase of preparation before their first tour in the Vietna
m War.

  The troops of Charlie Company trained in Hawaii for a time, learning guerrilla tactics and how to survive in jungle terrain. Those were grueling weeks, but Morgan and his squad had made it through with honors. Under the hard and watchful eye of Captain Ernest “Mad Dog” Medina they’d posted some of the highest marks on record. By the time their training was over they were tough as nails and had bonded like brothers, all 140 of them.

  • • •

  Four men stood out to Morgan Campbell in those early days, all for different reasons.

  The first was Captain Medina. War truly is hell, Medina reminded them, and so the highest goal must be to win as soon as possible. He told them the only proven way for a fighting force to win was simple: You kill people and break things, better and faster than the other side. He called his men “death dealers” and handed out packs of cards that were all aces of spades. One of those cards was to be left on every dead gook body, to let others know that Charlie Company had been there. Medina hated the enemy, loved his country, was admired by most, and respected by all.

  The second memorable man was Lieutenant William Calley. The soldiers of his First Platoon saw him as something of a blowhard and a bungler, and from what the men could tell he was little more than a butt-kissing yes-man to his superiors. Medina had nothing but scorn for Calley, but that just made the lieutenant try all the harder to impress him.

  The third man was Billy Weber, whom everyone genuinely liked and vice versa. Billy may have been the only soldier in the U.S. armed forces whom Lieutenant Calley could call a friend.

  The last man was Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson Jr. Thompson flew a little OH-23 helicopter on recon and rescue missions, risking his life every day and night, flying low cover and drawing enemy fire so the troops on the ground could get early warning of any ambush up ahead. He saved a lot of men with the risks he took. Life expectancy was short for such pilots and their crews, but he was damned good at what he did and as brave as they came. No one ever saw Hugh Thompson sweat.

  • • •