Witness to the Revolution

by Clara Bingham

  I ended up in Vietnam in September ’67, which was the beginning of the really heightened phase of the war. I was in three different combat units. I was there from basically September ’67 to November ’68—fifteen months. Vietnam was scary. I mean, within one week in the jungle I just knew that I was in for far more reality than I thought. I got wounded within a couple weeks.

  I was doing my duty. I was trying to become a better soldier. At first I didn’t have any friends. I was on my own, just trying to stay alive. Becoming a better soldier means to really fucking get your shit down, get tight, listen to the jungle. I became a jungle animal. You live on your feet. You don’t sleep. You read your nerves. You’re always watching.

  SEYMOUR HERSH

  So I go to Fort Jackson and I start driving around and it’s a big base. They do basic training. They do ranger training. They do parachute training. They do all sorts of stuff. I start driving to the brigs, the jails. There were five different camps and I drive to three of them. I was wearing a ratty suit and I had a briefcase. I walk into the brig and there’s always some sergeant dozing off. “Sergeant! I want Bill Calley out here right now.” “Who?” “Bill Calley.” If they wanted to think I was a lawyer let them think that. But I didn’t say. If they’d asked me who I was I’d say I’m a reporter named Hersh from Washington. I would always do that, but you don’t have to give everything away.

  I struck out at three of those jails and by now it’s twelve noon and I had a hunch that he’s not there. So I go into the phone booth in the PX and ask the operator, “I would like to get the new listings for the June phone book.” And she said to me in this deep southern voice, “Yes, I got him. He’s in…” He was in an engineering battalion.

  WAYNE SMITH

  As a medic, I would write medical notes for guys. If they had medical maladies, I would try to keep them out of combat. It wasn’t uncommon. There were other soldiers who asked me to break their legs, to injure them, so they didn’t have to go out into the jungle. They would take medications and things to underperform, and not be ready for duty. Let’s face it, when you’re going out into combat, you want to have everybody clearheaded, clear-eyed. There was no smoking dope out in the boonies, at least in my unit. Coming back into the rear area, absolutely. But one of the ways that we were able to keep some men out of combat was giving them a sick call and they would get a three-day out-of-combat order from the doctor, based on a medic’s recommendation. So it was the system itself that was breaking down from within.

  OLIVER STONE

  What I saw, in three different combat units, was definitely that there were those people who could think for themselves a little more freely, and those who didn’t. Those who were locked into a rigid, racist, anti-Vietnamese point of view, in which there was no margin between the enemy and the villagers. The general treatment of even the civilians around the military bases was pretty shoddy. You know, fuck ’em but don’t trust ’em, that kind of attitude. There were a lot of people who, I would say, were not educated. But there were also some educated people. I hung out with a few.

  We were fucking with the villagers. They were fucking with us, too—there was all kind of hidden shit. We were scared, and there was anger, too. We’d lose guys to snipers, booby traps….Sometimes the guys were stupid enough to blame the villagers. They would say, “The villagers knew where the booby trap was.” But they didn’t.

  The villagers were on both sides: Their sympathies may have been with the North, because what’d they get from the southern government except get kicked around? The South Vietnamese troops were more brutal than we were. And, of course, their sympathies may have been with the North, too, but they were trying to stay alive in a very impossible situation. I didn’t like it. I got very upset with some of the villagers but I didn’t kill them.

  SEYMOUR HERSH

  So I get to this building where he’s supposed to be, an engineering battalion. And I park about a couple blocks away and go in the side entrance and it’s midafternoon and it’s three floors of double bunks. Sure enough on the second floor some kid’s asleep in a bunk. Figured I got Calley. So I go in and I’m aggressive and I kick the bunk. Bam. And I said, “Get up, Bill!” And some blond kid about twenty has a name tag with a Polish name. I’m disappointed because I thought it would be Calley and it wasn’t. I just said, “What’s your job?” He said, “I’m the mail clerk.” I said, “Oh yeah? Ever hear of a guy named Calley?” And I’m telling you, the next sentences are literally what happened: He said, “You mean the guy that shot up everything? I get his mail. He’s not here.” I said, “Where does it go?” He said, “He’s in an engineering company at battalion headquarters. Smitty, the mail clerk at battalion headquarters, comes every week to pick up Mr. Calley’s mail.”

  And I said, “Okay, in eight minutes I’m going to pull up to the back door here with a blue Chevy, and you come out in eight minutes and take me over there.” He said, “Okay.” So I drive him there and I remember it was a one-story wooden headquarters building, and there was a big fat sergeant leaning against the door picking his teeth. Now Smitty’s just been cashiered, so I said, “Sergeant, get Smitty out here right now.” And he starts laughing. What’s Smitty done now? So out Smitty comes, slumping. I said, “In the car!” It’s amazing how you can pretend some authority. And he gets in the car and I say, “Hey, I’ve got no problem with you. I’m just a crummy reporter. I’m looking for a guy named William Calley. You know who I’m talking about?” He said, “Yeah. He’s in big trouble.” I said, “Where is he? What’s the story?” He said, “He lives off-base.” I said, “What do you know about him?” Then he said, “We have his personnel file.” If you have his personnel file in the military that’s big. It’s called a 201 file. “You have his personnel?” “Yeah, we’re still storing it here in a special safe.” I said, “Get it.” He looked at me and he said, “Okay.” I said, “Put it in your shirt.” So he goes back inside and a minute later he comes out and gets in the car and he opens up his shirt and he pulls out the 201 file and the first page is the same page I’d seen the day before in the lawyer’s office in Salt Lake. I copied it down—got the serial numbers and what the date was. And also there was an address where he was living.

  WAYNE SMITH

  In my view, most of these officers were looking to get their ticket punched. They wanted to get their medals. They wanted to fatten their résumés for their career path. But the infantry soldiers were all pretty cool. There were some guys who didn’t know Rhode Island was a fucking state; they called me “Long Island.” Like “Where are you from? Are there black people in that place?”

  You’ve got to also remember that one of McNamara’s great sins was Project 100,000.*1 Project 100,000 began in the mid-sixties when the government could not get the number of people they needed. So one way to simply get one hundred thousand soldiers in the war ASAP was to lower the intelligence standards and physical qualifications that ordinarily would have kept people out of the military. They lowered the floor level so that they could add these people who had real limited abilities. I mean, fucking crazy and dangerous.

  BARRY ROMO (Vietnam vet)

  When I went to join up, my father sat me on his lap and cried. He was sixty-six years old and he said, “I don’t want you to go.” And I said, “You and my brother Harold went off in the Second World War. I’m just doing what our family does.”

  I wanted to go. I was volunteering for Vietnam. I didn’t listen to my dad, who was forty-eight years old when I was born. My dad said to me, he had a fourth-grade education, “Your brother and I went off to fight people that were putting human beings in ovens. You’re just going to go fight some poor farmer who doesn’t want to be bothered with you.”

  I was a nineteen-year-old second lieutenant, infantry. I was assigned to the 196th Light Infantry Brigade at Chu Lai, and a short time later we were sent to Tam Ky. I was supposed to have forty-five men in my brigade, but depending on how many casualties we would take, it was anywhere
between eighteen to forty-five men.

  BOBBY MULLER (Vietnam vet)

  I grew up in Great Neck, New York, in Nassau County, just outside the city line. Unless there was something special, you didn’t have a choice but to go into the service. So if you’re going to go, I said, “You think I’m going to have some fucking hillbilly from the South get me fucking killed? I’d rather take charge of it myself.” So I enlisted as opposed to simply getting drafted. So it’s good morning, Vietnam!

  All the guys in my Marine infantry company, except for the NCOs, were eighteen. They asked for five guys out of the company to go work with the CAP program, the Combined Action Platoon, which is a thing the Marines had where you work with local people in a small unit. They said, “We need guys who have at least a high school diploma.” The company clerk went through the record, and out of a hundred and fifty-five guys in my Marine infantry company, we didn’t even have two with a high school diploma.

  BARRY ROMO

  I had Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and Cubans who could barely speak English in my platoon. I had whites from Appalachia who couldn’t read and write. I had African Americans from Mississippi, and we would have to write their letters home for them. It was the lowest of the low, the people who had the least to gain from society. I mean, black servicemen were still being killed and beat up in the South for just trying to vote.

  SEYMOUR HERSH

  By midnight, after knocking on about a hundred and twenty doors, I finally find Calley in the senior officers’ quarters. He is five foot six, a hundred and thirty-five pounds, and his skin is translucent. We had a beer or two and he was telling me that it was just a setup, just a firefight. I’m taking notes. It’s now about 2 A.M. Calley’s girlfriend gets off from the hospital, so we’re going to go get her and get a steak and some more bourbon. Then at five or six in the morning we’re going to call Ernie Medina, his captain, who will tell me how he did everything under orders. So Calley’s telling me all this stuff and I’m taking notes. At one point he goes to take a leak but the door to the bathroom is open a little bit and I see that he vomits arterial blood. He’s got an ulcer. So I know it was eating him up, and there was a lot more to the story.

  At about 5 A.M. we drove to the hospital to pick up his girlfriend, who was doing the night shift, and we had a steak. She was plenty pissed when she found out that I was a reporter. So now it’s six, when the day starts, and Calley’s got no assignment, he’s just waiting for doom. He’s going to have a court-martial. He said, “Oh, we’re going to beat that. Don’t worry. The army’s just out to get me.” And we call Ernie Medina. Calley says, “Hey, Captain, hi. I’ve got a reporter here. You’ve got to tell him how I had nothing to do with it.” And he puts me on the phone and Medina said, “I have no idea what he’s talking about.” He hangs up, and Calley was stunned. Captain Medina ran away from him so fast it wasn’t funny because it was either Medina or him. Medina got off even though he shot somebody point-blank in front of witnesses. But anyway, everybody shot somebody point-blank.

  WAYNE SMITH

  We were the first integrated army since the Revolutionary War. Before Vietnam there were a couple of isolated integrated units in the Korean War. But that son of a bitch Truman didn’t desegregate the military until ’48. So here was Vietnam, the first fully integrated military. I didn’t have rank superiority, but as a medic I was viewed as a leader of sorts, and a high target for the enemy.

  There was a lot of black pride. We African American brothers called ourselves “soul brothers.” And the Vietnamese called us soul brothers, too. I mean, it was straight up. They left propaganda sheets for us all around the Mekong Delta when we were on patrol that said, “Soul Brother, no Vietnamese ever called you nigger. We treat you with respect if you treat us with respect.” Like, “Look at what’s happening in your cities.” The riots had been jumping off the summer before—the ’68 riots. Everybody knew about that.*2

  It was powerful, just for brothers to see each other on the street. We would do this thing called “dap.” Diệp is the Vietnamese word for beauty, but we called it “dap,” an American bastardization. We would slap fives and do all this other stuff. To call it a special handshake would be an understatement. Some brothers would do the special handshake to Santana’s “Black Magic Woman.” This is love. It was really beautiful that men could show emotion, regard, real care and love for another man. This was a unique kind of relationship that I believe happens mostly in war.

  Got a black magic woman

  Got a black magic woman

  I’ve got a black magic woman

  Got me so blind I can’t see

  That she’s a black magic woman

  She’s trying to make a devil out of me.

  —“BLACK MAGIC WOMAN,” WRITTEN BY

  PETER GREEN (FLEETWOOD MAC)

  OLIVER STONE

  Most of my friends, frankly, were black guys. I don’t know why. I never had experienced many black men in my life. I liked them. They introduced me to dope; they introduced me to music that I had never heard before. I was a classical conservative—Beethoven and all the great classical scores. But the first time that I heard soul music out of Detroit, I was blown away. They made me understand the Detroit sound, and then the blues sound, and then the southern sound, the Memphis sound.

  We had hangouts, and we would smoke dope. We kept our humanity, and humanity’s very important. When you live in a military existence with other men, it’s like jail: You can become very brutal and inhuman. A lot of the guys were. I saw it everywhere in the three units I was in.

  Credit 12.1

  Oliver Stone (left) with a friend. They were both in the First Cavalry Division stationed at Camp Evans, west of Qui Nhon and Da Nang in Vietnam, 1968.

  WAYNE SMITH

  There was a division between the boozers versus the heads. It didn’t always break along those lines, because there were some African Americans that wanted nothing to do with socializing with white soldiers. There were some white soldiers that wanted nothing to do with African Americans or Hispanics—God forbid, Native Americans.

  But then there was an integrated group that I traveled in that we called “blue-eyed soul brothers.” Some of us, in combat especially, formed a brotherhood. This guy with red hair and freckles is closer to me than my own brothers and sisters. When one goes through experiences that are so horrendous, so indescribable that you cannot find the words for it, but you can look at this guy and he knows. And he knows that you know. “You’re my brother. This is no bullshit. I’m willing to put my life on the line for you. Are you willing to do that?” And that’s not even a question. That was very powerful in Vietnam.

  SEYMOUR HERSH

  It’s 6 A.M. and I was done but Calley wanted to go bowling with me. I said no. I think he knew that I was the last reporter he was going to talk to in that way. So we said goodbye and I flew back home and wrote the story. I couldn’t get anybody to buy the story. I showed it to editors at Look, The New York Review of Books, and an editor at Life magazine, who I later learned had been told about My Lai months earlier by an American GI, Ron Ridenhour. Nobody would touch it. No one wanted to be the first to publish.

  BOBBY MULLER

  I took a bullet through the chest forty-four years ago, on April 29, 1969. It went through both lungs and severed the spinal cord on the way out. It was absolutely a series of miracles that I lived. Unbelievable. I got medevaced virtually right away. With my luck, the hospital ship, Repose, was right off the coast of where we had been operating, and the medical ship is the best provider of trauma care that you’d ever want, right? Just getting steady fucking casualties. They put in my medical record that had I arrived one minute later, I’d have been dead. Both lungs had collapsed. I had blown-up chest tubes, both sides. So I’m in intensive care. I don’t know how long. At some point a psychiatrist comes to me and says, “You want to talk about anything?” Presumably he thought that I want to talk about being paralyzed. But what I wanted to talk to him about w
as something else.

  A few days earlier I had sat down amongst a bunch of dead bodies and ate lunch. I said, “How come it doesn’t bother me anymore? Is there something wrong with me?” The psychiatrist said, “No. Your mind has defense mechanisms. When you are in extreme circumstances, those mechanisms come in to protect your mind. They will soften things and let you endure it.” He said, “When you go back to New York, next year, if you see somebody get hit by a cab, you will be as affected as anybody else.” What I came to understand, and in a way I’m actually grateful for it, is that when you go to war, going down what I call a dark path, you change. Whether you realize it or not, you change. Depending on how far down that path you go is the amount of change that takes place.

  SEYMOUR HERSH

  I knew this was a loaded story and if we were going to send it out over the wire I needed a lawyer. I had a lawyer named Michael Nussbaum, who was a lot of people in the antiwar movement’s lawyer. He’s a First Amendment lawyer. I went to see him at his little house in Georgetown and I said, “Mike, I need you to be my lawyer on this.” He read my story and said, “Why don’t you call Calley’s lawyer? You know you’re screwing Calley by quoting him. I mean it’s your job, but you’ve basically put him in jail, and you should tell them everything Calley told you.”