It’s rush hour and, even with a street map of Columbus, it’s after five o’clock by the time I get to Calley’s condo in what seems to be a new housing development. The car in front of me pulls in to the driveway to which I am headed. Three young army second lieutenants, dressed in camouflage fatigues, climb out. I park behind them, get out of the car, and explain that I’m a journalist who is trying to find Bill Calley, that I understand he lives here. Not anymore, I am told. I tell them that I’ve just seen Calley’s lawyer and he believes the lieutenant to be guilty of nothing, but was in the wrong place at the wrong time. They invite me in for a drink, share a bourbon with me, and explain that they are June graduates of West Point who are finishing up combat training before heading off to Vietnam as infantry platoon leaders. They are polite, articulate, and very likable. Yes, Calley was their roommate for some weeks but no longer lives with them. Yes, they understand the seriousness of the charges against their buddy, but there is another side. Calley and his platoon were engaged in a horrific firefight with an experienced and tough Vietcong battalion, they say. Bullets were flying and of course civilians get caught in cross fire. It’s the inevitable consequence of war. It was the same line I’d heard from George Latimer. The young lieutenants are earnest, and we have another drink or two. Calley stops by occasionally to get his mail, one of them tells me. Of course they know where he’s living now, but they volunteer nothing and I ask nothing. It’s time to get some takeout, and they offer me another drink and dinner. I tell them I’ve got to keep on looking for Calley. It’s dark outside, and as I prepare to leave, one of them finally breaks ranks and tells me where Calley has been tucked away. (Of course I would have asked.) He’s in the senior BOQ—bachelor officers’ quarters—for field-grade officers, including colonels and generals who are on temporary assignment to Benning. I was stunned: a suspected mass murderer hidden away in quarters for the army’s most elite? I was going to hang around the fort until I got my man, but I never would have looked there. It would have been like finding Calley in a neonatal intensive care unit. I got the address and drove off.
The senior BOQ was a complex of two-story buildings, I think three in all, each housing about forty swank, by army standards, one-bedroom units, with a large parking lot. I got there by eight o’clock and began knocking on doors, calling out as I did, “Bill, Bill Calley?” I kept track of those rooms whose tenants answered—usually with a shouted “Get out of here” or “No one named Bill here”—as well as those doors that needed another try. I got through two buildings over the next few hours, with no luck and much exhaustion. I’d gotten up at five o’clock that morning in Washington and had little to eat and more than I needed to drink. But I was not at all discouraged. Calley was living in the complex, and I was going to find him if it took days. I needed to check into a motel, get an hour or two of sleep, and start knocking on doors again.
It was dark as I walked across the nearly empty parking lot. I noticed two guys working underneath a car a few hundred feet away, with the aid of a floodlight powered by a black power cord that ran the length of the lot. I vividly remember thinking to myself, you do not have to take the last run at the end of a long day’s skiing. But I did. As I got close to the car, I apologized for bothering the two guys but said I was looking for Bill Calley. One of the men, perhaps in his late forties, crawled out and asked what I wanted with him. I explained that I was a journalist from Washington and Calley was in a lot of trouble and I was going to write about it. He asked me to wait a second, wiped off his hands, and said something like, “He’s not here, but you can wait for him at my place, if that’s okay.” He muttered something to his pal, who was still under the car, and we walked off. His place turned out to be on the first floor of one of the units, and Calley lived above him. I was warned that it might be hours before Calley would show up; he had gone motorboating at a lake miles away. Motorboating? Yes, said my new friend, who said he was a senior warrant officer who flew helicopters in heavy combat in the war, he knew Calley was in a lot of trouble.
Drinks were offered as we waited; the U.S. Army clearly was running on bourbon. He understood where I was coming from, he said, and acknowledged, sadly, that Vietnam was a murderous, unwinnable war that was taxing his love for the army, which had educated him and taught him how to be an excellent pilot. Calley was frightened, as he should be, the pilot said. His story of a firefight would not hold up. I liked the pilot, and admired his honesty (he mailed me Christmas cards for years), but after an hour or so of pretending to sip a drink, I was done. I had to get some sleep. I said good-bye—I can still see the mosquitoes buzzing around a naked lightbulb outside his door—and began walking to my car. “Hersh,” the pilot yelled, “come back. Rusty is here.” I was not ready to meet a new friend and said so. “No. No. It’s Calley.” It turned out Bill Calley was known to all as Rusty.
We shook hands. I told him who I was and that I was there to get his side of the story. He said, as if my tracking him down had been a piece of cake, that yes, his lawyer told him to expect a visit from me. We went upstairs, I had another drink—this time a beer—and we began to talk. I had wanted to hate him, to see him as a child-killing monster, but instead I found a rattled, frightened young man, short, slight, and so pale that the bluish veins on his neck and shoulders were visible. His initial account was impossible to believe—full of heroic one-on-one warfare with bullets, grenades, and artillery shells being exchanged with the evil commies. At one point Calley went to the bathroom to take a leak, or so he said. He left the door—with a full-length mirror in it—partially ajar, and I watched as he vomited bright red arterial blood, the result of a serious ulcer, I would learn.
Sometime after three in the morning, Calley took me to a PX where he bought a bottle of bourbon and some wine. The next stop was an all-night food store on the base, where he purchased a steak. Then we picked up his girlfriend, who was a nurse on night duty at the main hospital at the fort. She was enraged at Calley upon learning that he was introducing her to a journalist, but she drove back to his apartment with us and made dinner. There was more drinking, and as daylight broke, Calley was talking about going bowling. The nurse had fled by then and I’d had it. I had compiled a notebook full of quotes, much of them full of danger for him; his account of the assault at My Lai had become more and more riddled with contradictions as he went on. As I was leaving—by now it was early morning—Calley insisted that I stay and talk to his captain, Ernest Medina, who was in charge of the assault at My Lai. Medina, who would be found not guilty of premeditated murder, involuntary manslaughter, and assault after a court-martial two years later, picked up the telephone after a ring or two. He also was at Fort Benning, presumably going through the same process as Calley. I shared a phone with Calley, and he explained to Medina that he’d been talking with a reporter about My Lai and he wanted Medina to tell me that anything that took place was done under direct order of the captain. Medina said, very simply, “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” and hung up. Calley was stricken; at that moment he knew what I am sure he already suspected: He was going to be the fall guy for the murders at My Lai.
It was too late, or too early, to sleep, and I drove to the Columbus airport and took the first plane to Washington. I began outlining my story as I flew. I had a verbatim copy of a vital document and an interview with the main player. I understood that I had to keep my feelings about the war out of the story.
I was worried by how my story would be received, and remembered as I began to write that my family lived in the last years of World War II in an apartment across the street from the V—for victory—movie theater on Forty-Seventh Street in Chicago and on Saturdays my brother and I would be taken by our sisters to watch heroic war movies. In the best of those films, our guys, flying P-51s in Asia, were in a dogfight with the Japanese, who were flying the hated Zeros. Our guys flew with their cockpits open, no headgear, long white scarves, and their thumb constantly giving the A-OK sig
nal. The bucktoothed Japanese—we called them Nips, of course—flew in closed cockpits, with grim faces and wearing soft dark helmets that tied under their chins (the hated kind we kids were forced to wear in winter by our moms). At a critical moment, one of our heroes dramatically saves the life of another who is under imminent attack by unloading a barrage of bullets into a Japanese plane. We watched as the Zero, suddenly out of control, began its death descent, screeching as it went down. Just before it struck the water, a trickle of blood streamed out of the right corner of the Nip’s mouth. We were beside ourselves with cheers as the Zero slammed into the water and blew up.
I was going to try to sell a story that said Americans do not fight war more honorably or more sanely than the Japanese and Germans did in World War II. I wasn’t sure what would happen, but I knew it wasn’t going to be easy.
*I learned later that Charles Black, an experienced military affairs reporter who’d gone to Vietnam five times for the Columbus Enquirer, the local daily that covered Fort Benning, had learned significant details of the case against Calley but chose not to publish what he knew until the army went public with the case. He was quoted as explaining after the My Lai story broke that he did not want to embarrass the military.
· TEN ·
A National Disgrace
I’d been a reporter for a decade by the fall of 1969 and somehow had figured out that the best way to tell a story, no matter how significant or complicated, was to get the hell out of the way and just tell it.
My first My Lai dispatch thus began, “Lt. William Calley, Jr., 26, is a mild-mannered boyish-looking Vietnam combat veteran with the nickname of Rusty. The Army says he deliberately murdered 109 Vietnam civilians during a search-and-destroy mission in March, 1968.” I deleted the word “Oriental” in describing the victims after getting assured by an official in Melvin Laird’s office that the army would do the same in its case against Calley. Laird, who would become a good friend after leaving office, did so out of fear—a fear I shared—that the overt racism of the initial charge would lead to random violence against GIs in South Vietnam who had nothing to do with the massacre.
I wrote the story to the best of my ability and then telephoned my editor friend at Life and said it was all theirs, if the weekly moved quickly. The editor called back within a few hours and said no. He had pushed for it, he said, but there was little interest for such a story by the senior management. I had been in touch earlier with Look magazine, another popular weekly that had discussed an assignment for me, and, at the request of an editor there, had written a two-page summary of where I assumed the My Lai story would end up. I called the editor and told him that I had taken it much further than I thought I would and filled him in on the Calley interview. He, too, passed. I was devastated, and frightened by the extent of self-censorship I was encountering in my profession. I feared I would have no choice but to take the My Lai story to a newspaper and run the risk of having editors there turn over my information to their reporting staff: in other words, to be treated like a tipster. In any case, I knew I needed a lawyer to review what I had written for libel. That led me to Michael Nussbaum, a classmate during my year at the University of Chicago Law School. Michael was as brilliant at law as I was opaque, but we nonetheless had become the closest of friends, and he was now a partner in a major law firm in Washington. He was an expert litigator and outspoken critic of the Vietnam War who had just written a handbook on how to avoid the draft legally.
I arrived late one night at his small house in Georgetown just as Michael, then a carefree bachelor, was shooing a woman out the door. He read the story I had written, asked me a series of appropriate questions, recommended some changes that I made, and said, yes, his firm would represent me and stand behind me in case of trouble. There was no talk of fees or obligation. Michael was not new to the world of the First Amendment: His clients included Ralph Nader and a number of Washington Post journalists. He would die of cancer in 2011, after representing me, always successfully, in seven libel proceedings during my career. In an essay I wrote after his death for The New Yorker’s blog, I told of a suggestion that made that first My Lai story work:
I’m not sure how it came up, but it was obvious to Michael that Calley’s interview with me could be legally disastrous for him, in that it would likely contradict what he had told the Army. Michael’s advice was to go back to George Latimer, Calley’s lawyer, and tell him everything Calley had told me.
So I did. Latimer was distraught, and said—how right Michael was—that Calley’s comments to me conflicted with his prior sworn testimony in the military proceedings….If I published the interview this way, Latimer told me, I possibly would be denying Calley his constitutional right to a fair trial. He offered a deal: if I would in some manner avoid saying outright that Calley’s comments were made directly to me…he would go over the story, line for line, and correct any factual mistakes he could….And so George Latimer and I spent a great deal of time on the telephone. He corrected dates, phrasing, the spelling of the names of others involved, etc. He was exceedingly precise, to the point, as I learned years later from an academic’s Freedom of Information request, that military analysts had concluded after publication of the first of what would become five freelance articles on My Lai, that I clearly had access to the most secret of Army files.
Latimer had one more inducement. He told me I could tell editors and reporters to telephone him, and he would confirm that he had reviewed the article and that, to the extent of his knowledge, what it said about his client, Calley, was accurate. He lived up to his commitment, although he and Calley never talked to me again.
David Obst was continuing to urge me to let his tiny news service handle the story, but that, even after the travesties with Life and Look, made no sense to me. I had stayed in touch with I. F. Stone through my recent travails, and he responded to my desperation by telling me that he knew Bob Silvers, the editor of The New York Review of Books, would publish it immediately. (I had written another piece or two for the magazine since the serialization of my CBW book there.) I called Silvers—it was on the eve of the closing of an edition of the biweekly magazine—and so he had me dictate the story to someone there. Under Silvers’s leadership, the magazine had emerged as a voice of the anti–Vietnam War movement, and Bob, when he and I talked, told me how excited he was about the story and was planning to do what he had done only a few times in the magazine’s history—start the piece on the cover. Bob had only one significant editing request: Would I add a short paragraph up high in the piece to explain the meaning of the massacre, in terms of the day-by-day brutality of the war? I was familiar with editors wanting to put their scent on a good story, and laughed him off, saying that surely there was no need to tell readers the political importance of the case against Calley. Bob insisted. I said never. He said he would not run the story without adding the words he wanted me to write. I said good-bye, and that was that.
I was adamant because I knew from my years of being immersed in the war, and the racism and fear that drove it, that the mass murder of civilians was far more common than was known and, most important, prosecuted. We now had a case where the army itself was drawing a line and finally saying, in essence, that there are some actions that cannot be overlooked. There was no way I would let even one paragraph that smacked of antiwar dicta pollute the straightforward report of a mass murder I had written, even if it was to be published in a magazine that was against the war.
The flap with Silvers, someone who was totally on my side, proved to me that there was no way I was going to get the My Lai story published the way I wanted, unless I somehow found a way to take responsibility for publishing it. What the hell, I’d started a newspaper when I was twenty-five years old, and the fact that Nussbaum and his prominent Washington law firm were behind me on libel questions was a good start. I called up David Obst and told him that he had the goddamn story and he’d better not screw it up. I also t
old him that Dispatch News Service was going to copyright the My Lai story and take full responsibility for publishing it. The newspapers that chose to publish what we wrote would pay a fixed fee for doing so; we settled on one hundred bucks per paper, no matter the size of its circulation—and that would be the extent of each newspaper’s responsibility. I somehow had faith that this twenty-three-year-old who could talk himself in and out of trouble with great charm and pizzazz could pull it off.
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