There were a lot of reasons I could have been wrong. David had been in the streets during the 1968 Democratic convention and was a veteran of hard-core antiwar activity in Berkeley, California, and while he could rattle off the good, and bad, effects of most street drugs, he was now going to be dealing with the senior editors of America’s largest newspapers—the same editors who had been ignoring the growing antiwar peace movement. In later years he would go on to help Daniel Ellsberg get the Pentagon Papers published, to become a literary agent for John Dean, Bob Woodward, and Carl Bernstein of Watergate fame, to have his own publishing imprint at Random House, and even to have a role in the filming of Revenge of the Nerds, a cult film of the 1980s. But to convince the executive editors of newspapers to publish a mass-murder story?
In its own way, what David did was as much of a miracle as I had managed in finding Calley at Fort Benning. In his memoir, Too Good to Be Forgotten, published in 1998, David told how he went about selling the My Lai story, beginning early in the morning on Wednesday, November 12, 1969:
I got a copy of a book called The Literary Marketplace, which listed the names and phone numbers of all of the newspapers in America. I opened to A and began calling. It wasn’t until I got to the Cs that I got a hit. The Hartford Current [sic] in Connecticut said they were interested and requested a copy of the story….I hadn’t really thought out how I was going to get it out. I couldn’t just mimeograph it and mail it like I did for our Dispatch stories: it would take three days to reach the Current….Forget it, I’d figure out how to send it later. I had to sell it first.
As David went along, more and more editors were interested, aided by the fact that he could tell editors that the article had been read for libel by Nussbaum and that George Latimer, Calley’s lawyer, had read the story and would attest to its accuracy. One editor he befriended explained to him that my fifteen-hundred-word Calley story could be sent by telex and reach every editor within an hour. Of course, we did not have the money to do so, so the articles, once the editors agreed to read them, went out telex collect.
My only effort to sell the story that day ended in fiasco. I was a good friend of Larry Stern, a star reporter on the national staff of The Washington Post, and he invited Nussbaum and me to meet with Ben Bradlee, the Post’s magnetic executive editor. We arrived just after lunch and met in the tiny office of Phil Foisie, the foreign editor. Four or five editors and reporters gathered around as I distributed copies of the Calley story. There was quiet as all began to read. It was broken by the effervescent Bradlee, who literally flung the five or six pages he was reading at Foisie and said, “Goddamn it….I’ve got hundreds of reporters working for me and this has to come from the outside. Publish it. It smells right.” This was three years before Bradlee’s heroics during Watergate. I could tell at that moment that you either loved the guy or had to leave the paper. (I ended up playing doubles on Sundays with him throughout the 1980s and coming to understand why so many of his reporters admired him.)
Despite Bradlee’s drama queen performance, the Post totally rewrote my story, adding denials from the Pentagon and other caveats, but did put its article on page 1. The early edition hit the street well before midnight. It was an ignoble beginning, made worse when Peter Braestrup, who had been assigned to rewrite my Calley story, woke me up a few hours before dawn to tell me that I was a lying son of a bitch: No one soldier could be responsible for the murder of 109 civilians. It was just impossible. I thought he was drunk, but he might not have been. I had a lot of trouble going back to sleep; I had seen no video or photographic evidence of a mass murder. I would soon learn that the My Lai story made a lot of people irrational. My telephone at home remained listed, as it still is, and for months after the story broke, I got calls from angry officers and enlisted men, usually drunk, telling me what they were going to do to my private parts. Braestrup’s was far and away the most stressful case, especially when I learned of his expertise. He was a former marine officer who had been seriously wounded in the Korean War, and was soon to be the Saigon bureau chief for the Post. I obviously anticipated pushback and anger from many in the government and the military, but Braestrup alerted me to the possibility that my fellow reporters would be equally resentful.
I knew I would survive the criticism from Braestrup and the others. Even today, I have flashbacks on stormy days about the wet and snowy mornings on which I, still in my teens, opened my long-gone father’s store on Indiana Avenue in the dark of a Chicago winter at 7:00, turning on lights and getting ready to deal with laundry and cleaning while sneaking in a few hours of homework for a later class at the University of Chicago. I survived that beginning, and I would survive any criticism of a story I knew to be true. The streets of Chicago somehow gave me a sense of well-being that stayed with me throughout my career and kept me from falling into a funk when my work was being savaged, as it occasionally was.
Obst and I would have no idea whether the fifty or so newspaper editors around the country who bought the story actually would choose to publish it—this was an era long before the internet—until the middle of the next afternoon, when out-of-town newspapers arrived at the newsstand in the National Press Building, where Dispatch now had an office. David created a miracle, and dozens of major newspapers, including the Chicago Sun-Times, the Philadelphia Bulletin, and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, prominently displayed the Calley story on the front page the next day, a few even making it the banner headline. The New York Times did not buy the story offered by Obst, but the New York Post did and gave it dominant play.
The major television networks did nothing with the story, in part because the Pentagon shrewdly refused to make any comment. I was not flooded with the calls that I had imagined would roll in—from energetic reporters eager for leads and from Vietnam vets who had their own horror stories to relay. After a few days, I was reminded of the self-censorship that seemed to dominate the media’s coverage of the war. A few editors, instead of assigning their reporters to dig up more dirt, were calling Obst and asking about follow-ups, and he was making promises of further reporting, to my dismay. There was a lively debate in the British Parliament about the Calley crimes, which was extensively reported by the Times. The only newspaper, in fact, to actively chase the story seemed to be the Times, which sent Henry Kamm, an experienced foreign correspondent, to the immediate area of My Lai, in what once, before the war, had been a beautiful farming community along the South China Sea. He eventually was flown to an evacuation area for the survivors of the massacre and filed a dispatch that was published on Thursday, November 13, quoting survivors as saying that as many as 567 men, women, and children had been massacred by the Americans. There was widespread skepticism elsewhere in the media about my Calley story, with many newspapers—including The Washington Post—noting the hardships U.S. soldiers were having in fighting a guerrilla war against an enemy who posed as farmers during the day. The subliminal message was clear: American soldiers were often in a position where they had to shoot first or become victims. Who was I to make such a harsh judgment about the war?
The breakthrough came Sunday night. Obst, in his zany memoir, vividly recalled the moment:
Sy came over to my house. We were both wondering what to do next—how to follow up. The story…didn’t have as much of an impact as we had hoped. Newsweek and Time both ignored it. We were looking over the ways the various papers had played the story…when Sy spotted another story in the Washington Post. It was an item about a guy named Ronald Ridenhour who had announced that he was responsible for initiating the army’s inquiry. Sy jumped out of his seat and began yelling, “The kid! The kid! The kid!” Suddenly it all made sense to Sy. He hadn’t been able to figure out why the army would air its dirty laundry about the killings. Why had the army charged Lieutenant Calley? Ridenhour was the answer.
Sy got on the phone and tracked the kid down. He planned to take the first flight to Los Angeles to meet Ron, now a stu
dent at Claremont College.
What David did not say was that the item about Ridenhour was a one-paragraph AP story, datelined Phoenix, Arizona, attached at the end of a long Post story about the dangers facing American boys in the war. On Monday, I got to Ron’s dormitory at Claremont, thirty-five miles east of downtown Los Angeles, in time for the two of us to have lunch. Surprisingly, or perhaps not surprisingly, I was the first reporter to actually meet with him. The Times and wire services had chatted with him by telephone, but no one from the Los Angeles Times, the premier newspaper on the West Coast, had deigned to phone him, let alone drive the thirty-five miles to Claremont. Ridenhour and I talked for five hours. Ron had not been at My Lai; he served much of his year in Vietnam in an advance combat unit known as LRRPs, for long-range reconnaissance patrols. He told me he had flown over the My Lai area in late March 1968 and noticed the desolation—“not even a bird was singing,” he would later write—but did not learn what had taken place until late April, when a member of Calley’s platoon told him that few, if any, of the villagers at My Lai survived the onslaught. He was determined to find out more, but realized how dangerous his questioning would be. He told me that he did not take notes as he gathered information, out of fear for his own safety if they were found.
By November 1968, when his tour of duty in Vietnam was over, he had firsthand information from five members of Calley’s company who confirmed the extent of the atrocity. In March 1969, back at his family home in Phoenix, Ridenhour wrote a detailed two-thousand-word letter, replete with names and ranks, about the atrocity and mailed copies to more than thirty officials in Washington. His list began with President Nixon and included fifteen members of the Senate, five members of the Arizona congressional delegation, the State Department, the Pentagon, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Department of the Army, and three members of the House of Representatives, including the office of L. Mendel Rivers. Twenty-two of the offices later said they had no record of ever receiving Ridenhour’s letter, but the letter worked: The Department of the Army told Ridenhour in April that it had begun an inquiry. The former GI was urged to be patient; his information needed to be corroborated, and it could take many months to do so.
Ridenhour was fearful of a cover-up because he understood that many of those being interviewed—even perhaps some of those who had talked to him—had been participants in the slaughter and would have no incentive to be forthcoming to an army investigator. In late May, he decided he would tell the story of the massacre himself and contacted a literary agent who provided a number of publications with the essentials of Ridenhour’s letter, including Life, Look, Harper’s, and The Washington Post, owners of Newsweek magazine, but none responded. When we talked, Ridenhour recalled the name of the editor at Life who had been contacted by his agent; it was the same editor I telephoned four months later with a separate account of the massacre, as obtained by my reporting. If there is a journalism hell, that editor belongs there.
Ron was open about his failed journalistic ambitions and made it clear to me that he was ecstatic that I, someone he saw as a real reporter, had managed to find Calley and evidence that the army was ready to prosecute him. We both understood that the issue went far beyond Calley and that most of the men in Charlie Company had joined in the killing, and the cover-up. Ron gave me the names and addresses of those witnesses who might flesh out the story and, most important, dug out a 1967 Thanksgiving Day menu of Charlie Company, then training in Hawaii, that included the correct spelling of the unit’s officers and enlisted men. The two veterans I had to see, he told me, were Michael Terry and Michael Bernhardt. Terry was out of the army and living in Orem, Utah; Bernhardt was still a soldier, stationed at Fort Dix, New Jersey. I left to catch a late flight to Salt Lake City, having made a lifelong friend in the courageous and generous Ridenhour, who did make it as a journalist after all and won a George Polk Award in 1987 after a yearlong inquiry into a tax scandal in New Orleans, his hometown. He died at age fifty-two, far too young, after a heart attack in 1998.
I had an address for Mike Terry but could not reach him by phone, and getting to Orem, forty-five miles south of Salt Lake City, turned out to be hellacious. There was a huge snowstorm, and I was driving in the darkness on twisting, snowy mountain roads of which I knew nothing. Lights were out all over the city, whose population then was twenty-five thousand, and I drove around aimlessly until I finally found an open gas station and got directions. The Terry home was extremely modest, made of wood and warmed, as I would learn, by an indoor oil heater. It was close to midnight when I began knocking. A young boy answered. I asked for his big brother, the one who fought in the war, and was ushered inside, no questions asked. A moment later out came Terry, in pajamas. It was as if late-night visitors were the rule in Orem. I told him who I was and about my visit with Calley and the talk with Ridenhour and asked him to tell me what he remembered. “Do you want me to tell you what I told the colonel?” he asked. Yes. Ridenhour had told me that he had been contacted after writing his letters by an army criminal investigator, a Colonel Wilson, who repeatedly urged him not to do what he had done with me—talk. Terry’s next line produced headlines all over the world. “It was a Nazi-type thing,” he said, in describing a ditch in which scores of women and children had been slaughtered. I took copious notes as we talked, while also keeping a wary eye on the parlous oil burner, a reminder of my days in Pierre.
I left after a few hours, grabbed some sleep at an airport motel in Salt Lake City, and called Obst and gave him the go-ahead to alert editors all over the world—we’d had inquiries from abroad—that I had another story in the works. I flew to Philadelphia, drove an hour to Fort Dix, and met with Michael Bernhardt. He talked about seeing more than he ever wanted to see and shredded Rusty Calley’s self-serving story of a major firefight (as did Terry’s account). Ridenhour, Terry, and Bernhardt each recalled—more than that; they needed to share—stunning details of crazed soldiers taking special pleasure in killing little boys and girls by bayonet and other means. It was Bernhardt’s first search-and-destroy mission and he said, “It was as if I’d missed a couple days in basic training and this was the way war was, but they never told me. It was like an old joke: You miss something in second grade and you never learn to spell. I got to see everybody killing everybody.”
Obst sold my second story. It was especially big in London, following the debate over My Lai in Parliament. The Daily Mail headline said, “The Story That Stunned America.” Louis Heren, the American editor for the august London Times, had praised my earlier work on CBW, and my story ran there, on the front page: The Times splashed the Terry/Bernhardt interviews under a triple-deck headline, “US Soldiers Say ‘We Saw Massacre’; ‘Women and Children Shot Down.’ ” The New York Times chose once again not to pay Dispatch one hundred dollars, and so we sold the eyewitness story, as before, to the New York Post. Editors all over America kept calling Obst and asking when the next Hersh story was coming. Given my problems in getting the story in print, I was not surprised that no one else in the American press corps, save for some reporters on the Times, seemed to be chasing the story.
I kept on going. I knew there was yet another story that, so I thought, would end any resistance to the obvious truth of My Lai. Terry, Bernhardt, and other platoon members I had talked with told me about a soldier named Paul Meadlo, a farm kid from somewhere in Indiana, who had mechanically fired clip after clip of rifle bullets, at Calley’s orders, into groups of women and children who had been rounded up amid the massacre. Calley’s company moved on in the late afternoon toward the South China Sea a few miles to the east. Early the next morning Meadlo stepped on a land mine and blew off his right foot. As he was waiting to be evacuated, he chanted, again and again, “God had punished me and God will punish you, Lieutenant Calley, for what you made me do.” Calley was shaken and began screaming for the helicopter. I knew how to spell Paul’s name, courtesy of Ridenhour’s Thanksgiving menu, and I spent hours dialin
g Indiana information operators, beginning with cities in the north, looking for a listing for Meadlo. I found one in New Goshen, a small village near Terre Haute, and called. It was the right Meadlo residence, and Paul’s mother, speaking in a scratchy southern accent, said it was okay with her if I came to visit, but she had no idea what her son would do.
I don’t remember how I got there—I think I flew to Indianapolis via Chicago and drove east for two hours—but I got to the Meadlo farm midday. It was a run-down mess, with clapboard siding and chickens crawling in and out of torn coops, and lots of obvious repair work had not been done. As I pulled up in front of the house, Paul’s mother, Myrtle, in her fifties but looking much older, came out to greet me. I introduced myself and asked if I could visit with Paul. She pointed to a second, smaller wooden frame house on the property, and said he was inside. And then this long-suffering mother, who did not follow the news and knew little of the war in Vietnam, said it all: “I sent them a good boy, and they made him a murderer.”
I began my talk with Paul by asking to see his stump. He took off his boot and prosthetic device and talked openly and with animation about the treatment he had received in the field, in Vietnam, and the long recuperation he went through at an army hospital in Japan. We turned to the day of the massacre. Paul told his story to me without overt emotion; it was as if he’d clicked from on to off. He’d been asked to stand watch over a large group of women and children, all terrified survivors of the carnage, who had been gathered in a ditch. Calley, upon arriving at the ditch, ordered Meadlo and others to kill all. Meadlo did the bulk of the killing, firing seventeen-bullet clips—four or five in all, he told me—into the ditch, until it grew silent. I would be told later by other soldiers that a moment or two after the firing stopped, and the ditch grew quiet, the GIs heard the sound of a child crying, and Calley’s men watched as a three- or four-year-old boy, who had been protected by his mother, crawled to the top of the ditch, full of others’ blood, and began running toward a nearby rice paddy. Calley asked Meadlo to “plug him.” Meadlo, flooded with tears and confronted with a single victim, refused and so Calley ran up behind the child, with his carbine extended, and blew off the back of his head.
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