by Tom Bissell
The night before the massacre, my father's friend Captain Medina spoke to Charlie Company. Medina was well liked by his troops, who regarded him as grumpy, garrulous, short-tempered, and essentially fair. But Medina had also ignored many instances of Charlie Company getting out of control. The retribution murder of an innocent Vietnamese girl riding her bicycle in the days after a soldier's death was hushed up by Medina, as were literally dozens of random beatings. Medina himself routinely smacked prisoners around and cautioned soldiers that if they captured anyone alive they would have to share their food with the captive. One month and a half after arriving in Vietnam, one member of Charlie Company later recalled, “we stopped taking prisoners.”
Many individual soldiers within Charlie Company differed on what Medina's instructions for the following day's assault had amounted to. Most agree that revenge was implicitly in the air, as the company had recently lost a popular sergeant to a booby trap. Some soldiers maintained that Medina would have never ordered civilians killed (though all agree that Medina did not have much use for the Vietnamese), others claimed that his implication had been clear, and many testified that Medina had ordered the men to “kill everything.” Even if the orders were not to kill civilians, the orders that all acknowledge were given by Medina (as well as Lieutenant Colonel Frank Barker, who also briefed the men) were themselves illegal. These included burning houses (which required official permission), poisoning wells with animal carcasses, and slaughtering livestock. Generally, the men who took part in the massacre remembered that Medina ordered everything killed while those who refused to take part did not. A minimal student of human nature can deduce some attempt on the part of murderers to assoil their sense of guilt. Most tellingly, a journal entry written by one member of Charlie Company immediately after the briefing does not mention the singularly striking order to “kill everything,” only that “we are going to really hit something tomorrow going to hit 4 places its a hot place.”
On March 16,1968, Task Force Barker, a 500-man assault unit broken into three companies (Alpha, Bravo, and Charlie), set out to do what no previous group of soldiers—not U.S. Marines, not Korean Marines, and not the South Vietnamese Army—had so far managed: to pacify the area of Quang Ngai in which the Son My hamlets lay. Medina's Charlie Company had been in Vietnam for only three months and because of dire troop needs had left Hawaii before completing their training, which included one whole hour of nudge-nudge instruction regarding the Geneva Convention. In its twelve weeks in Vietnam, Charlie Company had taken twenty-eight casualties, five of them fatal, all from snipers or booby traps. Beyond this sniper fire, Charlie Company had not experienced any protracted fighting. The assault on Son My—known to the soldiers as “Pinkville,” due not to its putative Communist infestation, as is commonly supposed, but because that was its color on military maps—was Charlie Company's first combat assault. In the words of Michael Bilton and Kevin Sim, authors of an exemplary book on the massacre, “They had never seen or encountered the enemy in any strength. There had been no heavy contact. They were battle-scarred without being battle-hardened.”
In its assault on Son My, Task Force Barker was operating under several assumptions floated to it by inexperienced CIA officers: that the NLF's hated and elusive 48th Local Force Battalion would be in the area, that there were at least four hundred NLF insurgents in and around My Son's hamlets, that everyone in these hamlets was an active NLF supporter, and that all noncombatants would be at the market on the morning in question. Later evidence would suggest that the village had only ten active supporters of the NLF, though many, perhaps even most, of Son My's villagers had family members in the insurgency. In addition, the NLF's 48th Battalion was dozens of miles away from Son My at the time Task Force Barker arrived.
“Things like My Lai happened all the time?” I asked my father now.
“All the time, yes. lust not so severe.”
“They did. All the time.”
“Unfortunately, yes. That's the reality.”
I looked at him, astonished. I knew what he meant, and he knew that I knew what he meant, but to hear him say these words—their buried tolerance for murder—was very nearly too much. I could have asked, and almost did: Did you ever do anything like that? But I did not ask, because no father should be lightly posed such a question by his son. Because no father should think, even for a moment, that his son believes him capable of such a thing. Because I knew my father was not capable of such a thing. So I was telling myself as we pulled up to Son My.
As we climbed out of the car, I caught a whiff of my father. At our last stop for the night, he had realized he had misplaced his Right Guard and purchased a new stick from the hotel. This was Glacier Mist Secret. It may have been strong enough for a man, but its gentle, pistilly bouquet was definitely intended for a woman. “Nice smell,” I said.
“Goddamn it, you little creep. I told you—it was the only deodorant that last hotel had!”
Two tour buses were already parked here, both decorated with a splashy porpoise motif. As usual I asked Truong if he wanted to join us, and as usual he shook his head and lit a cigarette. I walked up to a large wooden sign that listed “The Regulations of Son My Vestige Area”: “Everyone should be responsible to preserve this place as well as to look after the garden or bonsai trees. Visitors are not allowed to bring explosive powder, flaming, reating substances, poison or weapons into the museum. Also you should inform and stop any anti-attitudes toward this historical relic.” I snatched up a brochure from the tourist booth. Opening it, I read, “Dot sack! Giet sack! Pha sack!” Translated it meant, “Burn all! Kill all! Destroy all!” These words—as words, at least—had nothing to do with My Lai. “Burn all! Kill all! Destroy all!” was instead the self-described policy of Japanese General Okamura Yasuji in China in the summer of 1941—now widely ventriloquized in Asian Communists’ schoolbooks.
I walked around. The grounds were marked by a series of tall, wind-hissing palm trees, cobbled paths, cubically sheared evergreen hedges, and statuary, harrowing statuary: staggering gut-shot peasant women, beseeching children, defiant raised fists. These were the first examples of Communist sculpture I had ever seen that did not produce an initial impulse to have at them with a jackhammer. Meanwhile, my father was studying a headstone that listed the names and ages of some Son My victims.
“What don't you see?” he asked as I joined him.
I had a long look. One column of victims’ ages worked out like this: 12,10,8,6,5,46,14,45. Most were women. “I don't see any young men.”
“That's because none of the young men were around. This was a VC village.”
“Dad. Dad.”
“It's just an observation. This whole thing was probably a revenge mission. Actually, I know it was. They probably said, ‘We're gonna teach ‘em a lesson,’ so they massacred everyone. Which is a slight violation of every rule and regulation both moral, written, military, and civilian.”
I left him there and walked across an esplanade of long grass, momentarily cooled by the javelins of shade thrown down by the palm trees. This was such a beautiful place. Its green fields and bright red dirt and determined little roads made me somehow hopeful. Was it perverse to find hope and beauty in a place with so many poor, rasorial lives? But poverty was not the sum total of a place or a people. Around me women wearing sun masks worked at trimming Son My's hedges. All of them took the time to bow politely as I passed by. I did not trust the fulsome-ness with which I returned their bows. Behind me, across the road, behind the porpoise buses, were a few businesses selling the bottled water Vietnam's perspiring tourists consumed by the gallon. I had a thought to go purchase a bottle but then came across a marker commemorating the death site of more than a dozen Son My victims. Almost all were children. I sat down, the hope and beauty I had just been contemplating as distant and transitory as a satellite.
The danger of events such as the My Lai massacre is that the iconic placement they assume in human consciousness overrides
the horror of what actually took place. “My Lai” rarely meant a specific massacre anymore. It was instead a hyponym of human savagery and almost always an object of comparison, something that other instances of brutality either failed to equal or surpassed. Certainly “My Lai” connoted horror even to those who knew little about it. And who would not acknowledge that what had happened here was horrible? (Many people, in fact, argued that it had not been notably horrible. Many.) But My Lai's reflexive connotation of horror was the problem. Its generic horror no longer suggested the specific horror of American soldiers chasing down and bayoneting children among these trees and hedgerows.
On the morning of the massacre, an older Vietnamese man in a rice paddy near the landing zone watched Charlie Company disembark from their choppers. As Herbert Carter, the tunnel rat of the 1st Platoon, later told U.S. Army investigators, the old man “said some kind of greeting in Vietnamese and waved his arms at us. Someone—either Medina or Calley—said to kill him.” The elderly man was the day's first victim. Then, in Carter's words, “a woman came out of the village and someone knocked her down and Medina shot her with his M-16 rifle. I was 50 or 60 feet from him and saw this. There was no reason to shoot this girl.” Indeed, Charlie Company had taken no incoming fire. They would receive no fire all day. Michael Bernhardt, who did not take part in the massacre, later said that after these first two victims he knew, somehow, that they would not stop. After murdering the girl, Medina killed another boy, moved on to slaughtering some water buffalo, then asked Herbert Carter to help him throw an old man into a well. Carter refused.
Charlie Company broke into its platoons and moved through the village. Lieutenant William Laws Calley, Jr.—five feet four inches tall in his boots, a dropout from Palm Beach Junior College, known as “Rusty” to his few friends and as “Lieutenant Shithead” to Captain Medina— commanded the 1st Platoon. The U.S. Army's dearth of suitable officer material by 1968, caused in no small part by the draft deferments university students were given in order to avoid alienating their middle-class voter parents, helped lead to the human nadir that was Calley. Lieutenant Shithead graduated from Officer Candidates School not knowing how to read a map. Compasses baffled him. In one assessment, Calley displayed “absolutely zero leadership ability,” and before and after My Lai his mistakes in the field led to the death and injury of several of his men. (The 1st Platoon would eventually put a bounty on Calley's head.)
Calley was always open, before and after the massacre, about his antipathy toward all Vietnamese, civilian or soldier, northern or southern. The Tet Offensive in particular had strengthened his resolve to “fix the problem” (the existence of Vietnamese people) and accomplish his “mission” (killing them). A later psychiatric evaluation done on Lieutenant Calley indicated that he considered Vietnamese “animals with whom one could not speak or reason.” According to Vietnamese survivors of the massacre, here is what these animals were saying as Calley and his men murdered them: “I haven't done anything!” “Oh, my God!” “Have pity!” “We're shot!” “Have pity!” Reading Calley's court-martial testimony, one gets the impression that in his mediocrity, in his lack of imagination, in his deadened morality and thoughtlessness, he willingly blurred the already blurry line Medina had established for Charlie Company.
There were other contributors. During World War II, the U.S. military determined that 98 percent of soldiers who experience sixty days of continuous combat become “psychiatric casualties.” The 2 percent who do not are those with “psychopathic personalities.” Certain things can delay this process of emotional disintegration. One of them is leadership. If poorly led, soldiers at war rapidly lose their self-respect, their sense of mission, and their higher motives. Poorly led soldiers move to a midbrain place of strictly animal logic, and while they might not become psychopaths in the clinical sense, they can certainly become acquainted with psychopathia's temptations. Of Medina's contested orders the night before the massacre, Calley said, “The way I interpreted it was, if they were in the way, kill them.” When asked at his court-martial if he knew the difference between an illegal order and a legal order, Calley responded, “I was never told that I had a choice, sir.” When asked if he understood he had been killing innocent women and children, Calley responded, “I never sat down to analyze if they were men, women, and children.” One gets a glimpse into Calley's primeval, two-percenter psychology during one moment in his testimony, when he explained that “the only time I denoted sex was when I stopped Conti from molesting a girl.” Dennis Conti was not “molesting a girl.” Conti was holding a .45 to the woman's baby's head while she tearfully fellated him. And why did Calley stop him? As he later wrote in his memoir, the unbelievably titled Body Count, “if a GI is getting a blow job, he isn't doing his job, he isn't destroying communism.” Calley, who also raped Vietnamese women, led his men into a bestial cavern, and they became beasts. But Calley did not. Calley remained Calley. There was no place for him to descend to, nothing for him to change into. Calley's lawyer, for his part, maintained that his client had been a “good boy until he got into that Oriental situation.”
The “good boy” and my father's “great guy” thus marched into combat. Here are some snapshots from the slaughter, as provided by Bilton and Sim:
Then Wood saw the pitiful sight of an elderly woman who had been wounded, staggering toward them. She had been shot with an M-79 grenade which had failed to explode and was still lodged in her stomach. An old man wearing a straw coolie hat and no shirt was with a water buffalo in a paddy 50 meters away. He put his hands in the air. Several members of the platoon opened fire as Calley watched.
Just then a child, aged about 2 years and parted from its mother, managed to crawl up to the top of the ditch. Dursi watched horrified as Calley picked the child up, shoved it back down the slope, and shot it before returning to question the monk…. Immediately Calley grabbed the monk, pulled him round, hurled him into the paddy, and opened fire with Meadlo's M-16. As the elderly mama-san tried to get up, she too was killed.
Dennis Conti, the aforementioned rapist and a minesweeper with the 1st Platoon, later described for Army investigators how he and Paul Meadlo had
rounded [some Vietnamese villagers] up…. Lieutenant Calley came back, and said: “Take care of them.” So we said: “Okay.” And we sat there and watched them like we usually do. And he came back again, and he said: “I thought you were going to take care of them.” I said: “We're taking care of them.” And he said: “I mean kill them.” So I looked at Meadlo, and he looked at me, and I didn't want to do it. And he didn't want to do it. So we just kept looking at the people, and Calley calls over and says: “Come here, come here … we'll line them up here, we'll kill them….” Then they opened up, and started firing. Meadlo fired a while. I don't know how much he fired, a clip, I think. It might have been more. He started to cry, and he gave me his weapon, and he told me to kill them. And I said I wasn't going to kill them. At the time, when we were talking, the only thing left was children. I told Meadlo, I said: “I'm not going to kill them. He [Calley] looks like he's enjoying it. I'm going to let him do it.” So, like I said, the only thing left was children. He [Calley] started killing the children. I swore at him. It didn't go any good. And that was it. They were all dead. He turned around, and said: “Okay, let's go.”
Paul Meadlo, a young man often teased by his fellow soldiers for being a “farm boy,” was soon (as revealed by later testimony) “crouched, head in his hands, sobbing like a bewildered child.” Meadlo's torment would lead, fourteen months later, to his blurting out a confession to Army investigators at a crucial early stage of the first official inquiry into the massacre.
The moral chaos was such that the 1st Platoon's medic went insane, too, and butchered several cows before regaining his senses. Men such as Fred Widmer, a radio operator who, only weeks before, had been photographed playing with Vietnamese children, now began to mow them down. (All the men loved Vietnamese children, Calley complained to Army inves
tigators. “Not me. I hated them”) Varnardo Simpson would try to explain to Bilton and Sim how he had been able to kill children: “I just went. My mind just went…. I just killed…. And once you start, it's very easy to keep on. Once you start. The hardest—the part that's hard is to kill, but once you kill, that becomes easier, to kill the next person and the next one and the next one.” The firing grew to be such that Captain Medina worried that his men were going to run out of ammunition, and others worried about being caught in the friendly cross fire.
Then the rapes began. Later investigations revealed that among Charlie Company the rape of civilian women was common. “It was predictable,” Michael Bernhardt, one of the few soldiers in Charlie Company who had been well trained, later said. “In other words, if I saw a woman, I'd say, ‘Well, it won't be too long.’ That's how widespread it was.” During the massacre there were approximately twenty separate rapes, most of the victims under the age of twenty and some of them as young as ten; almost all were murdered after the rapes were over. These were among the most unspeakable crimes committed by Charlie Company, and virtually none of the grisly details came out during the soldiers’ various trials. Women were scalped, violated with rifle barrels, and then shot. Some victims’ tongues were cut out, while others had their vaginas ripped open by bayonets. A few were decapitated. While all of this was going on, an “equally vicious massacre” (in the later words of the Army's investigation) was being enacted in the nearby hamlet of My Khe. The perpetrators were the men of Bravo Company, commanded by Stephen Brooks. Bravo Company killed dozens of children and wiped out cowering families by throwing fragmentation grenades into their grass huts. They were also responsible for many rapes. According to Bilton and Sim, the actions of Bravo Company were never fully investigated or widely revealed, for one simple reason: unlike the men of Charlie Company, the perpetrators of Bravo Company's atrocities never talked.