by Tom Bissell
Throughout the morning these gusts of horror were intercut with the stray kindness: the 2nd Platoon's medic, George Garza, bandaged several wounded children while around him their mothers were being raped and shot. A few in the 1st Platoon also refused to kill unarmed villagers—the most stirring suggestion that the “madness of war” cannot fully account for what happened. When Robert Maples, a machine gunner who disobeyed Calley's orders, was later asked by U.S. Army investigators after his questioning if he had anything to add, he said that he did: “Only that I expected something to happen about that incident and I did not expect that it would wait this long.”
I returned to my father's side. He had not moved. I touched him on the shoulder, and with a kind of steadfast emotionlessness he nodded. As we walked over to the museum, I noticed that the palm trees were marked with little plaques to indicate the still visible bullet holes the soldiers had fired into them during the massacre. (“Kill some trees!” was, among American soldiers in Vietnam, the equivalent of “Fire at will!”) I stopped at one tree. In addition to noting the bullet hole, the plaque named the murdered man whose property this tree had grown on. “Good Christ,” my father said quietly, stopping to finger the tree's spi-derwebbed bullet hole. His face was suddenly spectral. “Five hundred people.”
“Five hundred and four,” I said. “According to this pamphlet, at least. I don't think anyone knows how many were killed. Between four and five hundred. Over a hundred of them were under the age of five.”
His head had not stopped shaking. “Good Christ.”
The museum's three rooms were spacious and floored with dark wood. Around each room milled the porpoise buses’ tourists, most of them older Europeans, all of whom were looking at the exhibits with something like cosmic dread splashed across their faces. I looked at a photo of the man Medina had thrown into a well, his shiny brain visible through the hole in his skull, and felt that same dread take up residence upon my own face. Another photo showed a little boy shielding his even littler brother, with this caption: “Truong Bon protecting his younger brother, Truong Nam, both were murdered by the GIs.” More photos: a skinny man cut in two by machine-gun fire, a woman with her brains neatly piled beside her. These photos of the massacre were taken in medias res by the U.S. Army photographer Ronald Haeberle. All of them were astonishing, in their way. I lingered before a photo that showed a number of grunts relaxing along a ridge near a ditch. They looked as though they were having a break, perhaps preparing for lunch. None appeared particularly traumatized—with the exception of one ARVN soldier accompanying Charlie Company, whose face was a small epic of barely contained emotion. Just out of frame, several wounded villagers were calling out for help. In the words of the historians James S. Olson and Randy Roberts, “two members of Charlie Company put down their plates, picked up their rifles, killed the wounded Vietnamese villagers, and then returned to their meals.” Some of Charlie Company's murderers—but, amazingly, only some—became reticent when Haeberle showed up with his camera. Shortly after the killing began, Haeberle told Bilton and Sim, “I asked some soldiers: ‘Why?’ They more or less shrugged their shoulders and kept on with the killing.” And Haeberle kept taking pictures. Despite one photo's caption that enshrines Haeberle's claim that he took the pictures to prevent something like My Lai from ever happening again, the only thing Haeberle did while documenting one of the worst atrocities ever committed by American soldiers was switch from a black-and-white to a color camera.
My father drifted by. “Hey, Dad.”
“Hey, yourself.”
“How are you?”
“I'm … okay.”
“What do you think?”
“What I thought before.”
I paused. “I hope you don't feel like I dragged you here.”
He shook his head. “No, no. I'm glad we're here now.”
“Okay.” Again I paused. “You're sure?”
“Not really, no.”
I followed him into the adjacent room. Hien was also here. A rogues’ gallery of My Lai perpetrators—huge blowups of badly Xeroxed photocopies, the pixels as big as dimes—stared back at us. Let their last names stand: Calley, Hodges, Reid, Widmer, Simpson, and Medina, at his court-martial in 1971, at which he was acquitted after fifty-seven minutes of deliberation. He soon resigned from duty and shortly thereafter admitted he had lied during his trial. Because he was no longer in uniform—the arm of military justice is particularly short—he was never tried for perjury, just as most of the murderers of Charlie Company, already having been discharged when the story broke, were never tried for their crimes.
There were also photos of Lawrence Colburn, Hugh Thompson, and Herbert Carter. Thompson, a helicopter pilot, was twenty-five years old at the time of the massacre, which he watched from his bubble-domed H-23 observation chopper. Lawrence Colburn was Thompson's eighteen-year-old door gunner. During the massacre Thompson marked with smoke a wounded villager writhing on the ground. As he was radioing for help for the woman, he watched Medina approach and execute her. An outraged Thompson then landed his chopper between a group of wounded villagers and Lieutenant Calley. Thompson had words with Calley, who, true to gutless form, stood down. As soon as Thompson lifted off, however, the villagers were murdered. Thompson found another batch of villagers and, once again, landed between them and their pursuers, Lieutenant Stephen Brooks of the 2nd Platoon among them. Before leaving the chopper to confront Brooks, Thompson told Colburn—in an order that went out over a frequency monitored by Thompson's superiors back at base—that if the Americans fired on the villagers, “Open up on ‘em—blow ‘em away.” Once again Thompson confronted a monster, and, once again, the monster backed off. Another chopper was radioed, quickly landed, and ferried the ten imperiled Vietnamese, including six children, to safety.
Colburn flew back to the ditch where Calley had overseen one of the day's mass executions, landed, and with his crew chief, Glenn Andreotta (who would be killed three weeks later), waded into the bodies and rescued a miraculously unhurt eight-year-old boy. Thompson flew the boy to an ARVN hospital in Quang Ngai, weeping the entire way. Andreotta, Colburn, and Thompson would receive medals for their actions (Thompson would throw his away), which cited their bravery in risking “enemy fire” while rescuing the villagers. Herbert Carter was less heroic. Although he refused to take part in the massacre, he accidentally shot himself in the foot with his pistol moments after Fred Widmer had used it to shoot “fifteen or so” villagers. It was the operation's only casualty. Carter, greatly scarred by My Lai, would testify before the massacre's investigatory committee stoned out of his gourd on heroin. Nearby, in a building adjacent to the main museum, Colburn and Thompson's Soldier's Medals for Heroism, awarded decades after the real nature of their actions came to light, were on display, though not very conspicuously.
I saw my father ducking outside with Hien, both of them gray and punched-looking, and began to follow after them when behind me I heard a heavily accented German voice declaim, “I have been to Auschwitz, and it is moving, but this is so much more moving, jaV I turned. The people this German woman was speaking to were Canadian, and visibly discomfited.
“Excuse me?” I less said than heard myself say.
She looked at me unapologetically. She was wearing a chunky jade necklace I had seen being sold on the streets. “More moving. Because of the life. The life around this place.” She waved her hands, which were long, thin skeleton hands, while the Canadians stealthily took their leave.
“Are you,” I asked her, “honestly comparing this place to Auschwitz?” My voice italicized each word differently. Auschwitz? This place? You?
With one step she halved the space between us. “No, it is just more moving.”
An ant farm spontaneously developed in my stomach. “Because of the life.”
She jumped on this assumed bit of concord. “Ja, ja. The life.”
Although I was fairly sure this constituted some form of “anti-attitude,” I did not report
her. I did not say anything and stalked off to an adjacent building. Some little goblin of anger jumped around inside me and then, unopposed, possessed me. I felt anger toward my country, those men. This anger had nowhere to go. It sat within me, stagnating. Anger toward the all-pervading taint of this place. Anger toward my anger. Anger toward the doorway, this floor, the Son My Memorial visitors’ guest book. I flipped through its wide-ruled pages, muttering. Unsurprisingly, it had scarcely any American entries. It was, however, filled with German entries. My college German had left me with enough ability to translate one entry, headed “Barbarei,” as something along the lines of “this establishes for me my anti-American feeling for the politics of the USA.” Someone from Holland had written, in English, “The madness of war.… Let's keep the words of the Vietnamese in mind. Do not forget the past but look to the future.” From Australia: “I feel the pain.” From Spain, something about “Vietnam” and “Irak.” From Italy: “I have always thought that Americans are the biggest terrorist country in the world.” From England: “It's so sad to see what human beings are capable of. Hope it never happens again!” And this: “War is terrible and cruel. I remember counting 57 pieces of what appeared to be meat hanging on a wire. As a ranger during the war in 1969 I saw many cruel things. About 2 5 miles from this memorial is the abandoned site where I counted what turned out to be 57 tongues of children the Viet Cong cut out during a night raid. Their memorial is written only in my memory but will never fade with time.” Signed: “An American.” I scribbled my name in the book with full intention of writing something, but the pen grew heavy and my mind went weightless, emptied of the stern, pretty sentiment of which, only a few seconds before, I had felt capable. Soon the pen was quietly set down, the page empty but for my name.
Was this massacre, I wondered, so affecting—so terrible—merely because it was carried out by Americans? Was it so terrible because of how few Americans were willing to condemn those responsible? A poll taken shortly after the story broke revealed that 65 percent of Americans were “not upset” by My Lai. Why was it that those who maintained the fiercest faith in American greatness were the first to resort to nihilistic relativism when American ideals were sullied and spat upon? Was My Lai terrible because of how thoroughly it was covered up, which involved the machinations of at least fifty American officers? Or was it terrible because virtually every man guilty of taking part in it was never brought to justice? Was it really so surprising? As Jonathan Shay, in his fascinating book Achilles in Vietnam points out, the central poem of Western civilization, The Iliad, begins with the word “Rage.” The Iliad is about a soldier going mad and desecrating the body of an honorable enemy. In this way it can be seen as a poem about the difference between war and atrocity. And there is a difference. Homer knew it. Somewhere within them, so did the men of Charlie Company.
The Battle of Pinkville's Combat Action Report, written by Colonel Frank Barker, read, “This operation was well planned, well executed and successful. Friendly casualties were light and the enemy suffered heavily. On this operation this civilian population supporting the VC in the area numbered approximately 200. This created a problem in population control and medical care of those civilians caught in fire of the opposing forces.” The Army's press release was equally chipper: “For the third time in recent weeks, the Americal Division's 11th Brigade infantrymen from Task Force Barker raided a Viet Cong stronghold known as ‘Pinkville’ six miles northeast of Quang Ngai, killing 128 enemy in a running battle…. They recovered two Ml rifles, a carbine, a short-wave radio and enemy documents.” The author of this dispatch was an Army journalist named Jay Roberts, who, like Ronald Haeberle, had witnessed everything. And although the helicopter pilot Hugh Thompson reported the massacre to three people (his chaplain, a captain, and the commander of the 11th Infantry Brigade), nothing was done and no investigation began, despite rampant assumptions that a massacre had taken place and widespread talk of Thompson's order to shoot his countrymen. Three weeks later, Task Force Barker was disbanded, perhaps to separate the men responsible for the slaughter and stifle further talk. Charlie Company staggered on, and soon many men beneath Medina began to fall apart emotionally while others continued to commit acts of atrocity. One newcomer to Charlie Company almost shot one rape-happy grunt, amazed that such lawlessness could exist among American servicemen.
Were it not for Ronald Ridenhour's chance beer while in Vietnam with a fellow veteran of the 11th Brigade, the story of the My Lai massacre would likely have never reached the public. Ridenhour, a highly trained quasi-Special Forces Army operative during the war, had been repeatedly dispatched on dangerous missions in Vietnam but always managed to maintain a moral understanding of the rules of engagement. (It probably helped that while in Vietnam he had read all of Bernard Fall's books and understood the war's complications.) Over the fateful beer, Ridenhour learned of a “village called ‘Pinkville’ “and of the horrible things that had happened there. After being discharged and while studying American literature at an Arizona university, he talked to more 11th Brigade veterans, pieced together the story, and finally decided to write about what he had heard to his Democratic congressman, which he copied to thirty others, including President Nixon and Senators Edward Kennedy, Barry Goldwater, and Eugene McCarthy. Ridenhour's extremely detailed letter described how one Lieutenant “Kally” (more like Kali) had been the prime mover of the unit's atrocities.
To William Westmoreland's immense credit, he ordered an investigation of the twenty-five men implicated in the massacre as soon as word of it reached him, but he was frustrated, as were many others, that “since they had already been discharged from the Army, they were beyond the Army's jurisdiction.” Westmoreland was equally frustrated by the initially phlegmatic response from the Nixon administration: “When I learned that some members of President Nixon's administration wanted to white-wash any possible negligence within the chain of command, I threatened … to exercise my prerogative as a member of the loint Chiefs of Staff to go personally to the President and object. That squelched any further pressure for whitewash.” As Bilton and Sim write, White House transcripts reveal Nixon's belief that “dirty rotten lews” were behind the massacre's exposure.
Defenders of William Calley—who quickly became the locus of the investigation, charged as he was with killing 109 “Oriental human beings”—were legion. He received so much fan mail he had to hire a secretary. Esquire serialized his memoirs (“And babies. On babies everybody's really hung up. ‘But babies! The little innocent babies!’ Of course, we've been in Vietnam for ten years now. If we're in Vietnam in another ten, if your son is killed by those babies you'll cry at me, ‘Why didn't you kill those babies that day?’“) for $150,000. Lieutenant Shithead was also besieged by pretty young admirers who wanted a glimpse of the man who had murdered an entire village and called it his duty. The National Review editorialized in a piece called “The Great Atrocity Hunt” that whether “atrocities were committed at Songmy [sic] we do not as yet know; but more than enough atrocities against human reason have been committed in response by the American media.… [T]here is something dark and sick about much of the reaction from the liberal Left.” As Bilton and Sim note, a Georgia minister proclaimed during Calley's trial, “There was a crucifixion 2,000 years ago of a man named Jesus Christ. I don't think we need another crucifixion of a man named Rusty Calley.”
After a closed military trial that left even Calley's defenders speechless, the calm young psychopath was sentenced to life in prison at hard labor. As Nixon tells it in his memoir, Calley's conviction triggered more than five thousand telegrams to the White House, which ran “100 to 1 in favor of clemency.” Many prominent Republicans recommended that Nixon intervene in the Calley case. Although Nixon did order Calley removed from the stockade and put up in more accommodating confinement, executive intervention never went beyond that. Nor did it need to. The message had been sent: on appeal, Calley's sentence was reduced from life to ten years, with the chance for
parole after one year. “Three months after I resigned,” Nixon wrote, “the Secretary of the Army decided to parole Calley.” The rest of the My Lai murderers tried for their crimes were acquitted, while those who covered up the massacre received nothing worse than censure.
I saw Hien and my father standing by the ditch from which Hugh Thompson pulled the unhurt, gore-slathered eight-year-old Vietnamese boy. Nearby was a long Guernica-style mural with death-spraying choppers and wicked-faced American soldiers looming over defenseless Vietnamese women and children. As I closed in, I saw that the American soldiers’ helmets were fashioned in the steel glans style reminiscent of Nazi helmets. I walked toward the ditch, less sad than emotionally excavated. The ditch itself was not very deep, long, or wide, and was largely grown over with scrub. The little water in the ditch was filthy, though two short-legged jackal-like dogs were lapping it up between wary looks over at me.
“Why would one man,” I arrived to find Hien saying, “like Calley, kill, while another man, like Colburn, try to prevent it? What is the difference?”
My father was staring into the ditch. “It's just … war,” he told Hien. Hien nodded, but I knew he was not satisfied by this. I was not satisfied by this. Neither, it seemed, was my father. “I guess what it comes down to,” he went on, searchingly, “is discipline.” (Michael Bernhardt said something similar to the historian Christian G. Appy: “A lot of people think My Lai happened because there was too much military discipline, too much indoctrination. Not so. It was the exact opposite. There was way too little in that company”) After Hien left, my father rubbed his chest through his shirt and said, “My heart hurts.”
I nodded. “Yeah.”
“I've seen American Marines take revenge, but they just killed men, not women and children. It's horrible. When I came here we were … we were like crusaders! We were going to help people. We were going to make their lives better, give them democracy. And the way we did it was so morally …” He sighed, rubbed his mouth, shook his head, all the willful gestures of sense-making and significance assembly. But there were none. My Lai occurred two years after my father left Vietnam. The Vietnamese War of 1966 was not the Vietnamese War of 1968, which had by then scythed down whole fields of men and goodwill, including that of the war's own planners and originators. Kennedy, McNamara, lohnson: by 1968 all had fallen. I thought about the story my father had told me a day or two ago about how he been asked to transport an NLF prisoner by helicopter to the village of Tam Ky. He had described this prisoner as “a little guy who's terrified, frightened to death, tied up, but still bucking and heaving. And he fought and he fought and he fought for forty-five minutes. He knew he was going to be thrown out of the helicopter. He knew that. So we arrived in Tam Ky, and they asked me, ‘What'd you learn?’ I said, ? learned that this little guy wants to kill me because he thought I was going to pitch him out of the helicopter!’ And goddamnit, at one point I was about to.” We had both laughed, grimly. War stories. My father would not have been capable of throwing a bound man from a helicopter, under any circumstances. But I imagined him—I imagined myself—here in Son My during those first moments that saw the day's terrible momentum gather, the evil freedom of the trigger availing itself upon the minds of friends and comrades, the various ecstasies of murder, and I did not like the range of possibilities that I saw.