The Americans and their allies were taken completely by surprise. While some of the lost territory was quickly regained, the war had suddenly and permanently been redefined. The Vietcong and the North Vietnamese Army had made it clear to the world that they were more than a match for any invading force, superpower or not, and they were in it for the long haul.
A few days earlier, Charlie Company had been reassigned to Task Force Barker. This battalion-sized unit was stationed along the coast in the central region and their circle of operations included a particular stronghold of enemy activity. The place was called Pinkville because of the odd color that was used to label it on their tactical maps.
On the second night of the Tet Offensive, Morgan Campbell and Charlie Company were camped close enough to Quang Ngai City to see in the distance the very forces they’d soon be fighting. It was the Vietcong Forty-Eighth Battalion—the VC equivalent of the Green Berets—rumored to be the most elite and organized unit the enemy possessed, and Quang Ngai was thought to be their home turf.
It would be Charlie Company’s job to go out, meet the Forty-Eighth Battalion head-on, and destroy them.
Pinkville
February–March 1968
In a daily briefing before a routine patrol, one of the brass actually had the stones to quote Chairman Mao with a straight face.
The enemy is the fish, he’d said, and the civilians are the sea.
Mao had been preaching the gospel of guerrilla warfare when he said something similar, but now his saying was being repurposed as warning to the troops. The major’s point was that you can’t always tell who’s who, so you can no longer trust anybody Vietnamese. There were stories of old ladies and even little kids walking up to a sentry, giving him a big hug, and then pulling the pin on a grenade hidden under their smock.
Over the weeks since Tet, something fundamental had shifted in the atmosphere.
As the fighting had intensified, the locals started to change. Before the offensive they’d welcomed the Americans into their villages. Now that Quang Ngai was a free-fire zone, and regular bombing and shelling had begun across the region, honest friendliness was replaced with tight-lipped suspicion and distrust. The soldiers could feel themselves being watched from every shadow.
The locals knew where the minefields and booby traps were set, and where the snipers of the Forty-Eighth were hiding—but they didn’t tell. They’d prefer to keep their silence and let a man walk right into a trap and lose his leg or his life.
As time went on, and reports of daily casualties mounted, there was a growing feeling among the American troops that if the civilians were aiding and abetting the enemy, then weren’t they the enemy as well?
The war that Morgan Campbell and Charlie Company had trained for was different than the one that was closing in all around them. There were no uniformed opponents and few, if any, solid strategic goals. They’d go out on patrol every day, waiting for the inevitable attack and hoping the odds would be with them. The VC Forty-Eighth was fighting a war of attrition, picking off their enemies man by man and then retreating into the impenetrable jungle, knowing that the Americans couldn’t fight what they couldn’t see.
Yet even with those strategies in play, and entire villages of locals working against them, Charlie Company still hadn’t taken any major losses as the war escalated. But that changed fast.
One morning, a patrol led by Lieutenant Calley was ambushed by sniper fire down by the river. No sooner had they dived for cover when Calley ordered the platoon to get up and cross the river, right out in the open, and go after the sniper nest dug in on the other side. The men knew it would be slow and dangerous wading through the water, but they followed their orders. They’d hardly taken one step forward when a well-placed bullet hit Billy Weber in the side.
It didn’t look so bad at first. He was shot through the kidney, though, the organ was shattered, and the guy who got him must have known that his target would die slowly and in a lot of pain. The field medic did what he could, but nothing outside of morphine was going to help. It took almost an hour before Billy Weber finally died.
Throughout the ordeal some of the men were firing back, just shooting randomly up into the hills, yelling for the enemy to come out and fight. But that sniper had already done his job and had slipped back into hiding again.
With Weber’s death, the men of Charlie Company knew that their charmed existence in this war was finally over. Throughout February, they lost a man almost every day, yet it still seemed like there was nobody out there to fight. The VC were ghosts. They would hit hard and then melt back into the jungle and the villages around Quang Ngai.
Somewhere close to the middle of March, the First and Second Platoons were out on patrol when they walked into different minefields at the same time. The first one blew, boom, and as men went in to help the injured they’d step on another mine, and then another, and another. Through it all, Captain Medina ran with his troops right among the worst of it, shouting orders, pulling soldiers to safety, leading as though he were invincible.
Charlie Company had started out with 140 able soldiers. Now they were down to 105.
• • •
What Charlie Company lacked was a crystal-clear military objective and an enemy they could face and fight. Brigade commander Colonel Oran Henderson arrived on the scene and, with Captain Medina by his side, delivered both at a March 15 mission briefing.
The new intelligence, Henderson told Charlie Company, was rock solid: the Forty-Eighth Vietcong Battalion was using a nearby group of villages called My Lai as a base of operations from which to launch attacks against the American forces. If Charlie Company struck fast and hard, Medina and his death-dealers could take them out once and for all. The mission would take place the following day.
After Colonel Henderson left on a reconnaissance flight with the other unit commanders, Captain Medina stepped up to add his own perspective to the briefing. The Americans would be outnumbered two or three to one, but the good news was that almost all of the civilians in the area had already fled the zone. Anyone they encountered, he told them, was to be considered a combatant, either VC or VC sympathizers.
Lieutenant Calley chimed in here and there like a teacher’s pet, and the room soon became electric, taking on the tone of a pep rally rather than a mission briefing.
Every soldier was told to pack three times the ammunition that would be carried on a normal raid. They would go in strong and blow away everything that moved, laying waste to the crops and the livestock, fouling the wells, and burning the place to ashes so that the village would be useless to any surviving enemy.
Medina implored Charlie Company to remember who and what they’d lost so far: Billy Weber and all the others. They were to gut up and go in with one stone-cold intent: to kill people and break things, to search and destroy until not even a stick was left standing. This was their chance to even the score.
My Lai, Vietnam
Early morning, March 16, 1968
As Morgan Campbell and the rest of Charlie Company strapped into the transport helicopters they heard Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson, the recon pilot, reporting over the radio. He’d flown in first, as usual, braving enemy fire so the infantry could get a picture of what they were about to face. His door-gunners had strafed the tree line on either side of the target village and, according to Thompson, theirs was the only gunfire to be seen or heard. There wasn’t an enemy in sight. Then again, there was nothing so unusual about that.
They were almost to the landing zone when Medina gave his last orders.
“I don’t give a damn what recon says, this is a hot zone we’re landing in. Maybe the hottest you’ve seen so far. The colonel’s in the command craft up above us, and believe me, he knows what’s what. You hesitate and you’ll get us pinned down in there, understand? Remember your orders! This is your fight to win! You’ve heard the old-timers talk about Iwo Jima? Well, this is yours, boys, right here today!”
• • •
The helos had barely touched grass when Morgan Campbell and all the others jumped out and hit the ground running. There was sporadic gunfire as the men fanned out and headed in toward the hamlet. Campbell saw movement among the trees and fired into them before moving on while others backed him up and laid down heavy suppression fire so they wouldn’t get flanked in the advance.
Somebody ran past the window of a hut and Campbell swung his M60 around and cut the place up. Every fifth round was a tracer, and that allowed him to shoot from the hip with enough accuracy to hit what he was aiming at. Fleeing the hail of lead, two people burst through the door and Campbell shot them down just as his first ammo belt ran out.
As Campbell knelt and reloaded, he saw the rest of his company moving into the hamlet. There were people running away from them, some with hands in the air, and they were easily killed as the troops went house to house and cleared each dwelling of danger.
Campbell turned and saw a soldier he’d had dinner with the night before. The man walked up behind a young Vietnamese woman with an infant in her arms and shot her point-blank through the chest.
By then, some of the huts were burning. The helicopters overhead whipped up the smoke, hurting visibility and casting a dark, eerie shadow over the village. Campbell thought back to what he’d just seen. Or, more precisely, what he thought he’d seen. He couldn’t be so sure anymore.
Campbell stood up and felt the deadly hesitation that Captain Medina had warned them about. He shook it off, assessed the scene again, and continued his advance. The sound of gunfire was dying down, but intermittent shots still echoed throughout the village.
By the time he reached the center of the village it looked like their orders had changed. With Lieutenant Calley directing, a few hundred people had been rounded up and were being marched to the east, toward a long drainage ditch that ran the length of the clearing. When they got there the scene grew still. The Vietnamese stood with their backs to the ditch and a line of soldiers facing them. Morgan Campbell walked over and joined his friends in that line.
Some of the wounded Vietnamese were being dragged to the edge and tossed into the ditch by other soldiers. As those bodies began to stack up, an OH-23 landed nearby, and seconds later, Hugh Thompson walked up in his flight suit and got right into Calley’s face.
“What the hell’s going on here, Lieutenant?” Thompson shouted. Calley outranked him but it looked to Campbell as though military hierarchy was not on Thompson’s mind just then. “These are unarmed civilians; you can see that, can’t you?”
“This is my business,” Calley said. “We’ve got our orders.”
“Orders? Whose orders?”
“I’ve got my orders, Thompson, and you’ve got yours. Intel tags all these people as the enemy—”
“Intel? Tell me, Lieutenant, have you never known intel to be dead wrong before?”
“I told you, I’ve got my orders! Now get the hell out of here so we can damn well do our job!”
“You ain’t heard the last of this,” Thompson spat, heading back for the radio in his aircraft.
When the helicopter had taken off again, Calley walked up to Campbell and the others, and he said, “Now, men, let’s do what we came here to do.”
• • •
More than any other detail in those next minutes, Campbell remembered the feel of pulling the trigger—the unholy ease of it. He hadn’t been the first to start shooting all those people—grandmothers and grandfathers, women and boys and girls, almost no one of fighting age at all—but once he’d brought himself to make that one small motion with his right-hand index finger, the hardest part was behind him. From then on he killed efficiently and without hesitation.
As people died and fell to the ground there was nowhere for the others to run. Many began to jump down into the drainage ditch, some shielding their children with their own bodies. A few started forward, pleading, their arms outstretched as if they could stop the bullets with their hands. They were cut down like all the others.
When his ammo ran out, Campbell knelt to reload, then stood again and stepped to the edge of the ditch to scan for survivors. Each time he saw movement, he fired.
At last the ditch grew quiet; a still sea of arms and legs and bodies and faces with empty, staring eyes. Morgan Campbell looked around when it seemed like it was over and realized he was the only soldier remaining at his post and ready to fire.
It appeared that some of the men had put down their weapons and refused Calley’s orders. Others seemed to have simply fled the area. Another dozen or so were following the lieutenant as he chased a small group of villagers that had somehow been missed in the sweep of the town.
Campbell followed them, watching the pursuit. The survivors ran toward a bunker with the small contingent of Charlie Company in hot pursuit.
Campbell caught up just as the Vietnamese disappeared underground. Calley called out for his grenadiers to advance on the bunker, and that’s when Hugh Thompson landed his helicopter again, right between the soldiers and their unarmed, fleeing prey.
Thompson’s door-gunners unharnessed their machine guns and stepped out, facing their fellow Americans. It was a standoff; neither side took aim, but neither side looked like it was going to back down, either. And then the unarmed pilot walked out between all those guns and made an announcement.
“I’m going to go over to that bunker, now,” Thompson shouted, so all the soldiers could hear him clearly, “and I’m going to fly those civilians out of here myself. And Lieutenant, if you make a move to shoot them or me, by God you’d better be ready to take the consequences!”
Campbell continued to watch as three, then seven, then maybe fifteen people were brought out of the bunker. It was far too many to fit into his helo, but Hugh Thompson wasn’t going to leave anyone behind. He called down a pair of gunships to help ferry the group away.
Then, as he was departing, Thompson made one last pass over the drainage ditch. He hovered low, and Morgan Campbell saw the gunners jump down and wade into all that death and gore to pull a small boy, alive, from the depths of the mountain of bodies.
It wasn’t until that moment that he understood what he had done. What they’d all done.
Campbell dropped to his knees, numb from the realization, gritted his teeth, and grabbed the barrel of his M60 with his bare right hand. The metal was still hot as a branding iron from all the killing he’d done. He held on tight, his skin burning to the bone, until the pain overcame him and finally swept his consciousness away.
Tuttle-Woods Convalescent Home
Camden, New Jersey
March 16, 2008
Except for the storm outside, the room was quiet again. Morgan Campbell had stopped talking, as though he’d reached a moment in the retelling of his past that he didn’t wish to venture beyond.
“And what happened next?” Julia Geller asked.
Campbell blinked a time or two.
“Next?”
“Yes. What happened to everyone?”
The old man answered slowly, as though each detail required a deeper search of his failing memory.
“They covered it up, that’s what happened next. They told us to shut up about My Lai, and then they sent all of us up into the highlands, the real dangerous country. We were up there, cut off from civilization, for fifty-eight days. I don’t think they wanted any of us who’d been part of the mission to ever come back.
“Same for Hugh Thompson. After they debriefed him they sent him out to one of the worst hellholes possible. He was shot down five times. The last crash broke his back. But Hugh had already raised such a stink that they had to investigate. Colonel Henderson handled the job himself. Surprise, surprise, it was a total whitewash. After a month his people issued their verdict: Only twenty civilians had been killed in My Lai that day, not four or five hundred. All twenty had apparently died by accident.
“It took more than a year before the American press got enough real information to take notice, and then
the military finally had to take some real action. The first truth to come out was that our intel for that day had been completely wrong. The morning we came into My Lai the entire Forty-Eighth VC Battalion that we were supposed to wipe out was camped one hundred and fifty miles away.”
“There were trials and convictions,” Julia said. “I remember that much. What happened to everyone?”
“Captain Medina was brought up on charges,” Campbell said, “but F. Lee Bailey did for him what he later helped do for O. J. Simpson, and he got off with hardly a hitch. The heart of his defense was that he’d never given any orders to kill civilians.
“Calley was found guilty on twenty-two counts of premeditated murder and it caused an uproar among some. Jimmy Carter was the governor of Georgia at the time and he asked people to drive with their lights on for a week in protest of the verdict. George Wallace flew up from Alabama to visit Calley in the stockade and petition for a presidential pardon. State legislatures across the country made resolutions and requests for clemency.
“They handed down a life sentence for Calley, but a few days later Nixon intervened on his behalf and had him transferred to Fort Benning for a term of house arrest in a two-bedroom apartment. Three years later he was released for time served.
“I’m not sure if anyone was ever punished, not really—except for Hugh Thompson. Some congressman tried to get him court-martialed. He held a press conference and said that Hugh Thompson was the only one at My Lai that day who should be charged with a crime. Hugh got death threats and hate mail, and people drove by and threw dead animals onto his front porch.
It was thirty years before anyone in power ever bothered to officially call Hugh Thompson a hero and a patriot for what he did. In 1998 they gave him and his crew the Soldier’s Medal. That’s the highest award the U.S. Army can give for bravery in action not involving direct contact with the enemy.”
“And what about you?” Julia asked quietly.