Hugh Thompson and his two man crew were flying their small observation helicopter on a routine mission in a sector of Vietnam called My Lai 4. As they approached the village called Song My, he could see Charlie Company (1st Battalion, 20th Infantry) down below. Then he began seeing wounded and dead Vietnamese all over the hamlet, with no sign of an enemy force.
The pilot thought that the best thing he could do would be to mark the location of wounded civilians with smoke so that the GIs on the ground could move over and begin treating some of them. "The first one that I marked was a girl that was wounded." Thompson later testified, "and they came over and walked up to her, put their weapon on automatic and let her have it." The man who did the shooting was a captain, Thompson said. Later he identified the officer as Ernest Medina.
Flying with Thompson that day was Larry Colburn, of Mount Vernon, WA. He remembered that the girl was about 20 years old and was lying on the edge of a dike outside the hamlet with part of her body in a rice paddy. "She had been wounded in the stomach, I think, or the chest," Colburn told the Inspector General. "This captain was coming down the dike and he had men behind him. They were sweeping through and we were hovering a matter of feet away from them. I could see this clearly, and he emptied a clip into her."
Pilot Hugh Thompson and his helicopter crew's nightmare had only begun with the shooting of the girl. He flew north back over the hamlet and saw a small boy bleeding along a trench. Again he marked the spot so the GIs below could provide medical aid. Instead, he saw a lieutenant casually walk up and empty a clip into the child. He saw another wounded youngster: again he marked it, and this time it was a sergeant who came up and fired his M16 at the child. Larry Colburn, who was just 18 years old at the time, noticed that "the infantrymen were killing everything in the village. The people didn't really know what was happening."
Thompson was furious. He tried unsuccessfully to radio the troops on the ground to find out what was going on. He then reported the wild firings and unnecessary shootings to brigade headquarters.
There were over 300 dead already. Harry Stanley, one of the infantrymen on the ground tells what happened next: "There was an old lady in a bed and I believe there was a priest in white praying over her...Lt. Calley told me to ask about the VC and NVA and where the weapons were. The priest denied being a VC or NVA." Calley pulled the old man outside: "He said a few more words to the monk. It looked like the monk was pleading for his life. Lt. Calley then took his rifle and pushed the monk into a rice paddy and shot him point-blank." Calley then turned his attention to the crowd of Vietnamese and issued an order: "Push all those people in the ditch." Three or four GIs complied. Calley struck a woman with a rifle as he pushed her down. Calley began shooting and ordered the others to join in. One of the GIs who did told about it later. "So we pushed our seven to eight people in with the big bunch of them. And so I began shooting them all. I guess I shot maybe 25 or 20 people in the ditch...men, women, and children. And babies." Some of the GIs switched from automatic to single-shot to conserve ammo.
Other GIs had a different reaction. Herbert Carter watched the mothers "grabbing their kids and the kids grabbing their mothers. I didn't know what to do." Another GI began arguing with Calley. Another began to sob. Calley turned to Robert Maples and said, "Maples, load your machine gun and shoot these people." Maples replied "I'm not going to do that."
Moments later Thompson, still in his helicopter, flew by. "I kept flying around and across a ditch...and it...had a bunch of bodies in it and I don't know how they got in the ditch. But I saw some of them were still alive." By now Thompson was almost frantic. He landed his small helicopter near the ditch, and asked a soldier there if he could help the people out: "He said the only way he could help them was to help them out of their misery." Thompson took off again and noticed a group of mostly women and children huddled together in a bunker near the drainage ditch. He landed a second time. "I don't know, maybe it was just my belief, but I hadn't been shot at the whole time I had been there and the gunships following hadn't." He saw Lt. Calley. "I asked him if he could get the women and kids out of there before they tore it up, and he said the only way he could get them out was to use hand grenades. "You just hold your men right here." the angry Thompson told the equally angry Calley, "and I will get the women and kids out."
Before climbing out of his aircraft, Thompson ordered Colburn and the other crewman to stay alert. "He told us that if any of the Americans opened up on the Vietnamese, we should open up on the Americans," Colburn said. Thompson walked back to the ship and called in two helicopter gunships to rescue the civilians. Colburn recalled that while Thompson was waiting for them to land, "he stood between our troops and the bunker. He was shielding those people with his body. He just wanted to get those people out of there." The helicopters landed, with Thompson still standing between the GIs and the Vietnamese, and quickly rescued nine persons-two old men, two women and five children.
Thompson and Colburn took off in their helicopter and Calley-apparently furious with Thompson's intervention-ordered his men to begin firing into the ditch to make sure there were no survivors. Calley told a squad leader to gather his team to do the job. "I really believe he expected me to do it," the team leader said. When he refused, Calley angrily ordered him to take his team and help burn the hootches. They headed for the hamlet plaza instead.
The helicopter landed again at the ditch when the crew chief noticed some movement among the mass of bodies and blood below. The crew chief and Colburn got out and walked toward the ditch. They found a young child still alive. The crew chief climbed into the ditch. "He was knee-deep in people and blood." Colburn recalled. The child was buried under many bodies, still holding on to his dead mother. Amazingly, this child was not even wounded-just down there among all the other bodies and terrified. Thompson and his men flew the baby to safety.
By now it was nearly 10:30 in the morning and most of the company began drifting aimlessly toward the plaza. The villagers "were just laying around like ants. It was just like somebody had poisoned the water and everybody took a drink and started falling out." Herb Carter had shed his gear and was taking a break. Near by was a Vietnamese boy, crying, with a bullet wound in his stomach. A radio operator for the Captain walked by and asked Carter "Let me see your pistol." Carter gave it to him and the radio operator "then stepped within two feet of the boy and shot him in the neck. Blood gushed from the child's neck. He tried to walk off, but he could only take two or three steps. Then he fell onto the ground. He lay there and took four or five deep breaths and then he stopped breathing," recounted another GI who was with Carter.
Carter got his pistol back and turned to his partner and said, "I can't take this no more..." Moments later the GI heard a gun go off and Carter yell. "I went to Carter and saw he had shot himself in the foot. I think Carter shot himself on purpose."
Another GI summarized the day: "We met no resistance and I only saw three captured weapons. We had no casualties. It was just like any other Vietnamese village-old papa-sans, women and kids. As a matter of fact, I don't remember seeing one military-age male in the entire place, dead or alive. The only prisoner I saw was in his fifties."
The platoons pulled out shortly after noon, ransacking and burning as they went. By nightfall the Viet Cong were back in My Lai 4, helping the survivors bury the dead. It took five days to bury the 450 to 500 people who were slain that morning. Nguyen Bat was not a Communist at the time of the massacre, but the incident changed his mind. "After the shooting," he said, "all the villagers became communists."
The My Lai massacre occurred March 16, 1968. Formal complaints by Thompson resulted in official investigations that showed there had been nothing out of the ordinary that day. It was a year and a half later before any of the American public knew anything had happened, and that because of the persistent efforts of now-discharged GIs who refused to let the story die.
In his book Flower of the Dragon, Richard Boyle, a free-lance journalist who went to My Lai to investigate the massacre, says: "My Lai was not the act of one man. It was not the act of one platoon, or one company. It was the result of an ordered, planned and well-conducted campaign conceived at high command levels to teach a lesson to the villagers of Quang Ngai province.
"The killing, of course, is part of a definite political strategy, a strategy usually described as the 'pacification' of Vietnamese villagers. In his book The Betrayal, Lt. Col. William R. Corson, an ex-Marine who had been in charge of pacification teams, describes the pacification program in a DMZ village complex: 'We had conspired with the government of South Vietnam to literally destroy the hopes, aspirations and emotional stability of thirteen thousand human beings....This was not war it is genocide....'."
Boyle writes: "When I was about eight I used to ask my father what he'd been doing when Hitler rose to power, and he would reply that he'd been too busy trying to earn a living to pay attention. My mother would add that people didn't know what was going on in Germany.
"Now my father's generation shakes its head in dismay and wonders out loud how my generation could turn away from those values which 'made America great.' But they never told us that genocide was an old American habit, that U.S. soldiers scalped hundreds of Indian women and children at Sand Creek and held up their scalps at the Salt Lake City opera house; that hundreds more defenseless Indians were gunned down at Wounded Knee, that General Jake Smith ordered the massacre of 8,294 children, 2,714 women and 420 men on the island of Samar during the American occupation of the Philippines in 1901.
"For me and for millions of my generation My Lai came as the final punch in the mouth, the end of our illusions. We could no longer say we didn't know. The day we learned of My Lai changed our lives."