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interviews William Eckhardt
William Eckhardt is the former Army prosecutor who led the series of prosecutions related to My Lai. He examined much of the evidence that General William Peers gathered from his investigation into the My Lai massacre, and coordinated the cases against Calley, Medina and the others who were investigated as part of the My Lai probe.

Soldiers are two things, they are guardians of freedom, they are guardians of liberty, they are peace makers and peace keepers, they have a connotation of protector just like policeman. If a protector turns predator, he violates certain laws.

I think that one's vision of what one does and ones training is what influences them. If you are a policeman and the analogy of a policeman shooting a prisoner in the back of his car, that is just criminal conduct and is outside of what policeman do. What you expect is that the Uniform Code of Military Justice not only deters conduct but also articulates itself to encourage expected conduct. We expect people not to murder, not to rape, not to loot, not to steal, we expect soldiers to protect.

But for pity's sake, although society doesn't run around with the law in neon lights flashing it, I think that war organizes itself around what the expected rules are and I think that is what you could expect a soldier to do. When he puts on the uniform of this country then he becomes a protector or a defender willing to lay down his life for others and he behaves in a certain way like a judge behaves a certain way when he puts on a piece of cloth or that a minister behaves when he puts on a piece of cloth, and we expect them to behave in that way because that is the role that they have.

It came as a shock that one would have to stand in front of American soldiers and say that you are not to kill babies, you do not kill unprotected women, you do not violate unprotected women, that was just almost unthinkable before. What My Lai did, we lost our innocence and we learned that yes one had to do that.

In this particular war, it was complicated because of the policies that ensured that the brightest and the best weren't on the battle field. The brightest and the best got educational deferments. The consequence of that are your My Lai's.

The honor of the US was at stake when Lt. Calley was charged. The mood of the people was certainly not in favor of prosecution. The executive was luke warm at best and by the latter part, hostile. Congress decided that it did not want to see prosecution and many of its members attempted to see that there was no prosecution. I think that the record needs to record that it was the back bone of the Army that stood up and said that this is wrong and that you have to label it as wrong and the only way that you do that is to do what you do in other circumstances when you have credible evidence of criminal action, you charge it and you prosecute it and that is exactly what was done.

The cover up, in fact, did occur. It caused the Calley trial to take place years later in the US rather than in Vietnam, but that cover up, I have never seen any evidence that it ever went any higher than the division level, and I think that is important. The most remarkable thing in this particular instance is that only the US would not have covered up, that the institution did not allow this to be covered up, prosecuted it at the cost of losing a war and then used the lesson to educate others s to the way rules are implemented on the battlefield to be sure that nothing like that would ever happen again.

Ron Ridenhour's letter should be studied because it is the classic way citizens communicate with their government. I hope that the government always takes action when it gets those sorts of letters. I have been involved as a lawyer in many organizations that had similar methods for citizens to complain and I am amazed at how well those lines of communication often work.

I can still remember the afternoon that I examined the evidence for the first time in this incident. I had been in Vietnam and had prosecuted cases, nothing like this. I remember sitting and reading documents for about two hours and I was so disgusted that I threw the papers against the wall and left the office and went and ran about 5 - 6 miles. I reported that night that by what I had read that there was absolutely no doubt that an incident had taken place, that there was absolutely no doubt that there would be trials, but that the US would have a difficult time establishing those cases in view of the passage of time and the availability of "court room" type evidence and that I felt that it was imperative that the US declare such conduct to be illegal and immoral and to proceed.

Prosecutors must rely upon the people that they serve to come forward and to tell the truth. Peer pressure needs to be on the side of the truth tellers to see that justice is done and that simply was not true in this instance. Time after time witnesses were encouraged and applauded if they did not remember, if they lied and did not remember, to violate court orders, conduct which is outrageous across the board.

Not only do soldiers, when they commit crimes, commit personal crimes , when they act in the name of us all, they commit crimes for us all don't they. So how in the world can we hold somebody like Lt. Calley responsible, we sent him there didn't we, as the argument goes. Of course the other side of that is no accountability at all which is equally as outrageous. I think that what the American people seek is that the men who wear uniforms do not cease to be moral, accountable human beings and we expect them to do under the most horrific of circumstances, the right thing. The right thing is never to kill a defenseless baby, or to line hundreds of people up in a ditch and shoot them especially when there is no resistance.

The evidence that I saw shows that Capt. Medina on the evening of 15 March gathered his company together for a pep talk. There is no doubt about that. They were going to meet substantial resistance and he was trying to prepare them psychologically to do so. Part of that pep talk contained portions of the order that he gave to poison the wells with the livestock that had been killed. My concern came with what did he say or do in relationship to unresisting non-combatants. Was an order given to kill unresisting, unarmed non-combatants? As a prosecutor, the first thing that I noticed when I examined this evidence was that first, not everyone participated. 30% of the soldiers actually did what was done at My Lai.

Of all of those that were charged with killing, all of them said that they were given an order to do so. It seems strange that of those that did not kill no one said that they received such an order. I find that strange.

It is thought that Lt. Calley himself, through his actions and orders may have killed as many as 250 people. He was charged with killing at least 102 and the jury felt that beyond a reasonable doubt that he killed at least 22. Those are the numbers that are involved in this particular situation, making it perhaps the worst tragedy in American military history.

Hugh Thompson in my judgment is a hero from My Lai. If Lt. Calley is the villain then Hugh Thompson is the hero. Hugh Thompson was a warrant officer and was doing what he was supposed to be doing and one day he was flying and he sees things that aren't happening correctly on the ground, he is disturbed by this and he lands. He is so disturbed by what he sees that he has his door gunners point their door guns at Lt. Calley and he says that if you shoot another Vietnamese, I am going to shoot you.

Thompson gets out of his helicopter and goes into a ditch filled with body and gore and he finds a child that had been wounded but was not dead. He did what you would expect, he put that child into the helicopter and he took that child to the hospital. He went back to his landing spot, pounded the tail with his fist and hollered stop the killing. He protested and did exactly what one would expect. After the story broke, he told that same story, but - - - Rivers took Thompson to the front of the capital, to the front of the press, to the front of the US and tried to brow beat him within an inch of his life.

I don't know what interest there was in the White House. The only thing that I know is that when Calley was convicted, that the President of the US Richard Nixon made certain statements, responded to in magnificent fashion by the prosecutor, Aubrey Daniel -- an army officer in uniform -- how shall I say it, chastising the President for his inappropriate conduct and doing so in writing and doing so respectfully and accurately and wonderfully. It is one of the events in this particular incident that will always stick with me.

I am told that prior to going into battle in the Gulf War...major generals, division commanders with their brigade commanders gathered around them -- one of the last words out of their mouths before they went into battle -- they looked into their eyes and said, "No My Lais in this division, do you hear me?" What are they saying? That we expect professional conduct on the battle field. Never let that happen again, if the legacy of that comes from the prosecution from My Lai, then justice will be immensely served.

Some say that Calley was a scapegoat, but it is hard when one kills 250 people with his own orders or his own hands to say that one is a scapegoat. That is a little hard. He was the only one that was convicted. The proof was so difficult that I am surprised that the government convicted him of killing 22. To get 22 out of 250 he allowed the government a better odds than most but to say that he was a scapegoat I don't think necessarily follows that.

The commuting of Calley's sentence did not bother me nearly as much as his failure to serve prison time.
the INCIDENT the TRIAL the AFTERMATH

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