The military in '68/'69 was remember that this was a major buildup of American forces, we ere at the peak of build up at that point in Vietnam. Approximately 500,000 - 600,000 soldiers all serving a year if they lasted that long in country and then they went back to the world as they called it. Young, not terribly well educated, most of them.
Theoretically they were in Vietnam to protect the people of Vietnam and yet by '68, most soldiers looked at the Vietnamese as the enemy and not as the people that they were there to protect. It was an impossible situation, casualties were very heavy and especially among 1st and 2nd lieutenant. For officers, being in combat was a way to get a promotion, many lieutenants served 6 months if they lasted that long. They were not that well trained. Soldiers were there for a year, frequently you had a change in officers half way to the term, which did not lead to very great confidence in the officer or morale.
[Calley] enlisted and there he was, the first thing that they did was to make him a clerk, which was just fine and he managed to do it. But there was this crying need for officers and they looked at his record and saw that he had graduated high school and that he had even had a little bit of college and they decided to make him a LT in the infantry. He graduated from OCS near the bottom of his class which didn't phase the Army at all and they shipped him off to Hawaii and he was assigned to Company C, Americal Division and became the leader of the 1st. platoon.
How do you show that you are making progress, how do you show that you declare a victory when you are really fighting an unseen enemy? There are two ways. One is captured weapons, how many captured weapons did you get. We never got very many captured weapons. The other is to count bodies. Deal out casualties to the other side. After an engagement there would counting of the bodies that were there. The general tendency was to kind of multiply the number so that it looked like you killed more people than you really had.
My Lai, when they tried to get the body count, they came up with 150 I think at one point, it kept changing, but nobody had an exact idea except LT. Jeffrey LaCrosse who knew that his guys had killed 6 people, and that was it and they had been off in another area. So they just figured out that Calley, you take 50 and you take 50 and you take 50 until we got to 150 - 200 casualties. Then at one point it came down to 106. Calley took 50 and 2nd platoon took 50 and Lacrosse wouldn't let them take more than 6. Again this is body, if they really wanted to do a body count at My Lai, they would have come up with around 500. But then someone would have started to ask questions about babies, women and old men and it doesn't look so good.
Not much would have been known about My Lai except for the verbal descriptions by the guys who couldn't stand what had happened, but there was an army photographer on the scene there by the name of Haberle. He had three cameras with him, two were his own with color film and the other was an army camera with black and white film. He came in and wondered through the village and came to this crossroads and saw this mass of bodies laying and he took his color camera and took pictures of the bodies. With the army camera he took pictures of soldiers torching the hooch , posing here and posing there. His color camera was of the actual scene of dead bodies. This was a major piece of evidence in the trial. I remember one of the jurors, a Capt. Brown mentioned said that they sat there and they tried to count all of the number of bodies and he said that they couldn't come up with the number of bodies. He said that they couldn't come up with more than 25, the army had said something like 28 at that point in time. Some of them were babies laying under their mothers, but one thing was clear. That is that they were all either old men, women or children. There were no young men, no weapons, the bodies were piled up. If you look at the picture, what goes through your mind is the memory of the pictures that were taken during WW2 with the Germans massacring people in a village and just piling them up in the ditches.
The US public was very strange. It seems to me that people didn't want to believe it, but here you had the evidence. American soldiers don't do this, that it was an aberration. But then there was that is what is happening in Vietnam, everyone is doing it. There was a justification for it. The reaction was initially one of disbelief that you have to believe. The pictures appeared in Life magazine and there was absolute evidence that this had happened and it was something that had not been done by gun ships or by bombs because if you looked at those pictures you could see that there were small arms wounds.
There were a lot of questions as to if charges would even be brought, but I think that Army figured that they just could not ignore what happened. The could not ignore what Hersh discovered in his going around and what I had discovered in Vietnam. Hersh had wrote a book, I had wrote a book. Stuff was coming the papers so the Army had to do something. If the Army ignored it then the Army was saying that this was all right. So the Army could not ignore it and charges were brought against individual soldiers, against individual officers, against Capt. Medina, against Lt. Calley and on up the chain on up to Gen. Koster who was the commander of the Americal Division at that point.
What was at stake was the reputation of the Army, the reputation of the country. How would we have felt at the end of WW2 when Nazi troops massacred American troops, and they were American troops in Belgium? How would we feel if the Nazi troops who destroyed Mamendi and other towns, wiped them out, were let off with well, that is what happens? The American public would have gone bananas. So the Army was saving itself saying yes, it would try to prosecute those who committed a major atrocity so charges were brought against all of these people. Later mainly against just Calley and Medina.
I doubt that the military was really surprised by the influx of reporters and the begging for seats. There was a sense of anticipation that base and a feeling of dread on that base. You could feel among those of us that were covering the trial. There was a sense of , "how far are they going to go?", "where are they going to go and where are they going to take us?" and the most compelling question was if you believe Calley did what he was charged with doing, will the military convict one of its own?"
There were stories in the paper every single day. I wrote pieces for the Times, every Sunday in the week in review section, I had storied in the Times. The atmosphere initially was charged, then you ran into the dry stretches where if you hear the same stories about a massacre or variations of the same story about a massacre in vivid detail, how many times do you have to see a dead body before the dead body loses its impact? Then there were always at some point something would happen and you would sit up. One of Calley's defenses was that everyone did it, that was one of the things that his lawyers were saying, that was one of things that was being fed to the country by his side and a lot of people believed, was that everybody did it.
The Vietnamese survivors who had left that morning to go the markets either in the west or the east came back and found all of their family and friends dead or wounded, estimated to me that there were at least 500 who had lost their lives at the ditch, at the crossroads and in hooches that were burned. There was nothing left standing, there wasn't a house left, an animal left or a person left standing. The only thing that can come to mind when we hear of this are the stories of the Germans in the Ukraine and in Russia herding the Jews to the ditches on the outskirts and shooting them.
The Army's case was handled by a brilliant, a really brilliant young lawyer named Aubrey Daniel. Like most guys in JAG, he was serving out his few years in the Army before he went into private practice. He was the guy who was selected to handle the prosecution, nobody knew what he was capable of. He made the determination which was the correct one that he was not going to try the war which is what some people wanted him to do. There was no chance to try the war, he was not going to try Johnson, Nixon, Westmoreland, McNamara or Kissinger. He is going to try the one guy that he has been given the job of prosecuting. He is going to stick to Calley. In his presumption, which is my presumption as well, is that every man is responsible for what he does. You can make any defense, but in the end you are responsible for what you do. You will pay the penalty or reap the reward of your actions. You cannot turn in to someone else.
People would say that [Calley] was convicted of only 22 murders and it was not that he was convicted of 22 murders. It was that he was convicted of the murder of not less 22. The prosecution was extremely masterful, [prosecutor Aubrey] Daniel became increasingly passionate, he had the evidence, he had his case and he wanted to make sure that American soldiers don't do this. This is not what a human being does.
[The defense] did not have a case. [Defense attorney Kenneth] Raby tried to make the case but they didn't. At one point Lattimer said that he did not know what Calley had really done, he did not know what Calley's story was. Every time that Calley had tried to tell him what had happened, he said , "Don't tell me, don't tell me, I really don't want to know." What kind of a lawyer doesn't want to know? So when Lt. Calley took the stand it surprised everyone, because he lied.
The defense strategy, if there was any strategy, boggles my mind. On the one level was Calley's testimony. On another was that he was just following orders. On another level it was that he was suffering from combat fatigue. Where was it going, what was it, I couldn't figure it out.
Daniel had the last word and it was one of the more emotional things that I have heard in a courtroom: Yes others are to blame, but who killed more? Yes, others are to blame, but isn't every man responsible for his own acts? You men on the jury have to decide, you have to decided upon the basis of the evidence, you have to do your duty as he didn't do his duty.
At the end of the court martial, I had a very strange feeling . Calley had become a hero to a lot of people. I remember outside the courthouse, people standing with signs: "We are with you, Rusty," "You should get a medal." What about the guys who didn't do anything? What about all of the soldiers in Vietnam who didn't do anything? What about the fine 6 men who were on the military jury who found him guilty who did their duty? A hero was made out of a guy who committed a heinous crime, whether he was acting under orders or not, and there certainly are some questions as to whether he was acting under orders or not. There is the reasonable man argument. A reasonable man knows that he does not kill children, but he did. Yet he became the hero and the villains were Aubrey Daniel who prosecuted the case, Judge Kennedy, the members of the jury, the guys who testified, I could not believe it. President Nixon intervened to commute his sentence, he shouldn't go to Ft. Leavenworth, he should be under house arrest and then his sentence was ended, he was free. What about the people who acted like human beings? To me, I still do not find it understandable. The victim is his own murderer, the victim is to blame.
Richard Hammer
Richard Hammer is the author of The Court-Martial of Lt. William Calley. Originally a reporter for the New York Times covering Vietnam, he has written extensively about the war there and the investigation into My Lai.
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