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Ron Ridenhour describes how he first heard of My Lai

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Ronald Ridenhour
Freelance journalist Ronald Ridenhour was an army veteran who had trained with the soldiers of Charlie Company, Lt. William Calley's unit, when they were stationed in Hawaii. Months after the My Lai massacre, Ridenhour first learned about the incident during a conversation he had with a friend of his who was a member of Charlie Company. Outraged, he conducted his own year-long investigation where he found that many soldiers supported the allegations that over 100 innocent civilians were murdered by Charlie Company. Ridenhour's subsequent letter about his findings, which was sent to President Richard Nixon, several Congressmen, and the Army, sparked the investigation into Lt. Calley that ultimately led to his court martial.

I went to Vietnam in December of 1967. For three months before that, I trained in Hawaii as part of the 11th Infantry Brigade with a very small special unit called Long Range Reconnaisance Patrol. We were to be the detachment, the alert detachment, for the 11th Brigade. But about a week before the unit shipped to Vietnam, the high command decided that the 11th Brigade infantry units were under strength. So they cannibalized a lot of the smaller units in the Brigade, and ours was one of those. We had about thirty enlisted men, half a dozen enlisted men went off with Charlie Company first the 20th, Lieutenant Calley's company.

The place that we now know as My Lai was known to soldiers in Vietnam at the time as Pinkville. It was called that, in part, because urban areas were all colored pink on military maps. This particular area was called Pinkville, in part, because it was an area that was known to be . . . have a lot of NVA, or should I saw Viet Cong activity. It was considered to be hot, and so we called it Pinkville. It was only after the investigation got started and, in fact, after the event became public knowledge, that I learned that its actual name was My Lai.

I discovered that so had several of the people I had known in Hawaii who had gone to Charlie Company first the 20th, also were at that time transferring to the Division Alert Company. So, of course, we rendezvoused and we talked to each other. The first thing, when I ran into one of these guys, I said, you know, "Hey, what have you guys been doing?" And he tells me this story about, you know, we were catching up with each other. He tells me this story about Pinkville and what they had done in Pinkville. And, he sits down with me and we have a beer, and he says, "Hey man, did you hear what we did in Pinkville?" And I said, "No, what did you do in Pinkville?" I had been up there a couple of times, as a door gunner, and had been in engagements around the village. I said, "What'd you do in Pinkville?" He said, "Well, we went in there and lined up all these people and massacred 'em - massacred a whole village." And, I knew this story was true the moment it came out of his mouth - I just knew it was. And I asked him about it, I inquired more, and he told me some of the details. I knew that I was on my was to the Division Alert Company, and that some of my friends who I had been with in Hawaii, and even before that, in training, were also there, who had been at Charlie Company, and I would be able to inquire of them and find out if they told the same story, or about the same story as this guy. And sure enough, they did.

Each infantry division has an historical office. You can go in there and look and see. They have reports of their battles, that kind of thing. They had such a report on the event at My Lai - which we called Pinkville. I looked it up, found it, was able to get the grid coordinates of the village, kind of the official military story on what happened there so that I was able to include those details when I finally did report it. And, collected this information and came home, uh, really angry and disturbed and determined to report this, but without really a clue about how that would occur, you know, what the mechanics of it would be, how things would work.

And so, I wrote this letter, which was long, about three pages long, legal-spaced pages - legal-sized pages long, and it was very specific and detailed and that, I think, is what caused people to act on it, because it was so specific. I think people looked at it and said, "Whew . . Oh, my god, this can't be true. But, if it is true, we can certainly see, because the information is here that will allow us to determine whether it was true - to check."

I think the mood in the country was right at the time for people who receive such a letter to think that it could be true and, even if it wasn't true, that they should investigate it and check it out. I think that was really a critical factor in making all this happen.

I sent out the letter at the end of March, 1969, and they sent - the Pentagon sent and investigator from the Inspector General's office to interview me at the end of April, 1969, and their investigation went forward from there.

And so, I began to call them and just, you know, and just be a real pain in the butt. I continued to do that throughout the summer. And finally, they arrested Calley in September of '69, and they called me and they were very, sort of, proud, you know. "Well, we've arrested Calley." And I said, "That's fine. When are you going to arrest the rest of the officers, arrest and charge the rest of the officers in the chain of command?"

This was an operation. If you read the letter of complaint that I wrote, even today you can see that the notion that this was an operation and not and aberration, not the act of a single man, Lieutenant Calley, who goes crazy, that is not what happened. This was an operation, and it was clear from the context of the letter that this was and operation that came from . . . the orders came down from on high, and that that was what I was complaining about and seeking to have investigated. And what happened instead, of course, is that Lieutenant Calley, while he is culpable for serious crimes, and should have been tried for them, was - became the scapegoat, and was made to carry the load for the entire event

Calley turned out to be the only who was charged initially. And I knew that Calley was not the only one who was culpable - that there were officers from all levels of the chain of command present in the village that morning. Not only on the ground, but there were three helicopter loads of officers who were flying overhead that morning.

They were at the village for all - for much of the morning overhead. And certainly you can see, even from 1500 feet, the difference between adults and children. You can see that there are clumps of bodies, and they knew what was going on. This was not an aberration, this was something that was intended to happen by the high command, for purposes which have never been fully explained, because the basic issue has never been addressed, and that is that this was an operation rather than an aberration, and not the act of Lieutenant Calley.

One of the people who was - who I had served with in Hawaii, and who then got transferred Lieutenant Calley's platoon, was a fellow by the name of Mike Terry. He and I had been drafted together on the same day, we got through basic training together, we went through advanced infantry training together, we went through jump school together, we volunteered and were accepted to Special Forces together

In the village, on the morning of the massacre, he and another good friend, at the end of the morning - the massacre began at about 7:30 in the morning and the shooting apparently stopped a little after 11:00. About that time, my two friends sat down to have lunch, and they sat down not far from where the ditch was where Lieutenant Calley had lined up - the official count is, I believe, 93; I'm told by everybody who was there that there were at least a couple hundred people in that ditch. But, whatever the number, there were a lot of people in the ditch. But they weren't all dead yet. They were, most of them, mortally wounded, but not yet dead. And people who are mortally wounded, but not dead, make, well, just all kinds of racket, you know, I mean, the dying is hard. People give up life reluctantly. And so these people were in the ditch and they were moaning and groaning. Their limbs were flopping around spasmodically. And these guys, in the middle of their lunch, decided that there was no help for these people, that they needed to do something about it. And so, the two of them stood up with their M16's, walked over to the ditch, walked up and down the ditch one time and finished off all the survivors. Went back and sat down and finished their lunch. This was, to me, the most extraordinary and stunning news. I couldn't believe that Mike would be involved in something like this, even from the context that, in his perspective these were mercy killings. I just . . . It was hard to believe.

I don't think they became significantly differently people. I think they were simply people who were, you know, contrary to the vision that the military has of Charlie Company, that they were poorly disciplined, I think that what occurred at My Lai shows that they were highly disciplined, that they, in fact . . . in fact carried out orders that were against their grain, and that they, many of them, felt were wrong. They carried out those orders anyway, most of them. And that shows to me that they were disciplined rather than ill disciplined. The ill-disciplined theory comes about with part of the bogus notion that this was an . . . aberration, something that just sort of occurred spontaneously. It didn't occur spontaneously, it was part of a military operation, it was a plan. And they followed their orders. Should they have fought and not followed their orders? Well, there were probably ten or twelve there that refused to participate and, yeah, they shouldn't have followed those orders.

On the evening before the massacre, Captain Medina convened the entire company, brought all the men together, and gave them a little war speech, a little preparation, a little prep speech for what they were about to do the next day. And he told them that they were going to go into a village that was heavily . . . a heavy VC village, and that when they left that village the next day, he didn't want to see anything walking, standing or growing. And that's what they did. They went in and killed everybody.

Calley was eventually charged, was charged and eventually tried and convicted - as he should have been. He was guilty of, culpable of, serious crimes at My Lai, but he was not the only one. If it had been up to Lieutenant Calley, this event would not have occurred. This was not something that was organized by Lieutenant Calley, at Lieutenant Calley's initiation. It was something that was organized by other people. He carried out their orders, and when, he should have been one of many people charged.

If you ask most people today, who were politically conscious at the time, who still remember My Lai and even know what it is, if you ask them what occurred there, most of them would say, "Oh yeah, isn't that where that guy, the Lieutenant Something, something or other, I don't remember his, Kelly, Calley, something like that, isn't that where he went crazy and killed all those people." The answer is, no, not really. What Calley did was over-enthusiastic, was overzealous in the end, conduct, his conduct that day, but there were three other lieutenants on the ground that day and there was another officer, a captain, and there were officers in the air all over the place. This was a joint operation - this was an operation, not an aberration. And that's the lesson that was not learned about Vietnam, and that is that what happened at My Lai was a very direct reflection of policy there.

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