Greatest Trials of All Time

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Interview

interviews Fred Widmer
Fred Widmer was the radio operator for Charlie Company. He not only witnessed the My Lai massacre, but trained with Calley and served alongside him. He was trained in conventional warfare and was prepared for battle in Vietnam alongside Calley in Hawaii. Like many others who served under Calley, he gained distinct impressions of the young lieutenant, and as the radio operator for Capt. Ernest Medina, he was intimately familiar with the details of My Lai and both mens' involvement.

I joined Charlie Company after my final AIT training at Ft Ord, CA which would have been the beginning of summer, 1967.

In the beginning everybody was new so it was like going to a new school, you started to make friends with everyone and being together, we were together approximately 9 months, so everybody got to know everyone quite well. Pretty much everyone was congealed as a group and not as individuals.

Our training was basic routine, general training just like you would have had in basic and AIT training. Then we got into specialized training, mainly jungle type training since Hawaii was conducive to that environment.

There was a rivalry between the different companies in the battalion. Charlie Company strove to be the best and we were the best. Because of that fact we were chosen as Advance Party for the rest of the battalion on our trip to Nam when we first set off.

We were all pushing 19 or 20, that was about the maximum. The old timers of course were older but everyone else was young. Late teens early twenties.

My friends' faith in Lt. Calley as a platoon leader was somewhat diminished by some of his actions out in the field in training, with getting lost, not being able to read a map correctly, some instances like that, diminishes your faith in that individual.

You grew up with images of Korea and WWI and WWII and that is basically what you have in the back of your mind, but once you get there, it's a completely different war than what you anticipated and even the returning veterans try to tell us what it was like over there and you just could not comprehend what they were trying to tell you until you got there. It was completely different. You're not facing an enemy wearing uniforms. You don't know who's who. You're fighting a guerrilla war using conventional warfare tactics, which doesn't work, so we walked into a real hornet's nest.

It's not that the training didn't prepare us, because it did for the jungle type warfare which we were going to be involved in, and working in the jungle environment. It's just that the way that you're going to face your enemy with snipers and booby traps, individuals versus a company or platoon or squad, that's what we were not prepared for, and we really did not grasp and comprehend until we got in country and got involved in incidents, then we discovered where we lacked in our training.

As a unit, we flew out of Hawaii, they had a big send-off for us, they had a band down there and everybody came down to see us off, we all loaded on a jet, and the next day we were in Vietnam.

I remember very well the flight over, getting in country, and one of my recollections is the stewardesses (as we flew civilian airlines), the stewardesses were all standing at the doors crying as we left. We got off the plane and that's one of the things that sticks with me, because you begin to wonder and think, what am I really getting into?

When we first arrived in country and set up and started pulling patrols, our basic role at that point in time was local patrol duty, perimeter guard, and going out with the medical units into the villages to help the people, and basically keep guard around the villages while the medics and doctors helped treat people for any of the ailments and go over and give them physicals, anything we could do to help the people.

We were told that there were Viet Cong guerrillas in the area, that was it. There were no hard core NVA [North Vietnamese Army] in the area at that point in time, but there were guerrillas, and that is basically why we went and set up the perimeters around these villages while the medics went in and took care of the people.

My role within the company was a radio operator for Capt. Medina. I carried one of the two radios within the headquarters company. He had two RPO's - one carried the battalion and one carried the company radio.

From the pictures, you could tell that in the beginning, you tried to be friendly with the people, you were in a new country, you didn't know who was who. The people were new, the way of life was new, their lifestyle was completely different from what you would expect, and it was like taking a step back in time because they don't have all the modern conveniences like we were used to, you know, have a house with a car in the driveway, a TV, refrigerator, those were all luxuries that they didn't have.

With the villagers, you go in and pull a med-cap on a village and the kids would come over, you would give them candy or whatever you could give them out of your C-rations pack and since we had excess candy bars and everything, they liked American chocolate, just like any other kid, and chewing gum, and we always used to give it to them and they enjoyed it. They were our friends and we were friendly with them. That was one of the carryovers that you always saw from the other wars - the GI's were always friendly to the kids.

My personal concerns on these earlier along with the other members of the company were basically the same. You were starting to take casualties, you were starting to take losses, but you had no enemy to confront. This was the Vietnam War. This was the way it was fought. It began to take its toll on the members of the company. It became very frustrating. You would go out and come back in off of patrol and you have one more killed and one or two wounded mostly by booby traps. There was no one to fight, there was no enemy there, but you were still taking losses. It began to take its toll on the members of the company, from Capt. Dean on down the line.

We ran into booby traps. Anything from small land mines, personnel land mines, to bouncing betties which were the ones that popped up out of the ground part way and then exploded, booby trapped 81 mortar shells, booby trapped 60mm mortar shells, booby trapped grenades, home made booby traps made out of c ration cans, we even ran across a booby-trapped 500-pound bomb one time.

That particular day we were going in to do a block for a push coming down from the north and we were to set up a blocking position and several other companies were on a push toward us trying to flush the enemy toward our location. We were there to block anybody that they flushed out, any of the enemy. On our way to this position we had walked into a mine field, the entire company. The bad thing is that we were over half way into it before anybody had tripped the booby trap or a mine. Once the first one went off, it seemed that no matter where someone turned another one went off.

There were friends in there that were wounded. Doc White was wounded, Van Leer was wounded and they were all part of HQ squad. Doc White was a medic and Van Leer was a radio operator. We were all part of HQ squad and they were both hurt in the foot by landmines. There was a guy in the company by the name of Gus Rutgers he was killed, Bobby Wilson was killed, Bell was killed. Lot more but I forget who all was killed that day.

When we finally were able to get out of that area and get back to base camp, the mood had turned very somber. People were in a state of shock. We had been taking individual casualties up to that point and now all of a sudden you have a whole group of people that had been together almost a year now and a large chunk was gone. Whether they were wounded or dead, and that was all in the matter of a couple of minutes. We still hadn't found any enemy.

A little while later we had a briefing for our mission the next day which was supposed to be the assault on Pinkville. We were going there and our job was to go in and destroy the enemy. It was a VC stronghold, anybody who was in that area was considered to be a VC or a VC sympathizer. There is a matter of conflict as to what was said and what transpired that night. Supposedly the people were pre-warned that we were coming in the next day and if they were still there they would be considered to be VC and be killed.

This was all coming from capt. Medina the company commander, Col. Barker who was in charge of the BTL and this particular mission was part of what was called Task Force Barker.

At the briefing we were informed that the there was supposedly an approximate battalion-sized VC force and we were finally going have it out with the enemy. It was the relief valve that the company needed or was finally going to get to vent all of its frustration as to all of the people that we had lost through the booby traps and the snipers and the mine fields. The whole mood within the company changed very dramatically. This was our chance to get in there and get even and get entangled with then enemy and we were going to kick some butt.

Reactions throughout the Company were varied. There was the fact that you were going to get into a major battle with the enemy, so naturally you are concerned about coming out of this one, am I going to survive, am I going to get shot or blown up.

Initially we were told that we would be coming into a hot LZ [Landing Zone] but it wasn't. It was a quiet LZ.

As we proceeded into the village, there had been a lot of shooting going on around us in close proximity. Capt. Medina was trying to find out and determine who was shooting at what and were they taking incoming fire. How many were there, trying to find out what was actually happening for the amount of gunfire going on.

You could tell by Medina's questioning of the platoon leaders, "What is going on? What is happening?". He was very becoming very anxious and I would say he was becoming very stern in his questioning of the individuals as to what was happening. I know in one point in time that he wanted the shooting to stop. Then when the battalion net came alive then he became very concerned as to what the situation was and what was happening, more so than prior to that. But he was concerned prior to that because he had no idea as to what was going on.

The mine field incident was basically the straw that broke the camels back as far as the emotional stability of the whole unit.

In retrospect, you look at what was transpiring around you and the fact that people were starting to realize that this was not right, that this is not what we are supposed to be doing here. When the total unit finally realized it was wrong, it was too late. You could not undo the damage that you already done. There came a point after the swept through the village, because then you got to look back and see what exactly that you did do.

After it was all over, battalion just wanted our situation reports and wanted to know what was going on, what the body count was, what was happening on the ground, what had happened and from that point on that was basically all that was said about it. It was pushed off to the sidelines it was not brought up. Very seldom brought up, you would discuss it among yourselves but that was as far as it went.

As a group talking to each other, individually and one on one, you tried to justify what you did and you couldn't do it. There was no justification. There was a very somber mood in the company afterwards, the company would never be the same after that.

Depending on what you want to believe, from the briefing and what has been able to be told about the briefing, you could not justify killing the civilians regardless of how you look at it. They were non combatants period.

You also have your military code of conduct that you can deny an order if you know it is wrong. If I tell you to go jump off a bridge, are you going to do it? If I order you to go jump off a bridge and I know that when you hit the ground you are going to be dead, what is the justification? There is no justification for that.

The bottom line is you cannot go in and fight a guerrilla type war using conventional warfare tactics. It does not work. This My Lai incident was an end result of that. If you are going to confront the enemy in a guerrilla war, you must confront them on the guerrilla base. You have to fight fire with fire.

You need to know more about the culture and the type of people that you will be confronting. They cannot pick you up and fly you half around the world and drop you off and say here you are and here is your enemy. The first thing that you see is people living in grass and mud huts. There is one highway that runs north and south which is a dirt road which is the equivalent an interstate for us. No idea at all about their infrastructure within the family or the politics or anything else.

The best to sum it up, we ran into a farmer one day out in the field and they were talking to him, interrogating him and he said I don't like the government, I don't like the North Vietnamese and I don't like the Americans. He wanted to be left alone to farm his field. That is all he wanted out of life. He didn't care about the politics or who ran the country or anything else, he just wanted to be left alone with his mama-san, his baby-san, his water buffalo and his rice field and he would have been happy. The little man got caught in the middle, all over politics. Next time, let the politicians go over and fight.

the INCIDENT the TRIAL the AFTERMATH

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