Disturbing History - The Massacre At Son My

Episode Date: August 14, 2026

On the morning of March 16, 1968, an American helicopter pilot named Hugh Thompson dropped a smoke grenade to mark a wounded Vietnamese woman so a medic could reach her. He flew a circuit and came back a few minutes later. She was dead, and an American officer was standing over her.Within the hour, Thompson would land his helicopter between armed American infantry and a bunker full of civilians and tell his own door gunner to open fire on Americans if they opened fire on the villagers.Almost everyone has heard of My Lai.Almost everything most people believe about it is wrong or badly incomplete. It wasn't one village. It was a village complex called Son My made up of four hamlets, and the place we call My Lai 4 was actually a sub-hamlet named Xom Lang that American mapmakers mislabeled. It wasn't one company, because two separate American infantry units killed civilians in Son My that morning, several kilometers apart, under the same task force headquarters. And it wasn't one man, because the Army's own inquiry identified roughly 30 officers and enlisted men who either committed crimes or helped bury them afterward, up to and including a major general commanding a division.This episode walks the whole operation from the beginning.The attrition strategy and the body-count culture that made dead Vietnamese the measure of a good officer. Quang Ngai Province, the free-fire zones, and why American troops called the area Pinkville. Task Force Barker, an ad hoc unit thrown together from three companies that had never worked with each other, under a colonel who had commanded the brigade for exactly one day when the massacre happened. Charlie Company's three months of losing men to mines and booby traps without ever getting a fight, including the February 25 minefield and the booby trap that killed Sergeant George Cox on March 14.The memorial service on March 15, and the briefing Captain Ernest Medina gave that night, which remains the most disputed half hour in the case.Then the morning itself. Artillery preparation beginning around 7:22 a.m., a landing zone that turned out to be completely cold, and a company that came off the aircraft firing at people who were not shooting back. Charlie Company took no incoming fire that day and captured 3 weapons. The only American casualty shot himself in the foot. What they reported afterward was 128 enemy killed.The episode covers the irrigation ditch, where somewhere between 70 and 80 people were gathered and shot, and the trail junction to the south where another 20 to 30 were killed. The men who refused to fire, and what happened to them, which was nothing. The rapes and mutilations documented by the Peers Inquiry. Hugh Thompson, Lawrence Colburn, and Glenn Andreotta in detail, including the child Andreotta carried out of the ditch alive, and the 30 years it took the Army to award those three men the Soldier's Medal. Andreotta was killed in action on April 8, 1968, three weeks after the massacre.There is a substantial section on My Khe 4, the second massacre, which almost nobody has heard of. Bravo Company, a different battalion, different officers, men who never attended Medina's briefing and had never met William Calley, killing roughly 90 civilians in a coastal sub-hamlet on the same morning and reporting 38 enemy dead. It only came to light because investigators digging into My Lai tripped over it.The back half is the concealment and the reckoning. Colonel Oran Henderson's April 1968 investigation, which concluded about 20 civilians had been killed inadvertently.The Viet Cong leaflet that was substantially accurate and was used as proof the whole thing was fabricated. Tom Glen's letter to General Abrams in late 1968 and the young major who reviewed it. Ronald Ridenhour, a door gunner who heard about it secondhand in April 1968, spent months quietly interviewing witnesses, and mailed a letter on March 29, 1969, to some 30 officials in Washington. Seymour Hersh and the story no major magazine would buy, which ran on November 13, 1969, in roughly three dozen newspapers. Paul Meadlo on the CBS Evening News on November 24. Ronald Haeberle's color photographs, carried around for a year and a half before anyone acted on them, published in the Cleveland Plain Dealer on November 20, 1969, and in Life on December 5. The Peers Inquiry, delivered in March 1970, and what it found about command failure at four levels.Then the trials. Roughly two dozen men charged, 5 court-martialed for the killings, and 14 officers charged with suppressing information. Sergeant David Mitchell, acquitted. Sergeant Charles Hutto, acquitted. Captain Eugene Kotouc, acquitted. Captain Ernest Medina, acquitted on September 22, 1971. Colonel Oran Henderson, the only officer tried for the cover-up, acquitted on December 17, 1971. Major General Samuel Koster, charges dismissed, censured, demoted one grade, and out as Superintendent of West Point.Calley was charged with 109 murders, convicted on March 29, 1971, of the premeditated murder of not fewer than 22 Vietnamese civilians, and sentenced two days later to life at hard labor. Within days the White House had received something on the order of 100,000 letters and telegrams running overwhelmingly in his favor. Flags flew at half-staff. A novelty record sold in the hundreds of thousands. On April 1, 1971, President Nixon ordered him out of the stockade and into an apartment at Fort Benning.The sentence came down to 20 years in August 1971, then to 10 years in April 1974, and he was paroled in November 1974 after about three and a half years, nearly all of it under house arrest.Roughly 500 dead across two hamlets. One conviction.The Criminal Investigation Division found at least 347 killed at My Lai 4. The Peers Inquiry added roughly 90 at My Khe 4.The memorial at Son My carries 504 names, arranged by household so you read them in family groups. 182 women, 17 of them pregnant. 173 children, 56 of them infants. 60 people over the age of 60.And Pham Thanh Cong, who was 11 years old and lay under his mother and his four brothers and sisters in a bunker until the shooting stopped, and who spent much of his adult life walking American visitors through the ground where his family died.Email BrianJoin Our FREE NewsletterGet Brian's Books Leave Us A VoicemailVisit Our WebsiteHave a forgotten historical mystery, disturbing event, unsolved crime, or hidden conspiracy you think deserves investigation?Send your suggestions to [e-mail] History is a dark history podcast exploring unsolved mysteries, secret societies, historical conspiracies, lost civilizations, and the shadowy stories buried beneath the surface of the past.Follow the show and enable automatic downloads so you never miss a deep dive into history’s most unsettling secrets.Because sometimes the truth is darker than fiction.

Some stories were never meant to be told. Others were buried on purpose. This podcast digs them all up. Disturbing history peels back the layers of the past to uncover the strange, the sinister, and the stories that were never supposed to survive. From shadowy presidential secrets to government experiments that sound more like fiction than fact, this is history they hoped you'd forget. I'm Brian, investigator, author, and your guide through the dark corner.

of our collective memory. Each week I'll narrate some of the most chilling and little-known tales from history that will make you question everything you thought you knew. And here's the twist. Sometimes the history is disturbing to us. And sometimes, we have to disturb history itself, just to get to the truth.

If you like your facts with the side of fear, if you're not afraid to pull at threads, others leave alone. You're in the right place. History isn't just written by the victors. victors. Sometimes it's rewritten by the disturbed. Before we start, I need to give you a warning. This episode deals with the mass killing of unarmed civilians. That includes women, elderly people, small children, and infants. It includes documented accounts of rape and sexual mutilation. It includes

descriptions of how people died and what was done to their bodies afterward. There's no honest way to tell this story without those details, because those details are the entire reason that anyone eventually cared enough to investigate. If you're listening with kids in the car, or if this is the kind of material that lodges in you and doesn't leave, skip this one and come back next week. I won't take it personally. All right, here we go.

Sometime in the middle of the morning on March 16, 1968, a 24-year-old Army warrant officer named Hugh Thompson was flying a small bubble canopy observation helicopter in slow circles over a cluster of hamlets on the coastal, plane of central Vietnam. His job that morning was to fly low and draw fire, to find the enemy by letting the enemy shoot at him. He had two crewmen aboard, a crew chief named Glenn Andriata, and a gunner named Lawrence Colburn. And between the three of them, they had a pretty good sense of what a firefight looked like from 300 feet. Nobody was shooting at them. That was the first thing

that didn't add up. The second thing was the bodies. They were in the rice paddies and on the trails and in the ditches, and they weren't arranged the way bodies get arranged in a fight. They were in groups. Thompson saw a woman lying in a field, wounded, still moving. He did what he was trained to do. He dropped a smoke grenade to mark her position so that the American ground troops moving through the area could get a medic to her. He flew on, made his circuit, and came back over the same spot a short time later. The woman was dead.

According to Thompson's testimony, an American officer. officer had walked up to her, prodded her with his foot, stepped back, and shot her. Thompson identified that officer as Captain Ernest Medina, the commander of Charlie Company. Medina always denied that account. He said he'd fired at what he believed was a woman reaching for a weapon. That's the first of many places in this story where two Americans under oath described the same 30 seconds in ways that cannot both be true. Thompson kept flying. He found an irrigation ditch on the eastern edge of the hamlet, and the ditch was full of people, and most of them were not moving. Some of them were. He landed near a group of American soldiers and asked a lieutenant what was going

on and whether he could help get the wounded out of the ditch. The lieutenant told him the only way to help them was to put them out of their misery. Thompson took off again. As he lifted, he watched a sergeant walk to the ditch and fire into it. That was the moment a 24-year-old helicopter pilot decided he was going to point his guns at other Americans. Here's the problem with this story, and it's the reason I wanted to do it. Almost everybody has heard of my lie. It's one of the few Vietnam-era events that made it into the general American vocabulary, and the version most people carry around goes something like this.

There was a lieutenant named William Cali. He lost his mind in a village called My Lie. He killed a lot of civilians. He went to prison. It was terrible, and it was one man. Nearly every element of that summary is either wrong or badly incomplete. It wasn't one village. The Americans were operating in a village called Sun Mai,

which was made up of four hamlets, which were themselves made up of smaller sub-hamlets. The place Americans called My Life Four was actually a sub-hamlet named Zomlang, inside a hamlet called Tukun. American military maps had mislabeled it, so for more than 50 years we've been calling the massacre by a name that was, in a literal sense, a map error. It wasn't one company.

Two American infantry companies killed civilians in Sun Mai that morning, in two different places, several kilometers apart, under the same task force headquarters on the same operation. The second killing ground, a sub-hamlet called MyK4, has never entered public memory at all. Almost nobody outside of specialists knows it happened, and it wasn't one man. The Army's own investigation, led by a three-star general, identified roughly 30 officers and enlisted

men who either committed crimes or helped bury the evidence afterward, up to and including a major general commanding a division. Charges were brought against something on the order of two dozen of them. Only one person was convicted of anything. That's the story I want to tell. Not the story of a rogue lieutenant, which is the version the institution needed to be true. but the story of an operation that killed something in the neighborhood of 500 unarmed people in a single morning and then absorbed that fact into its own paperwork without a hiccup.

Let's start with why anybody was there in the first place. The winter of 1967 going into 1968 was the moment the American War in Vietnam broke in half. For three years, the strategy running out of military assistance command Vietnam under General William Westmerland had been attrition. The theory was straightforward and it was stated openly. The United States could not occupy and hold rural Vietnam, and it wasn't going to invade the north, so it would win by killing enemy soldiers faster than the enemy could replace them. There would be a crossover point. Eventually, Hanoi would run out of men before Washington ran out of patience. If that's your strategy, you need a metric, and the metric was the body count. When you make dead bodies, the measure

of success you have created a system where every officer in the chain of command has a professional incentive to produce dead bodies and a professional disincentive to look closely at whose bodies they are body counts went into after-action reports after action reports went into efficiency reports decided who got promoted a battalion commander with good numbers was a good battalion commander i spent 16 years in law enforcement and i've watched what happens to an organization when you tie people's careers to a number. You get the number. You get it whether it's real or not, and the people generating it will tell you with a straight face that it's real, because after a while, everybody's collectively agreed to stop asking. Vietnam did this at national scale with corpses.

Then came Tet. On the 31st of January 1968, the North Vietnamese Army and the Viet Cong launched simultaneous attacks on more than 100 cities and towns across South Vietnam, including including the American embassy compound in Saigon. Militarily, Tet was a catastrophe for the communist side. The Viet Cong in particular took losses they never fully recovered from. Politically, it was the end of the American public's belief that the war was being won. Because the American public had been told for years that the enemy was on the ropes, and then watched them attack everywhere at once on television.

What Tet did to the American soldier in the field was more specific. It confirmed a suspicion that had been building for two years, which was that the enemy was not a separate population living out in the jungle somewhere. The enemy was in the villages. The enemy was, at least some of the time, the villagers. And that suspicion, in a certain kind of unit, under a certain kind of pressure, turns into a license. Kwong-ungai province sits on the central coast in what the Americans designated as the northern military region. Kuongangai had been a stronghold of the Vietnam in the war against the French.

It had been organized, politicized, and armed for a generation before the first American combat unit arrived. By 1968, large parts of the province had never in living memory been meaningfully controlled by any government in Saigon. The countryside was under communist administration, and the villages paid taxes to it, fed it, hit it, and supplied it with recruits. The Americans knew this. Their response was a set of policies that would look insane if you didn't understand the logic behind them. Enormous stretches of Kwongai were designated free-fire zones, meaning that after the population had been notified to leave, anything moving in them could be engaged without further clearance.

Villages were burned to deny the enemy shelter. Rice was destroyed to deny the enemy food. Peasants were moved off ancestral land into relocation camps. By 1968, a substantial fraction of the province's rural population had been displaced at least once. None of it worked. What it produced was a countryside full of people who had every reason on earth to hate the Americans, which then confirmed the belief that the countryside was full of enemies. Along the coast in Son Tin District, sat the village of Sun Mai.

On the maps, the Hamlet complex was shaded pink to indicate a built-up area, an American soldier started calling the whole area Pinkville. It had a reputation. Units that went in there took casualties. Nobody enjoyed going in there. American intelligence in early 1968 believed that the 48th local force battalion of the Viet Cong was operating out of the Sun Mai area. The 48th was a real unit and a good one by the standards of local force battalions,

and it was believed to have taken part in the Tet attacks on Kwongingai City. Finding and destroying the 48th became the objective of an operation that spring. Task Force Barker was not a normal unit. It's worth understanding what it actually was, because the shape of the thing helps explain the disaster. In January of 1968, the 11th Infantry Brigade of the 23rd Infantry Division, better known as the Americal Division, cobbled together a temporary battalion-sized command out of three rifle companies,

borrowed from three different battalions. Alpha Company came from one battalion, Bravo Company from another, Charlie Company from a third. They had never worked together. Their officers didn't know each other. The task force had no real staff, no proper intelligence section, and no organic support structure of its own. Command went to Lieutenant Colonel Frank Barker, an experienced and reportedly aggressive officer who was well regarded by his superiors, and who was, by every account, under pressure to produce results. Above Barker sat the 11th Brigade, and here's a detail that reads like a screenwriter's invention, but as a matter of record. Colonel Oren Henderson took command of the 11th Brigade on

March 15th, 1968. He had been in the job for one day when the massacre happened. Above Henderson was Major General Samuel Costor, commanding the Americal Division, with Brigadier General George Young as his assistant division commander. Charlie Company of the First Battalion, 20th Infantry was commanded by Captain Ernest Medina. Medina was 32 years old, born in New Mexico, raised in Colorado, an enlisted man who had come up through the ranks and earned his commission. His troops called him Mad Dog, and by most accounts they respected him and wanted his approval. That last part matters.

Medina's first platoon was led by second lieutenant William Law's Callie Jr. Cali was 24 from Miami, a college dropout. who'd washed out a Palm Beach Junior College and drifted through a string of jobs before enlisting. He'd gone through officer candidate school during a stretch when the army was expanding fast and commissioning officers faster, and a lot of the men who served with him

have said in one way or another that he should never have been handed a platoon. He was short. He was insecure. He had trouble reading a map, and the enlisted men under him didn't think much of him. Medina reportedly rode him hard in front of his own troops. Second platoon was led by Lieutenant Stephen Brooks and third platoon by Lieutenant Jeffrey LaCross. Charlie Company had arrived in Vietnam in December of 1967, so by the middle of March they'd been in

country about three months, and in all that time, they'd never had a real fight. What they'd had instead was mines. The enemy in Kwong Nangai fought a war of attrition of his own, using command-detonated mines, pungy steaks, tripwires and booby traps built out of unexploded American ordinance. You'd walk a patrol for six hours through hedgerows and paddy dikes, and nothing would happen. And then a man would step on something and be gone, and there'd be nobody to shoot at. That happened over and over again. On February 25, 1968, Charlie Company walked into a minefield near the Batangun Peninsula

while moving through ground they'd been told was clear. The company took heavy casualties in a matter of minutes. Accounts vary on the exact figures, but several men were killed and dozens were wounded, and men who were there have described picking up pieces of people they'd shared a foxhole with. There was no enemy present and nothing to fight back against. On March 14, a booby trap killed a popular sergeant named George Cox and wounded several others. Cox was well-liked, and his death seems to have hit the company harder than the earlier losses did. On March 15th, the company held a memorial service for him.

That evening, Captain Medina briefed his men on the operation that would begin the following morning. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. What isn't seriously disputed is this. Medina told the company they'd be going into Pinkville. He told them the 48th Local Force Battalion was there. He told them intelligence indicated the civilian population would have cleared out for the market by 7 in the morning, which meant anybody still present after that would be Viet Cong or Viet Cong

sympathizers. He told them to destroy the hamlet, to burn the houses, to kill the livestock, to destroy the food stores, and to file the wells. And he told them this was the fight they'd been waiting for, which after three months of being killed by things they couldn't shoot back at, landed on a lot of receptive ears. What is disputed is whether Medina ordered the killing of unarmed civilians. Numerous soldiers testified under oath that they came out of that briefing believing they were to kill everyone in the hamlet. Some said Medina used words to that effect explicitly. Others said the message came across clearly enough without any single direct sentence, and that when somebody in the ranks asked whether that included women and children,

Medina's answer was some version of, if they're running from you, they're Viet Cong. Medina denied under oath that he'd ordered the killing of non-combatants. and he was acquitted at his court-martial. His account was that he'd ordered the destruction of the Hamlet and not the destruction of the people in it. Callie's position, then and for the rest of his life, was that he was following Medina's order. The Army's own inquiry concluded that whatever the exact words were,

the effect of that briefing was that a significant number of men in Charlie Company went into Sun Mai, believing they had permission to kill anyone they found. That's the honest conclusion, and it's an uncomfortable one. because it doesn't hand you a villain. What it hands you is a failure of language inside a command climate, where killing was the measure of success. In my experience, when you brief a group of armed men who are angry and grieving, and you tell them everyone left in a place is the enemy,

you don't need to say the word kill. You've already said it. Whether that meets a legal standard for ordering murder is a question a jury answered one way. Whether it caused what happened the next morning isn't really in doubt. The morning of Saturday, March 16, 1968 was clear. Artillery preparation started at about 22 minutes past seven, dropping high explosive and smoke onto the landing zone west of the sub-hamlet

and onto the western edge of the settlement itself. Gunships worked the area over. Then the first lift of helicopters came in with Charlie Company aboard and touched down around 7.30 in the morning. The men came off the aircraft firing, which isn't unusual for a hot landing. zone. But this landing zone wasn't hot. Nobody was shooting back. Over the course of the entire operation at My Life 4, Charlie Company took no incoming fire, encountered no organized resistance,

and captured a grand total of three weapons. The only American casualty was a soldier named Herbert Carter, who shot himself in the foot, and there's testimony suggesting he did it deliberately to get out of what was happening around him. The 48th local force battalion was somewhere else entirely. The intelligence had been wrong. What was actually in that sub-hamlet at 7.30 in the morning was what you'd find in any farming settlement in central Vietnam at that time of day, which is old men and women and children and babies, cooking rice and feeding animals and getting ready to head out to the patties. The intelligence assumption that everybody would be gone to market by seven was simply false. Market Day worked differently there, and even if it

hadn't. The artillery preparation had driven people down into their family bunkers rather than out onto the roads. First platoon under Cali and second platoon under Brooks swept into the sub-hamlet from the west, with third platoon following behind as a mop-up element. The killing started almost immediately, and it started without anybody giving an order that morning. Men shot people who were running, and then they shot people who weren't running. They shot a man coming out of a hut with his hands raised. They dropped grenades into the family bunkers dug beneath the houses, which is where people had gone when the artillery started. They shot people in doorways and in courtyards and standing in the road. The pattern that developed over the next two to three hours wasn't a frenzy,

and in a way that's worse, because a frenzy burns itself out. This was organized. Soldiers went house to house pulling people out and hurting them into groups, and the groups were walked to collection points, and then the groups were killed. Callie's platoon assembled a large group of villagers, somewhere between 70 and 80 people by most estimates, and moved them to an irrigation ditch on the eastern side of the settlement. Testimony at the court-martial described Callie ordering the people down into the ditch and then ordering his men to open fire. When one soldier, Private First Class Paul Meadlow, hesitated, Callie reportedly pressured him to open fire, and he eventually did.

Several witnesses described him crying as he did it. Callie fired into the ditch himself. Witnesses said he emptied multiple magazines. When people at the bottom were still moving, soldiers fired again. There was testimony that a small child, maybe two years old, crawled out of the ditch and started to move away, and that Callie picked the child up, threw him back in, and shot him. That specific incident was part of the case at trial.

A second major killing site was a trail junction south of the settlement, where another group of roughly 20 to 30 people was assembled and shot. There's testimony that Callie personally fired into that group as well, and testimony that he shot a Buddhist monk in the head at close range after questioning him. Elsewhere in the sub-hamlet, men of 2nd platoon and 3rd platoon were doing similar things on a smaller scale. Groups of villagers were shot in courtyards, and wounded people were finished off. A soldier named Varnado Simpson later admitted publicly to killing around 25 people that morning by his own count. The houses were burned and the livestock was shot, which meant the water buffalo and the pigs

and the chickens and the ducks. The rice stores were destroyed. Bodies were thrown into the wells. Because fouling a well does more than kill the people you throw in it. It kills the settlement, because in a village with no other water source, a fouled well means nobody can come back. The Army's own inquiry documented multiple rapes and sexual assaults committed by American soldiers in Sun Mai that morning. Some victims were killed afterward. Some bodies were found mutilated. Investigators documented cases where women and girls were assaulted by more than one soldier. In at least one case, where the letters identifying the Viet Cong were carved into a victim's body.

The victims included girls who were, on the Vietnamese account, still too. children. I'm not going to catalog this further and I'm not going to dramatize it. I'm telling you it happened at scale and that it was found and documented by a formal United States Army investigation because there's a version of this story that gets told where the killings were a tragic loss of control by frightened men in a combat zone. Sexual assault isn't a loss of fire discipline. It requires a soldier to stop what he's doing, decide to do a different thing, and take the time to do it while people around him are being shot. It happened repeatedly that morning, and the men who did it understood there'd be no witnesses left. It's important to say that not everybody took part.

Sergeant Michael Bernhardt refused to fire on civilians and said so openly, and he later testified that Medina warned him about writing letters home. Private First Class James Dursey refused a direct order to fire into the group at the ditch and testified to that at Callie's trial. Specialist Robert Maples, a machine gunner, refused to bring his weapon to the ditch. Harry Stanley refused to participate at all. Herbert Carter shot himself in the foot and got medevaced out. That's not a long list out of roughly a hundred men, but it exists, and it matters enormously, because it dismantles the defense that anybody who says he had no choice is offering. Men standing in the same field, under the same officers, who'd heard the same briefing the night before, said no.

Nothing happened to them for saying no. Nobody shot them and nobody arrested them. The option was sitting right there, and most of them didn't take it. Thompson's Aeroskout section was supporting the operation that morning, flying low-level reconnaissance in a small observation helicopter with a crew of three. Andriata was the crew chief, and Colburn was the doorkner. Colburn was only 18 years old. After Thompson found the ditch and got the answer he got from the ground,

He flew a wider circuit and saw a group of civilians, mostly women and children and elderly people, moving toward a bunker on the northeastern edge of the settlement. Behind them, coming across the open ground, he could see American infantry advancing in their direction. Thompson worked out what was happening, and he did something that as far as I've been able to determine has no precedent in American military history. He landed his helicopter between the advancing American soldiers and the Vietnamese civilians. Then he got out, and before he did, he told his crew that if the Americans opened fire on the civilians while he was pulling them out of the bunker, they were to open fire on the Americans. Colburn later confirmed that order, under oath. He was standing behind an M-60 machine gun at 18 years old, and had just been told by his superior officer to point it at United States infantry.

Thompson walked up to the ground element. Accounts differ on exactly who he spoke to and what was said. but the substance is consistent across all of them. He asked whether they could get the people out of the bunker and he was told they could be gotten out with a hand grenade and he said something to the effect that he could do better than that. Then he went to the bunker himself and coaxed the civilians out and he counted somewhere around nine or ten of them, including children. Then he got on the radio and called in two gunships from his own unit,

which was a serious thing to ask of anybody, because gunship crews were being told to land in what was supposedly a hot area and load up civilians. They came anyway. They flew the people out in two lifts. Thompson lifted off and went back to the ditch. Andriata spotted movement in it, so the helicopter set down again,

and Andriada went into the ditch on foot, through the bodies, and came out carrying a living child. That child was a boy named Dobah, somewhere around eight years old, and he'd survived because he'd been lying underneath his mother. Thompson flew back to the task force headquarters at Chulai and reported what he'd seen in language that left nothing open to interpretation. He told his section leader that Americans were murdering

civilians. That report went up the chain and at some point around 11 in the morning a ceasefire order came back down and the killing at My Life 4 stopped. Glenn Andriata was killed in action three weeks later on April 8th, 1968. He never knew that any of it came out. There's a way of telling this story that turns it into an American morality play with American characters, where the people who actually died get flattened into a number in the background. So I want to slow down here and put them back in the middle of it. 504 names are carved at the memorial at Sun Mai today. Those were people with families and specific lives that ended on a specific Saturday morning.

Fom Than Kong was 11 years old. He was down in the family bunker with his mother and his four brothers and sisters. when American soldiers threw a grenade in and then fired into it. He was wounded in the head and the arm and the leg. Everyone else in that bunker was killed, and he lay underneath his family until it was over. He later spent decades as the director of the Sun My Memorial Museum, telling that story to visitors,

including to American veterans who came back. Truong Thiele survived by lying under bodies with her son and playing dead while soldiers moved through, and she lost family members that morning. Hathiqai was in the group, taken to the irrigation ditch. She was shot and fell. She survived because others who were killed fell on top of her. Guyen Thiathan was a child who survived and lost most of her family.

Doebaugh, the boy Andriata pulled out of the ditch, grew up, and in 1998, 30 years later, he met Hugh Thompson and Lawrence Colburn again when they came back to Vietnam. The Vietnamese accounting of those 504 victims includes a breakdown that tells you what kind of event this was. Of the 504, 182 were women, and 17 of those women were pregnant. 173 were children, and 56 of those were infants. 60 of the dead were over 60 years old. That's more than two-thirds of the dead who were women, children, or elderly, before you even start counting adult men who were farmers rather than fighters. I'll be clear that these figures come from the Vietnamese government's accounting and the memorial's own records,

and that American investigators arrived at somewhat different totals through a different method, and I'll come back to the numbers before we're done. But the composition of the dead isn't seriously disputed by anybody from any side, and it's the single most important fact in this entire case. Several kilometers to the east on the same morning under the same task force, a different American company was operating in a different part of Sunmi Village, and almost nobody has heard of what happened there. Bravo Company of the 4th Battalion, Third Infantry,

went into the hamlet of Coeloy on the coast. Its first platoon, led by Lieutenant Thomas Willingham, moved into a sub-hamlet the Americans designated MyK4. What happened there was reported at the time as a firefight. The platoon reported 38 enemy killed. The hamlet was destroyed and the houses were burned, and by some accounts, the bodies were left where they fed, or partially buried by demolition.

When the Army finally investigated Sunmi properly, nearly two years later, investigators concluded that my K-4 hadn't been a firefight either. They concluded that Bravo Company had killed unarmed civilians there, and the inquiry's estimate was on the order of 90 people. Some Vietnamese sources and some later researchers have put the figure higher into the range of a hundred or more. Willingham was charged with unpremeditated murder

in connection with civilian deaths at my K-4, and the charges were dismissed. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. Think about what my K-4 does to the standard narrative. If my lie-for is the story of one unstable lieutenant who snapped, then my K-4 shouldn't exist at all. It was a different company from a different battalion, with different officers and different men who hadn't attended Medina's briefing,

and had never met William Callie. And on the same morning, in the same village complex, under the same task force headquarters, they killed a hamlet full of civilians and reported it as enemy dead. That's not a rogue lieutenant. That's a system doing what it had been trained and incentivized to do, in a place where it had already decided the population was the enemy. The part that gets under my skin as a former investigator is how my K-4 surfaced at all. It only came to light because investigators were already digging into my

lie for and stumbled across it. Nobody was looking for it. If Ron Ridenauer had never written his letter, we'd know nothing whatsoever about my K-4. And those 38 enemy killed would still be sitting in a report in a file in a warehouse. Completely unremarkable. I can't tell you how many other entries like that are in those files. And neither can anybody else. And that's the thing I've never been able to put down. The paperwork is where all of this got buried. So let's talk about the paperwork. Task Force Barker reported the operation as a success, and the body count submitted for March 16th was 128 enemy dead, against three captured weapons and zero American combat casualties. Any competent officer looking at that ratio should have stopped and asked a question,

because that isn't what a battle looks like. 128 armed enemy soldiers don't die while producing three weapons and no friendly casualties. That combination of numbers is a confession, written in the land. language of the after-action report. Nobody asked the question. Instead, General Westmoreland sent the unit a message of congratulations for a job well done. The American Division's newspaper and Stars and Stripes ran accounts of a successful operation against the 48th Local Force Battalion. The initial reporting acknowledged that a number of civilians had been killed, roughly 20, and attributed those deaths to the artillery preparation and to crossfire, which

was the standard formula. Civilians die in the vicinity of combat. Everybody understood that sentence and everybody had written that sentence. That's what body count culture does. It doesn't just tolerate a massacre. It processes one because it already has a form for it. Hugh Thompson had made a report, though, and reports have to go somewhere. Thompson's complaint reached Lieutenant Colonel Barker and reached the aviation chain of command.

A major named Frederick Watka, who was Thompson's superior. passed it up. It reached Colonel Henderson at Brigade, one day into his command, and it reached Major General Koster at Division. Henderson then conducted what the army would later characterize as an investigation. He talked to a handful of people, including some men from Charlie Company. He didn't talk to Thompson in any serious way. He didn't interview a single Vietnamese survivor. He didn't go to the site and count bodies. He produced a report in late April, concluding that around 20 civilians had been killed inadvertently and that the allegations of a massacre were unfounded,

and he attributed the rumors to Viet Cong propaganda. Medina, for his part, questioned members of his own company about what had happened, which isn't an investigation. That's a commander finding out how much exposure he has. Medina later admitted he'd withheld information and hadn't been truthful with Henderson. Meanwhile, the Vietnamese were reporting it. The Sun 10 District Chief filed a report, describing the mass killing of civilians.

The province chief knew. A Viet Cong propaganda leaflet describing the massacre circulated in the area within days, and that leaflet was substantially accurate. But because it came out of the enemy's propaganda apparatus, it got used as evidence that the whole story was manufactured. That's a tidy little piece of circular reasoning, and it worked. Lieutenant Colonel Frank Barker was killed in a mid-air collision in June of 1968,

and whatever he knew went with him. There's one more piece from this stretch that deserves more attention than it usually gets. In late 1968, a soldier named Tom Glenn, who served in the 11th Brigade, wrote a letter to General Crichton Abrams describing widespread mistreatment and killing of Vietnamese civilians

by American troops in the area. Glenn wasn't writing about My Lie specifically. He was describing a pattern. The letter got referred back down for review, and the officer who reviewed it was a young major on the American division staff named Colin Powell. Powell's response found no substance to the complaint and stated that relations between American soldiers and the Vietnamese people were generally good. Powell has been criticized for that for decades.

I'd put it a little differently. That response is exactly what the institution was built to produce. A junior soldier forwards a complaint. A staff officer reviews it inside the same command, that would be implicated, and the review concludes that the command is fine. That isn't one man's failure. That's a system with no independent path for a complaint to travel down. By the end of 1968, Sun Mai was closed.

It was a successful operation against the 48th Local Force Battalion, with regrettable incidental civilian casualties. It was in the files, and it was over, and it stayed over for about a year. Ronald Ridenar was a helicopter door gunner and later a long-rength, reconnaissance patrol member with the 11th brigade and he wasn't at Sun Mai. He heard about it in a bar essentially in late April of 1968 from a soldier named Charles Groover who'd been in Charlie Company and who told him the unit had wiped out a village. Ridenauer did something I find remarkable. He didn't dismiss it and he didn't panic. He investigated it. Over the following months, whenever he ran into

somebody who'd been at Sun Mai, he asked. He talked to Mike. Michael Terry and to William Dauherty and to Michael Bernhardt and to Larry LaCroix. He was careful about it. He asked open questions and let people talk. And he took notes on what they said. And he noticed that the accounts matched each other in the details that mattered. That's functionally good investigative practice from a 22-year-old enlisted man with no training in it. And he built a case out of independent witness accounts. He also decided, correctly, that reporting it through his chain of command, would accomplish nothing at all.

Ridenauer left the army in December of 1968. On March 29, 1969, a little over a year after the massacre, he sent a letter describing what he'd learned to around 30 recipients. It went to President Nixon. It went to the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of State, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and to more than 20 members of Congress. That letter is a model of how to do this kind of thing. It barely editorializes. It names names, it names units, it names its sources, and it asks for exactly one thing, which is a full investigation.

Most of the recipients did nothing. Congressman Morris Udall of Arizona didn't. Udall pushed, and Congressman L. Mendel Rivers, who chaired the House Armed Services Committee, got involved as well, and the Army was compelled to look. I want to be honest about something here because it's a fact that tends to get sanded down in the retelling. The Army did open a real investigation, and it was the Army's own Inspector General and Criminal Investigation Division that did the work that broke this case open. Colonel William Wilson from the Inspector General's office started interviewing witnesses in April of 1969 and quickly concluded the allegations were true. The Criminal Investigation Division under Colonel Henry Tufts took it over. and an investigator named Andre Fahir was the one who eventually tracked down the photographs. The institution buried this for a year.

And then, once somebody external forced the question, parts of that same institution dug it back up. On September 5, 1969, the Army charged First Lieutenant William Calley with the premeditated murder of 109 Vietnamese civilians. The date on that matters more than anything else you'll hear today. because Cali was days away from the end of his enlistment. Once a soldier is discharged, the Army loses court-martial jurisdiction over him. They filed just under the wire. Almost everybody else in Charlie Company was already out.

The public still knew nothing about any of it. A freelance reporter named Seymour Hirsch got a tip that a lieutenant was being held at Fort Benning on charges of killing a large number of Vietnamese civilians, and the tip came through a lawyer named Jeffrey Cowan. Hirsch started making calls. He went down to Fort Benning and found Cali, which took some doing and talked to him. He tracked down soldiers who'd been there.

He worked it like a beat reporter, one name at a time. Then he couldn't sell it. The major magazines all passed. So the story went out through a small operation called Dispatch News Service, and on November 13, 1969, it ran in something like three dozen American newspapers. Hirsch followed it with more. He found Paul Medlow, the soldier who'd fired into the ditch while crying, living in Indiana.

Medlow had stepped on a mine the day after the massacre and lost a foot. On November 24, 1969, Medlow sat down with Mike Wallace on the CBS Evening News and described in flat ordinary language shooting civilians on Callie's order. He said he'd fired on men, women, children, and babies. That interview did something the print stories hadn't quite managed. Americans watched an American soldier, a young man from the Midwest with a working class accent, described killing babies on the evening news in their living rooms. Hirsch won the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting in 1970.

The photographs came next, and they changed everything the reporting hadn't. Ronald Haberl was an Army photographer attached to Charlie Company that morning, working alongside a reporter named Jay Roberts from the Public Information Detachment. Their assignment was to document a successful combat operation for the division newspaper. Heberley carried two cameras. He had the Army's black and white camera, and he had his own personal camera loaded with color film. The black and white photographs from the Army camera show soldiers moving through a hamlet and huts burning, and they show nothing incriminating whatsoever.

The color photographs shot on Haberl's. own film, Show the Dead. He kept the color slides and carried them home. He showed them at a rotary club into friends, and for a year and a half, essentially nothing happened, which tells you something uncomfortable about how much a society can look at without seeing. When the investigator Andre Fayer found him, Hebril turned the photographs over. They ran in the Cleveland Plain dealer on November 20th, 1969, and then in Life magazine on December 5th. One of them is the photograph most people picture when they hear the name, My Lie, even if they don't know they're picturing it. A group of Vietnamese women and children standing on a dirt road clustered together.

One of the women is adjusting her clothing, and survivors have said that soldiers have been assaulting women in that group moments earlier. A boy is holding on to an older woman. They're looking at the camera, or just past it. They were shot immediately after the picture was taken. Another photograph shows a section of dirt trail covered with bodies, most of them small. I've said before on this show that the difference between a story people forget and a story that changes something is almost never the quality of the evidence. It's whether there's a picture. The sworn testimony of a dozen witnesses moved almost nobody for a year and a half, and the color photographs moved the whole country inside of a week.

On November 26, 1969, the Army appointed Leeuble. Lieutenant General William Peers to conduct a full inquiry into the original investigation and its failures. Peers was a deliberate choice. He was a combat officer who'd come up through the Office of Strategic Services in Burma during the Second World War. And critically, he wasn't a West Point graduate, which meant he wasn't part of the Academy Network running through the senior officers he'd be examining. The Peer's inquiry took testimony from around 400 witnesses and produced a report delivered in March of 1970, and it's a damning document written by the Army about the Army. Pears concluded that a massacre of unarmed civilians had taken place at My Life 4 on March 16,

1968. On the numbers, the inquiry's judgment was that the dead at My Life 4 ran at least into the hundreds. The Criminal Investigation Division's separate finding was that at least 347 people were killed there, and that's the figure the Army worked from. Peers also concluded that a separate killing of civilians, on the order of 90 people, had happened at MyK4 at the hands of Bravo Company. He found that the crimes included murder, rape, sodomy, maiming, and assault on non-combatants, along with the destruction of dwellings, livestock, and food. On the cover-up, he was blunt.

He found that at every command level from company through division, officers had received information about the killing of non-combatants, and that at every one of those levels the information had been suppressed, distorted, or ignored. He found that Colonel Henderson's investigation had been inadequate to the point of being a sham. He found that Major General Koster and Brigadier General Young had failed to ensure a proper investigation and had actively contributed to the suppression of information. Peers identified roughly 30 individuals whose conduct warranted charges, either for the killings themselves or for the concealment afterward.

He also identified something broader, and that's the part of the report I think matters most. He described a command climate in which the killing of Vietnamese civilians had become normalized, in which prisoner handling and civilian protection weren't taken seriously, in which body count was the operative measure of success, and in which soldiers hadn't received meaningful training in the law of war or their obligations under it. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. None of that is a finding about William Cali.

That's a finding about the United States Army and Vietnam in 1968, written by a serving lieutenant general. So roughly 30 people were identified, and here's how it played out. For the crimes themselves, charges were preferred against a group of soldiers and officers commonly counted at around a dozen or more, and the figure most often cited for the total number charged

in connection with the whole affair, killings and cover up together, sits somewhere around two dozen to 26. Of everyone charged, five men were actually court-martialed for the killings. Sergeant David Mitchell was charged with assault with intent to murder in connection with the ditch, and he was acquitted in November of 1970. Sergeant Charles Huda was charged in connection with killings at My Life 4 and acquitted, and the panel appears to have accepted that he believed he was following lawful orders. Captain Eugene Kotuch, an intelligence officer, was charged with maiming a prisoner during interrogation and acquitted.

Captain Ernest Medina was charged with responsibility for the deaths of at least 100 civilians under a command responsibility theory, along with specific killings. He was defended by F. Lee Bailey, one of the best defense attorneys in the country, and he was acquitted on September 22, 1971. The military judge instructed the panel in a way that required actual knowledge on Medina's part. which is a demanding standard to meet. Medina later acknowledged publicly that he'd suppressed information and lied to Colonel Henderson. He left the army, went to work for a helicopter company in Wisconsin, and died in 2018.

And First Lieutenant William Cali was convicted. On the cover-up side, 14 officers were charged with suppression of information, including Major General Koster, and the charges were dismissed against all of them but one. Colonel Orrin Henderson, the man who'd had command of him. of the brigade for a single day was the only officer tried for the cover-up, and he was acquitted on December 17, 1971. Coaster had the charges against him dismissed and was never tried. He was censured, stripped of his distinguished service medal, and demoted one grade from Major General to Brigadier General, which cost him substantially in retirement. When the scandal broke, he was

serving as superintendent of the United States Military Academy at West Point, and he resigned that post. Brigadier General George Young was censured and lost his distinguished service medal as well. Frank Barker was dead and beyond anyone's reach. Add all that up and you get a massacre of roughly 500 people across two hamlets, committed by two companies, concealed by officers at four levels of command, investigated by a three-star general who named 30 people who ought to face charges, and one conviction at the end of it. Callie's court martial began at Fort Benning, Georgia, on November 17, 1970, and it ran for more than four months,

which made it at the time the longest court martial in American history. The defense was essentially that Callie had followed orders from Medina, and that he was a junior officer executing a mission as he understood it. Callie testified. He said he'd been ordered to destroy the enemy, that he hadn't distinguished between armed and unarmed enemies because he hadn't been taught to. and that the people in the hamlet were inside the framework he'd been handed, the enemy. There's a line attributed to him from the trial about how he hadn't been discriminating between men, women, and children, because they were all classified the same way. Whether you find that horrifying or clarifying, probably depends on whether you think he

built that framework himself. The prosecution's case rested primarily on the testimony of the men who'd been standing next to him. Dersy, who'd refused the order, Meadlow, who hadn't, and others. On March 29, 1971, the panel convicted Cali of the premeditated murder of not fewer than 22 Vietnamese civilians, and of assault with intent to murder a child. He'd been charged with 109. He was convicted of 22. That reduction wasn't mercy so much as evidentiary reality, because it's difficult to prove specific homicides, beyond a reason.

doubt when the victims were never identified. The bodies were never examined. The scene was destroyed, and the investigation started two years late. That's a forensic failure that flows directly out of the cover-up. The cover-up didn't just delay justice. It permanently destroyed the evidence that would have made a larger prosecution possible, which, from the institution's point of view, is the cover-up working exactly as designed. On March 31, 1971, Cali was sentenced to life imprisonment at hard labor, dismissal from the service, and forfeiture of all pay and allowances. And then the country lost its mind.

Within days of the verdict, the White House had received something on the order of 100,000 letters and telegrams about the Cali case, and they ran overwhelmingly in his favor. Polling at the time found large majorities of Americans disapproved of the conviction. Draft boards resigned in protest. state legislature's past resolutions supporting him. Governors ordered flags flown at half staff. In Georgia, Governor Jimmy Carter proclaimed a day encouraging people to drive with their headlights on in solidarity with American servicemen, which everybody understood as a gesture toward Cali.

A spoken word record called the Battle Hymn of Lieutenant Calle, set to the tune of the battle hymn of the Republic and delivered in the voice of a soldier who'd only done his duty, sold hundreds of thousands of copies inside of a few weeks. And two days after the sentence on April 1st, 1971, President Richard Nixon ordered Callie released from the stockade at Fort Leavenworth and returned to Fort Benning to be held in his own quarters under house arrest pending appeal. Nixon also announced that he'd personally review the case before any sentence was carried out. The prosecutor, Captain Aubrey Daniel, wrote Nixon a letter that's worth remembering.

Daniel told the president that the country's reaction had been to treat a soldier who'd murdered unarmed civilians as a hero, and that the president's intervention had damaged the system of military justice. The sentence came down anyway, in stages. The convening authority reduced life imprisonment to 20 years in August of 1971. Secretary of the Army Howard Calloway reduced it to 10 years in April of 1974. A federal district judge in Georgia granted Callie a writ of habeas corpus in September of 1974, which the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals later reversed, though by that point it hardly mattered.

Cali was paroled in November of 1974. He'd served roughly three and a half years, almost all of it confined to an apartment at Fort Benning, where he was allowed visitors and kept a pet. 22 counts of premeditated murder and three and a half years of house arrest. Cali was guilty. I don't think there's serious doubt about that on the evidence, and I don't think following orders gets him out from under it. The men standing next to him refused, and nothing happened to them.

If Dersie could say no while looking into the same ditch, so could Callie. And Callie was the officer. Officers get held to that standard specifically because they're the ones who convert an ambiguous instruction into a lawful or an unlawful order. That's the job. And I also think he was used. Look at what the outcome accomplished institutionally. One junior officer, universally described as marginal and disliked, gets convicted.

Everybody above him is acquitted or has the charges dismissed. The division commander takes a demotion in rank and a censure, which is an administrative penalty. The story becomes a question about one man's character, rather than a question about how a body counts strategy in a free-fire province produced two massacres in a single morning. and my K-4, which would have made the one bad Apple story impossible to sustain, effectively disappears. If you set out to design a prosecution that would satisfy public demand for accountability while protecting the institution from any structural finding, you'd design this one. I'm not asserting a conspiracy, and I don't need one. Institutions protect themselves without

anybody drawing up a plan. What complicates all that is the public reaction, because it cuts hard against it. The institution didn't have to sell Cali to the American public as a scapegoat. Large parts of the American public rejected the conviction outright and treated him as a persecuted soldier. Those hundred thousand letters weren't organized by the Pentagon. That was the country in 1971, being told that an American lieutenant had shot babies in a ditch and responding by buying a novelty record about him. I don't have a real explanation for that. My best guess is that by 1971 an enormous number of American families had a son or a brother or a husband who'd been in Vietnam and accepting what Cali did meant opening a question about what everybody else had done over there

it was easier to defend him than to ask set William Cali next to Hugh Thompson and you've got about as clean a comparison as history ever hands you same war same day same village same chain of command, same institutional pressure, and both of them young men in their 20s with a weapon and a decision to make in a matter of seconds, with no lawyer available and no time to think it through. One of them decided the people in front of him didn't count as people. The other one landed a helicopter between armed Americans and a bunker full of civilians and told his gunner to fire on his own countrymen if they opened up. Thompson's choice cost him for a long time afterward. When he reported it, he initially received a decoration.

whose citation misdescribed what had actually happened, which is its own quiet insult. When he testified during the investigations and the trials, he was treated badly by members of Congress. He got hate mail and he got threats, and he said later that people left dead animals on his porch. A man who prevented murders was for years, treated as the problem.

It took 30 years to fix. In March of 1998, Hugh Thompson, Lawrence Colburn, and Glenn Andriata were awarded the Soldiers Medal, which is the highest American award for bravery, not involving contact with an enemy. Andriadas was posthumous since he'd been dead since April of 1968. The ceremony was held at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Thompson and Colburn went back to Sun Mai for the 30th anniversary

and met survivors, including Dobah. The child Andriata had carried out of the ditch. Hugh Thompson died in 2006, and Lawrence Colburn died in 2016. The lesson people usually draw from Thompson is that one person can make a difference. And frankly, I think that explanation is a little lacking. What strikes me is that Thompson didn't have any more information than anybody else that morning, and he wasn't any smarter.

What he had was a working definition of what he wasn't going to be part of, and he'd settled on that definition well before March 16th, because there's no time to work it out at 300 feet with the rotor turning. You don't get to decide who you are in the moment. You decide beforehand, and the moment just tells you what you decided. The numbers in this case are a mess. The figure carved at the memorial and used by the Vietnamese government is 504 dead across Sun My Village. That count covers both My Life 4 and my K-4, and it was compiled from local records, survivor accounts, and family testimony, name by name.

The American investigative figures are lower and more names. Arrow. The Criminal Investigation Division concluded that at least 347 people were killed at My Life 4, and the Peer's Inquiry added roughly 90 killed at My K-4. Add those together and you land somewhere around 440, which is in the same neighborhood as the Vietnamese figure. The American investigation started two years late, so the bodies were long gone. There were no autopsies, no scene examination, and no forensic evidence of any kind. Investigators were reconstructing a homicide scene out of memory, and specifically out of the memories of the people who'd done it, most of whom had every reason to remember less, rather

than more. The American figures were built from what could be corroborated by multiple witnesses, and the standard was deliberately conservative, because those numbers were headed into criminal prosecutions. The Vietnamese count was compiled locally and includes people whose deaths were known to their neighbors and families, but were never described by any American witness. It also covers the full village area rather than just the two sub-hamlets where American investigators concentrated. And it's also true that it was compiled by a government

with a strong interest in the highest defensible number. My honest feeling is that the real total is at least 400 and probably closer to 500, that the American figures are floors rather than estimates, and that we're never going to know the exact number, because the conditions required to know it were destroyed on purpose in the spring of 1968 by officers writing reports. That's what a cover-up actually costs. It isn't only the delay. It's the permanent, unrecoverable loss of the ability to count the dead. Paul Medlow, the soldier who fired into the ditch while crying and then told the story on national television, lived out the rest of his life in Indiana and mostly declined to talk about it further. Varnato Simpson, who admitted

killing around 25 people, spoke on camera in the late 80s for a British documentary, and described a total collapse of everything he'd been before that morning. His life afterward was extremely hard and it ended badly in 1997. Michael Bernhardt, who refused to fire, testified repeatedly over the years and spent decades being asked about it by strangers. Ronald Ridenauer became a journalist. He won awards for investigative reporting and spent his whole career doing the same kind of work he'd done as an enlisted man with a notebook. He died in 1998 at the age of 52.

Ronald Habral kept giving interviews about the photographs for decades, including some in which he acknowledged that he'd photographed rather than intervened, which is something he had to carry. Ernest Medina died in 2018. Orrin Henderson died in 1998. Samuel Costor died in 2006. William Calley left the army after his parole. married and worked in his father-in-law's jewelry store in Columbus, Georgia, a short drive from Fort Benning where he'd been tried. He refused interviews for decades. In August of 2009, at a Kiwanis club meeting in Columbus, he spoke publicly about my life for the first time in 40 years. He said there wasn't a day that went by that he didn't feel remorse for what happened, and he

repeated that he'd been following the orders of his superior and had been wrong not to stand up to them. He died on April 28, 24 in Gainesville, Florida, at the age of 80. There's a memorial at Sun Mai today, standing on the ground where the sub-hamlet used to be. There's a museum and a statue. There are reconstructed foundations of the houses that burned, with the family names on markers. Along the paths, footprints are set into the ground, adult footprints and small ones. The small ones made to the size of a child's foot, running toward the ditch. And there's a wall with 5404 names on it, arranged by household, so you read them in family groups. You'll find a woman's name and then four or five children's names listed under it,

some of them with an age of one year or a few months. Fom Thon Kong, who was 11 years old and lay underneath his mother and his four brothers and sisters in a bunker, until the shooting stopped, spent much of his adult life working at that memorial. Part of his job for years was walking American visitors through the site and answering their questions. Some of those visitors were veterans. He did it anyway. That's the image I keep coming back to when I think about this case. And it isn't Cali in his apartment at Fort Benning with a pet and a television.

And it isn't the record album or the 100,000 telegrams. It's a man in his 60s standing on the ground where his entire family was killed when he was 11 years old. explaining to visitors from the country that did it what happened here on a Saturday morning in March of 1968. Before we close this episode, I want to say something about the phrase, War is Hell. The phrase is true. Vietnam was about as bad a war as this country has ever asked young men to fight.

There was no front line and no rear area. The enemy didn't wear a uniform and often didn't carry a weapon until the moment he needed one. The ground itself was hostile, seated, with mines and traps built out of American ordinance that had failed to go off the first time. Most of the men fighting it were very young. A lot of them were draftees, and the 12-month rotation meant a man arrived alone into a company of strangers and left alone 12 months later, which is about the worst possible way to build the kind of unit cohesion that holds men together when things go wrong. Nobody could tell them what winning looked like, and when they

came home. A good number of them found out the country that sent them didn't particularly want to hear about it. Charlie Company didn't step off the boat in December of 1967 as murderers. They spent three months watching friends get taken apart by things they couldn't shoot back at, and they buried a sergeant they liked on the 15th of March and went into Sun Mai on the 16th. I've spent enough of my life around violence and around people who've been marinating in fear and grief to know what that does to judgment. I'm not going to stand here and pretend I don't understand how men get to that point. But here's where the phrase quits working as an explanation. Every single one of those pressures pressed down just as heavily on James Dersy, who was standing at the same ditch and refused the order.

It pressed on Robert Maples, who wouldn't carry his machine gun over there. It pressed on Michael Bernhardt, who said out loud that he wasn't doing it and then had to keep serving alongside the men who did. Q. Thompson had been flying the same war for the same length of time and had every reason to be exhausted and angry and done with the whole thing. And he put a helicopter on the ground between armed Americans and a bunker full of strangers. The hell was distributed evenly that morning. The behavior wasn't. That's the fact that no amount of context dissolves. And the law of war was never written for easy circumstances. Nobody needs a rule telling him not to shoot a child when nothing is at stake and nothing is on the line. Those rules exist

precisely because the men who drafted them understood exactly what combat does to a person, and they wrote them anyway, and they wrote them for the worst day rather than the best one. A standard that only holds when it's convenient isn't a standard at all. It's a preference. So the obligation stands, and it's an ugly one, because nobody gets to meet it under good conditions. You won't be handed a briefing that tells you plainly what's coming. You'll get an ambiguous instruction from a man whose approval you want, on a morning after you buried somebody, in a place where everyone around you has already decided how the day is going to go.

There's no time to work out your position while it's happening. Thompson didn't work his out at 300 feet with the rotor turning. He'd settled it long before, which is the only reason it was available to him when he needed it. That's the obligation. Not to be brave in the moment, because bravery in the moment is mostly luck and reflex, but to have decided in advance what you will not be played.

part of so that the decision is already made when somebody finally asked you to make it. A handful of men and son Ma had done that work ahead of time, and the people they pulled out of that bunker lived to be old. The wall at the memorial is what it cost when the rest of them hadn't. Five hundred and four names arranged by household on the ground where those households used to stand.