Jocko Podcast - 31: Book Review, “Four Hours in My Lai” by Michael Bilton

Episode Date: July 13, 2016

0:00:00 - Book Review.  Four Hours in My Lai, by Michael Bilton and Kevin Sim  2:22:22 - Cool Online / Onnit stuff - Onnit.com/JockoSupport this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/jocko-podcast/exclusive-content

This is Jocko podcast number 31 with Echo Charles and me, Jocko Willink. Vernato Simpson watched three men, including Huto and Hudson, go into a hut with a girl aged about 17. Her trousers were forcibly removed. The girl was held down while she was violated. Simpson observed this from the door. Fagan was also part of the girl's... ordeal. When they were finished, the helpless captive was shot dead. Her face completely blown away. Torres stabbed several people with a bowie knife and was seen by Huto raping a girl.

She was crying, fighting, and resisting him. Another soldier held her down. For Simpson, the crucial moment was when he shot the woman and baby soon after entering the village. I went to turn her over and there was a little baby with her that I had also killed. The baby's face was half gone. My mind just went. The training came to me and I just started killing. Old men, women, children, water buffaloes, everything. We were told to leave nothing standing. We did what we were told, regardless of whether they were civilians. They was the enemy. Period.

Kill. If you don't follow a direct order, you can be shot yourself. Now what am I supposed to do? You're damned if you do, and you're damned if you don't. You didn't have to look for people to kill. They were just there. I cut their throats, cut off their hands, cut out their tongue, their hair, scalp them. did it. A lot of people were doing it and I just followed. I just lost all sense of direction. I just

started killing any kind of way I can kill. It just came. I didn't know I had it in me. After I killed the child, my whole mind just went. It just went. And after you start, it's very easy to keep on. The hardest is to kill the first time, but once you kill, then it becomes easier to kill the next person and the next one and the next one because I had no feelings no emotion nothing I just killed I wasn't the only one that did it a lot of people in the company did it hung them up all types of ways any type of way that you could kill someone that's what they did that day in me lie I was personally responsible for killing about 25 people personally I don't think beforehand anyone thought we would kill so many people

I mean, we're talking about four to 500 people. We almost wiped out the whole village, a whole community. I can't forget the magnitude of the number of people that we killed and how they were killed, killed in lots of ways. Do you realize what it's like killing 500 people in a matter of four or five hours? It's just like the gas chambers, what Hitler did. You line up 50 people, women, old men, children, and just mow them down. and that's the way it was

from 25 to 50 to 100 just killed we rounded them up me and a couple of guys just put the M16 on automatic and just mowed them down good evening echo good evening well that was an excerpt from a book

called four hours in mili by Michael Billton and Kevin Sim And when I was prepping for this, I mentioned to a couple people that I was going to do Mili on the podcast next. And surprisingly, a lot of people didn't know what it was. And I thought everybody knew about Milai. Mili is a war crime.

It's an atrocity. and what makes it so hard to talk about is that it was an atrocity and a war crime that was committed by American soldiers. Now, of course, there's people out there that like to claim that, you know, that America is this evil imperialistic empire, which I am telling you, it is not. Not by any stretch. America isn't an incredibly benevolent nation with a conscience and a soul that as a whole is good

and have we done some things in the past that don't reflect that we absolutely have but for the most part we have stood up for the week we have liberated the oppressed we defeated the Nazis we defeated the imperial Japanese army we give aid and military assistance and education and money to less fortunate people all over the world all the time. We are a good nation filled with, for the most

part, good people, but not all good people. And people, inside of people, inside of humans, there can be something very dark. And sometimes that darkness can override the light. And that is exactly what happened in a small village in Vietnam called Mili on March 16th, 1968, at 0.715 in the morning. A massacre and atrocity. The murder of hundreds and hundreds of old men, women, and children, unarmed, begging for mercy. shot stabbed

blown up raped tortured killed murdered murdered and no I don't like talking about this

especially when it's Americans that are committing the sin when we talk about the Nazis in Germany and we talk about the Chessians and Grodhny and we talk about the Japanese in the in the

in the Malaysian jungle and the Hutus in Rwanda. I don't like that, but this is us. And so the question comes, it came into my mind. Do I do this? Do I talk about this? Can I talk about this? And the bottom line is not can I. But we have to.

We have to cover this. We have to talk about it. We can't ignore it. We can't deny it. We have to take ownership of it. To admit it. To air it out. And to keep it in the front of our minds to ensure that we do everything we can to make sure

nothing like this ever happens again. War is hell. Mili is the ninth circle of hell. The worst part. And let's go there. to make sure we remember and start by looking at the path that led there

and in order to look at the path that led there we're going to start just by a little bit of broad strategy because there's plenty of blame to go around and when you look at the broad strategy and the way it was laid out here's a little piece on General Westmoreland who was running the strategy in Vietnam General Westmoreland's strategy of attrition also had an important effect on our behavior.

Our mission was not to win terrain or seize positions, but simply to kill. To kill communists and kill as many of them as possible. Stack them up like cordwood. Victory was a high body count. Defeat a low kill ratio. War, a matter of arithmetic. The pressure on unit commanders to produce as many corpses as well, was intense, and they in turn communicated it to their troops.

It's not surprising, therefore, that some men acquired a contempt for human life and a predilection for taking it. So that's the environment that you're in. The environment, yet you're in, that's being encouraged to kill, kill as many as possible. That's coming from the top. That's the broad strategy. It's not to win this hill, it's a kill. And who are you talking to and who's receiving this?

Here's a little piece on Charlie Company, which is the Army unit that this is based on and that committed this atrocity. We were kids, 18, 19 years old. I was 21 years old at the time. I was one of the oldest people around there among the common grunts. Most of them had never been away from home

before they went into service, and they end up in Vietnam, many of them because they thought they were going to do something courageous on behalf of them. for their country. So young kids. And nowadays, if you're a young kid, you're 13, 14, 16, 18, you know, guess what? You might not have traveled around the world, but you've seen the world because you

have television, you have the internet, you can see all these parts of the world, you can see all different cultures and people. Well, when you're from Iowa in 1967, you don't know anything about this. So you're getting next thing you know, six months later, you're in view. Vietnam. And here's a little bit of where you're going to get your attitude from. Back to the book. To the troops of Charlie Company, to American troops in general, all Vietnamese were gooks, dinks, dopes, and slopes. Soldiers who could not find the Vietnamese who were their enemy soon struck out wildly at the Vietnamese who were supposed to be their friends.

How can you tell the enemy, Varnato Simpson said. said, they all looked the same. To which another Milai veteran added, In the end, everyone in that country was the enemy. In all wars, it is common for the enemy to be dehumanized, but in Vietnam, American soldiers also dehumanize their allies. Charlie Company had not been in Vietnam long before the pattern of brutality leading to Mili began. Their own losses and injuries hasten the process.

Hatred, fear, racism, and revenge turned to beatings, torture, rape, murder. All these offenses were committed with impunity by individuals and groups from Charlie Company in the weeks before the massacre. Finally, at Milai, they discovered that having dehumanized the Vietnamese, they had also dehumanized themselves. So you're going to see this escalation. and it's just like we talked about with the Russian soldiers in Cheshnea and how it starts when they don't shave and then they don't clean their weapon

and then they don't stand watch and then the next thing you know they're not doing their duty and they're being overrun you're going to see a similar escalation here around lack of discipline but it's in the way that they treat the local populace

and you know I had one of my high school teachers was a Vietnam veteran. And when I was going to high school, the movie Platoon came out. And you can tell, actually, you can tell that the movie Platoon, the book we did,

Platoon Leader by Jim McDonough, there's so many scenes in that book that you can tell Oliver North read that book and put some of those scenes in the movie. There's no doubt about it. There's even a character named Barnes in the book and in the movie. Well, Platoon also showed

you know, a very it portrayed the Americans in a very rough light in many of the situations. And when I talked to one of my teachers in high school that was a Vietnam vet and he just said, you know, the thing that they didn't show very well, because they show the guys coming in

and really beating people, killing people, burning villages. And what he said was, you know, Jock, we would walk around a village and one of our guys would hit a booby trap every day, every other day, and the villagers are out there walking on the same trails, but they're not getting blown up. And so after weeks and then months of this happening,

of me losing two guys, three guys, six guys getting blown up, getting killed, losing their legs, losing their arms, losing their lives, and the Vietnamese villagers, they're not hitting anything, eventually in our minds. they become guilty. Now, when you have leadership that can explain and restrain and control, you can keep that stuff controlled. But when you have leadership that buys into that attitude, you end up in a very bad

situation, which is where we're heading here in Milai. Now back to the strategy. The aim of American strategy was simple, to kill Viet Cong in such large numbers that they would not be replaced or could not be replaced. But how was this to be achieved without at the same time killing large numbers of civilians? This was a problem to which no one on the American side ever discovered a satisfactory answer. It was the biggest failure of the war. It was a failure magnified enormously by American strategic thinking. For Westmoreland, Vietnam was a war of attrition, a meat grinder, as they called it in the Pentagon. The obvious,

The object he explained was to bleed the North, to waken in the communist mind the notion that they were draining their population, to the point of national disaster for generations to come. To achieve this goal and to win in a war of attrition, Americans had to kill Viet Cong fighters faster than the communist could replace them. As befits a great industrial power, the war was to be fought on an industrial scale. Westmoreland, like Patton before him, intended to construct a killing machine, so formidable as to be irresistible. Its sheer size and power would pulverize the enemy into submission. So there you go.

Once again, it's very clear what the goal was from a strategic level. Kill as many as you can. And this kind of spells out how determined they were to do that. Back to the book, from the beginning of American involvement, it had become common practice for patrols to call for artillery or an air strike if they received even sniper fire from a village, irrespective of whether civilians also sheltered there.

By the end of 1966, fighter bombers were making up to 400 such shorties a day. Added to B-52 raids in the country, this meant that around 825 tons of bombs were delivered every day, a figure that doubled by the tonnage of high-explosive fired off by artillery. The solution in Vietnam, General Dupy, told a visiting emissary from the Pentagon, is more bombs, more shells, more napalm, till the other side cracks and gives up.

And that's what they got. In 1967, an article in Life magazine claimed that the cost of killing a single Viet Cong guerrilla was $400,000, which included the cost of 75 bombs and 150 artillery shells. no nation in history had waged a war with such little regard to expense. Only days before Mili, Robert McNamara, the retiring Secretary of Defense, would remind an audience gathered to record his farewell from the Pentagon that more bombs had been dropped on Vietnam than on the whole of Europe during the whole of World War II. So that's just, that's crazy, especially for me, from my perspective,

having been in the war in Iraq and having known guys that fought in Afghanistan, this idea that they take sniper fire from a village and then call in airstrikes on the village is just something that would not happen. And that's why when people frame America as being this power that just goes and crushes and kills all these civilians, I know for a fact it's not true. Yes, obviously it happened in Vietnam, but we go through, great lengths, almost sometimes, I'm telling you, almost sometimes absurd lengths to protect the civilian populace in Iraq, in Afghanistan.

I could bring, I could bring so many people on here on this program, just seals, but I could bring anybody from all kinds of different, every branch of the military to come here and say, oh yeah, here's a situation, my guys were pinned down under fire, we tried to get bombs dropped on this building. No one would do it. We couldn't do it. We weren't allowed to do it. And that's the reality today.

And, you know, part of that is we've matured as a nation. Obviously, we see that that's a problem. I mean, I'm not in care. This is the way we should fight. You know, sometimes we go too far in one direction. This was obviously too far in the other direction. In Iraq, I remember you mentioned something about the enemy in Iraq would use the civilian populace. Oh, there's no doubt about it.

For, like, shields and... They literally used kids as shields. they knew our rules of engagement. They knew that if they stayed in buildings that were close to a mosque or were close to a hospital that we wouldn't bomb it, that we wouldn't hit it with armor. So they were very smart about how they took advantage of our rules of engagement. And then we had to adjust our tactics. So there's no doubt. The enemy figures out what your rules of engagement are and then they start to press you in the seams of that rules of engagement to try and take advantage of it to the best of their ability.

Do you think that that's kind of an indicator that they cared about their civilians less than you cared about their civilians? That is 100% accurate. Of course. I mean, the Al-Qaeda insurgents and now the ISIS in Iraq, they don't care about civilian casualties at all. They don't care. They literally don't care. Their own civilian. Their own.

That's what's crazy. Yeah. And the civilians, again, this is something that never gets portrayed correctly. the civilians don't want ISIS in charge. The civilians didn't want Al-Qaeda in charge. They knew what that would lead to. And, yeah, Al-Qaeda would use their children as shields. I mean, I literally had snipers of mine that shot al-Qaeda guys carrying machine guns in one hand

and a baby in the other hand. And luckily, we had really good snipers. Yeah. Dang. So back to the book here, we get to talk a little bit about the company, the company that this is about Charlie Company. And a company is, the company is soldiers, generally around 150 people. And you'll have three, generally you'll have three platoons in there. So your platoons are going to be 40, 50, maybe 60 people.

Sometimes it's actually a lot more flexible than people realize. Sometimes in Army company, you'll have five platoons. But generally three platoons, what are you? they'll have. So, you know, we're talking here probably about 150 guys in Charlie Company. And their guys, they lay out, they kind of go into a quick background of the different guys. And really what it ends up showing you is a, is a cross-section of America. Some highlights, you know, they got a guy named Fred Widmere from just north of Pittsburgh. You got a guy named Kenneth Hodges from Dublin, Georgia, a farmer's boy. You got a guy from Portland, Portland,

Oregon named Greg Olson, who's a Mormon, a devout Mormon. And, you know, from a good family, you got another guy named Harry Stanley from Gulfport, Mississippi, who was brought up by his mom who believed in hard work, school, and church on Sundays. So you're looking at a fairly normal cross-section. Michael Bernhardt came from a middle-class Catholic family from Long Island. So you got just the troops are just a cross-section. And then you get to one of the leaders in Charlie Company in charge of second platoon. And his name was William Laws Cali, Lieutenant Cali.

And he's going to end up being the monster here. So back to the book, Who Was Cali? In the early 70s, a small industry grew up trying to find the answer. Toilers at this trade looked for a monster, but all they found was a non-entity. A bland young man burdened it seemed with as much ordinariness as any single individual could bear, and almost too much of a conventional and commonplace to retain what is necessary for human identity. To press, Callie, to the press, Cali was just about as average an American as ever came out of the nondescript middle-class streets of Miami. He could be any young American.

He was the quiet American. It was noted with astonishment that he emerged from a background which most would regard as coming close to the American ideal. Elsewhere it was said that his life could have been lifted from the cover drawing of the old Saturday evening post. His averageness had made him so invisible at one college he attended that all anyone could remember about him was that he paid his rent regularly. The many who combed through his life found no shred of deviance, nor even a single distinctive feature other than his height, five feet four inches. He'd come from a stable family.

He'd been neither particularly popular or unpopular. He had no particular talents and few, if any, enthusiasms. Water skiing was the closest he ever got to violence. Throughout a long education, he'd shown no aptitude for learning, His college career simply fizzled out. And that's one of the things. I mean, you can see this guy just is blank white bread, just plain. Just plain.

And that's what they find about him. Now, the company itself, they say, back to the book, Charlie Company was very average. So Charlie Company actually reflects Cali in the fact that Charlie Company as a whole is pretty normal for a company of Army soldiers in Vietnam. An investigation ordered by the Army Chief of Staff. staff in 1970 revealed that 87% of Charlie Company's NCOs were high school graduates, nearly 20% above the Army's norm.

Most of the men in Charlie Company were between 18 and 22 years old. Nearly half the company was black. The Peers report concluded that there was little to distinguish Charlie Company from other rifle companies. The men were generally representative of the typical cross-section of American youth assigned to most combat units throughout the Army. They brought with them the diverse traits, prejudices, and attitudes typical of the various regions of the country and segments of society from whence they came normal people and why it's

important to remember that as we dive into this and as this story develops you're going to see these normal people do completely demonic things and now we talk a little bit here about they're in Hawaii and they're going through some training to prepare them for Vietnam back to the book. What most Charlie Company veterans remember about the training was its unreality and how little it prepared them for what they had to face in Vietnam. For Fred Widmere, it seemed they had been preparing for World War II or Korea. Cali thought they could go to Vietnam and be Audie Murphy's, kick in the door, run in the hooch, give it a good burst, kill. Vernado Simpson said, you can't have no type of training can compare with what

wars like none there's no such thing as preparedness for war we trained and we were so psyched up and they program you to kill and to go to vietnam you know but once you get there it's a different situation now i spent my last three years in the military training guys for war and i'll tell you right now we trained guys really well for war and the training that i received preparing for war did a great job and we improved upon that the more combat experience we got the better we got at training and preparing guys for war but you can see how you know how important the training is and the training has got to be realistic to the situations you're going to be put in and clearly you know they're them saying that this was like world war two or korea well in world war two

and korea there's vast differences between what you're dealing with vietnam i mean world war two or korea You're fighting against enemy uniformed troops that are on the other side of a line that are attacking you, right? That's what World War II in Korea was very much like, for the most part. Another person in a different uniform that you are going to fight and kill. And here we just have something totally different. People that are mixed in with the villages. There's no front line anywhere. They're dressing the same.

Sometimes they have a gun. Sometimes they don't. It's an infinitely challenging more. more challenging situation. Now, here we go back to the book. According to Cali, the only lesson every GI learned was not to trust anybody. It was drummed into us, be sharp, on guard. As soon as you think these people won't kill you, zap.

In combat, you haven't friends. You have enemies. Over and over again, at OCS, we heard this. And I told myself, I'll act as if I'm never secure, as if everyone in Vietnam, would do me in as if everyone is bad. Michael Bernhardt was also concerned. Charlie Company did not match up to the high standards of order and discipline he had learned at the LaSalle Military Academy.

So this is one of the soldiers. He had gone to a military-type high school where they had good discipline and they learned about the military. And then when he got in, he went to airborne school. So he was more the higher-end soldier. Back to the book. Trained as a parachutist. he was disappointed to have been transferred to a run-of-the-mill infantry company.

Bernhardt was unusual for an enlisted man. He was a military animal, a stickler for authority, and was happiest when things were being done by the book. But it was not this system that bothered Bernhardt. He believed that good soldiers not only needed discipline, but liked it. It was the lax discipline in Charlie Company and the fact that officers did not always insist on their orders being carried out that worried him.

In an argument with Cali, shortly after arriving in Hawaii, he found the young Lieutenant Calo and lacking in leadership qualities. So right now we're already seeing some chinks in the armor of Lieutenant Callie. And if you remember what Hackworth said about Milai, he talked about Callie. And he said that Callie had been kicked out or failed. failed officer candidate school three times. And they just wanted, hey, we need more guys. We need to have better numbers getting through.

Go ahead and pass the guy. So you got a guy that lacks leadership. And it is, I mean, it's interesting to talk about how bland this guy is. I mean, somebody that's that bland, that they literally have nothing, no characteristics. Obviously, the guy lacks some leadership characteristics as well, because he has no characteristics. And now you've got the young soldiers looking at the guy and thinking he doesn't have, he doesn't have, he doesn't have, any leadership.

And this is a part that I highlighted because I think it's an interesting perspective of what it was like to go to Vietnam. Back to the book, we flew over on a Continental Airlines plane. Fred Widmere recalls

it was a weird situation. A civilian plane with a civilian stewardess and crew. They were flying both ways. They were flying people out as well as in, so they got to see both ends. I remember getting off the plane and the stewardess just stood there crying

as we unloaded. They were more attuned to what we were getting into than we were. That's pretty surreal. Now, they start talking about what it's like there and what they're doing.

And there's a province there that they they're starting to concentrate on a province in Vietnam and some of the problems that they have there. In a province deemed correctly to be overwhelmingly sympathetic to Viet Cong, this meant eliminating the countryside. The villages were bombed, burned down, and pulverized. Sometimes villagers would be warned in advance that their homes were about to be wiped off the face of the earth.

Sometimes not. It was common practice to shell or bomb any village from which the U.S. soldiers had taken any fire, even small arms, without any warning at all. The destruction was on an or only. almost unimaginable scale. So again, this is something that in the wars that I fought in, that we would never do that. It wasn't just like, oh, we took

rifle fire from a village, bombed the whole thing. That was not happening. This was the reality behind Westmoreland's prediction in 1965 that the war will bring about a moment of decision for the peasant farmer. He will have to choose if he

stays alive. American officials frequently referred to this choice. The choice is yours one leaflet dropped on villages proclaimed. If you refuse to let Viet Cong use your villages and hamlets as their battlefield, your homes and lives will be spared.

A million leaflets a day were being dropped on Kwainang province. Quangnai province at this time. The whole exercise assumed that the largely illiterate peasants could actually read them. From 1965 to

1972, 50 billion leaflets were dropped over Vietnam, 1,500 each for every member of the population. So that's just, when you think about we're dropping these leaflets to tell people what to do and most of the popular, a lot of the population is illiterate. Hey, get out of your village. Well, there's a piece of paper flying from the sky, and I don't know what it says. Back to the book. To stay and be killed or to go join thousands of other refugees in the squal of refugee camps or the mushrooming shanty towns around the towns and cities, what kind of a choice

was this? But for the Americans, the whole point of clearing an area of countryside of its people was so that anyone who remained must be Viet Cong. These areas became free fire zones. Anything that happened to someone who chose to remain in or return to a free fire zone was their own fault. They could expect the worst. The belief that people had been given a chance to take a chance to get out had made their choice, made the strategy morally workable. In a free-fire zone, the pursuit of a high body count could proceed unencumbered by the need to discriminate between combatants and civilians at all. Nowhere was this breathtaking carelessness of human life greater than in Kwang Nye. No one was actually saying kill civilians, but no one strived to keep them alive.

because the killing of civilians came to be seen as unavoidable, less and less time was spent on seeing how it could be avoided. To American spokesmen, the death or injury of non-combatants was always accidental, an inevitable tragedy of war and therefore somehow uncorrectable. It doesn't take a genius to figure this out. When the Americans are bombing your village and they're killing your son, your husband, your wife, whatever, I mean, whose side are you going to be on? You know, and we know that the VC were brutal.

Look at the end of platoon commander when the VC come in and murder half the village or three quarters of the village and burn down their huts and blow up all their hooches. We know that the VC were capable and evil. But when our strategy is, hey, give them a quick warning, drop some leaflets, tell them if they stay there, they're VC. And if not, hey, we gave them a chance. So if they're staying there, there must be VC. Charlie Company spent December guarding bridges and practicing in the deserted village of Duke Foe. The army called it in-country orientation. An Australian advisor was brought in to instruct the company on how to distinguish between non-compatants, Viet Cong regulars, suspects,

and sympathizers. He said it was very difficult. So did other instructors from the South Vietnamese Army. They got the same story from former Viet Cong. The Australian emphasized that you should be extremely leery of children. Medina testified later and Medina is the company commander. So the company has three platoons in it. The overall in charge of the company's guy named Medina. Now think about this. Not only you're just distinguishing between good and bad, you've got non-combatants, which are friendly civilians, Viet Cong regulars, suspect. and sympathizers. And now you've got the Vietnamese soldiers who are from Vietnam, obviously,

they're saying how hard it is to distinguish who's who. And then the captured Viet Cong themselves are saying that it's very difficult to know who's who. So how is a kid from Iowa going to be able to tell the difference? We were exposed to something that went far beyond the world as we knew it, said Fred Widmer. We had just left Hawaii with all its hotels and nightclubs and bars, and we wound up in Vietnam, where people went right out and shit in the rice paddy in the morning,

dropped their drawers right along the trail at any time. It was hard to consider people in the modern day and age living like they did. I think it went against our value of what human life is. Callie was always frustrated in his attempts to keep the children away from his men when they were guarding bridges at Duck Fo. All the men loved them, gave the kids. Candies, cookies, chewing gum, everything, he said later. Not me.

I hated them. I was afraid of the Vietnamese kids. So, you know, you got the Australian guy saying, hey, look, belie of the kids. You got the kid from Iowa, the normal American grunt. He loves the kids. And he's giving them gum. He's giving them food, playing with them.

It's all good. Meanwhile, Cali, again, you start seeing the indicators of what's about to take place. You've got a guy that's saying, I hated them. I hated them. It's hard to develop hatred for a kid, for a five-year-old. Now, they become part of a unit that's called Task Force Barker, which is multiple companies, of which Charlie Company is one of them, and this lieutenant colonel, like a battalion commander,

he is the commander of this task force. And actually, his name is Colonel Frank Barker, so they named the task force after him. And they send him up to this province. Now, inside their, back to the book, inside their fire bases, men of the task force enjoyed as much of the American world as could be flown in by helicopter.

They received their mail, American newspapers, cold beers, steaks, ice cream, Coca-Cola, and Playboy magazine. But all around them was the world of the Viet Cong. And I got another interesting thing from this book, just to show the extent that they did this. There was 40 ice cream plants built in Vietnam to supply the troops with ice cream. And each, another figure that I read

was that each person, each soldier in Vietnam, used 100 pounds of supplies a day. Crazy. Now, the guys, they move into this new province, Kwang Nai, and they start to encounter some combat. And I'm very careful to say they're not encountering, they're not really encountering VC.

They're not getting in a bunch of fighters. But they are getting in some. And this is their, they're in their first firefight, and here we go. Back to the book, the men in their first firefight were discovering things about each other and about themselves. Greg Olson recalled, we were pinned down in a trench taking a lot of fire. Sergeant Cowan was on one side, one side of me putting up his helmet to get some bullet holes in it, almost like it was amusing.

On the other side, there was this other guy just sobbing. He'd come unglued, crawling around. like a dog, just lost it. The first platoon withdrew under cover of massive artillery bombardment. According to some of the men, Callie was totally lost. He led them back towards the river. As they broke cover, the snipers started up again. Ron Weber, Callie's radio operator, took a shot which shattered his radio set and tore his kidney out.

He died a few moments later. Charlie Company's first killed in action. his horrified companions lifted him onto the hovering medevac helicopter a GI in shock blubbered and howled no one had known much about shock before if we got hit much harder we would all go into shock callie told his court-martial nearly three years later it was terrifying a terrifying experience in later years callie admitted that he'd been careless he had led his men into an exposed position so they're in a firefight and they're trying to break contact and Callie leads him out into an open area and gets one of his guys killed. And then he has to report back. He got in a firefight. Okay, how'd it go? Let's report back.

What's the body count? Because remember, this is all about killing. This is all about killing. And so he passes up the body count. And here's how he comes up with his body count. Asked later how he arrived at a body count. Callie had replied, you just make an estimate off the top of your head. There is no way to really figure out exact body count.

As long as it was high, that's all they wanted. I generally knew that if I lost a troop, I'd better come back with a body count of 10. Say I shot at least 10 of the enemy, which was pretty hard when you're only fighting one sniper. So you got these guys out in the field, and they're reporting, they're just making up the body count. Now think about what the effect this has on the war effort. Because General Westmoreland's up there saying, hey, we're going to kill them until they can't take it anymore. Well, guess how many people they killed right there?

Zero. They didn't kill that sniper. And yet they're reporting that they killed 10. Well, you multiply that over the whole country and every unit that's out there that's making up these body count numbers. And guess what? Eventually, Westmoreland thinks we're doing a good job and killing a lot of bad guys, but we're not killing any.

Yeah, and that can jam you up when you have that, like, even a different type of scenario where you're getting reports on a certain level of progress, and therefore a lot of times the decisions, the next decisions to be made are based on that. 100%. Any situation that you're in, if you've got your troopers and your subordinate leadership with the mindset that they would rather lie to you than tell you the truth about what's happening, you're never going to be able to make good decisions. Because you're making your decisions based on lies.

Yep. Back to the book. Frustration and anger ate away at the company's esprit of corps. The men stopped believing that Charlie Kong, meaning the Viet Cong, was afraid of Charlie Company. Faith in Medina, the company commander, was still high, although some GIs felt he pushed the company too hard. Cali was another matter.

Opinion on him was universally hostile. According to one GI in his platoon, Callie was a glory-hungry person, the kind of person who would have sacrificed all of us for his own personal advancement. John Smale, a squad leader in third platoon, called him a nervous, excitable type who yelled a lot. I think it's important for you to know, Smale told Army CID that Callie was so disliked by members of the unit that they put a bounty on his head. None of the men had any respect for him as a military leader. Greg Olson thought he was incompetent.

I remember instances that we were lost one time at night. Everyone knew we were lost, but Cali wouldn't admit it. So there you go. You got a guy. We talk about this all the time. And say, oh, what do you do if you make a mistake? You own the mistake. If you need help, you say, hey, you know what? I'm not sure we were on the map

right now. Let me get someone up here to do a map study. Help me out. Let's figure out where we are. But instead, he just lies. He doesn't admit it. He doesn't own it. and no one is going to have respect for him. Back to the book, someone else thought Callie acted like a small guy who had been pushed around

a lot by bigger people before he joined the army. Now that he had authority, he didn't know how to use it, and he didn't listen to suggestions. I talk about this all the time. If you're in a leadership position, you need to listen to your people,

up and down the chain of command. That's one of the main thing that he's getting called out on. Doesn't it, when he's wrong and doesn't listen to suggestions. Many commented that there was something about him that rubbed people the wrong way. Medina, the company commander, gave his junior lieutenant a tough time

and ridiculed him in front of his men. The captain called him lieutenant shithead regularly. One GI remembered. That tended to minimize your opinion of him. Others recalled that Calle's attempt to win favor with Medina were frequently rebuffed with a sarcastic, listen, sweetheart. So now we have another situation

where you have a subordinate leader that's not doing a good job, he's not being a good leader, people don't respect him, and what is his superior doing? Undermining him in front of his troops, instead of counseling him, instead of helping him aside

and say, hey, it's okay to admit when you're wrong, hey, you need to take suggestions from your guys. Instead, he's calling him a shithead, lieutenant shithead, undermining him all the time. So now you get put in Cali

in an even worse position. Now, they continue to patrol, they're starting to take some casualties, and they start to go down the spiral. Back to the book, Charlie Company's drift toward brutality took very little time. It began with beating up suspects in villages and quickly became more serious. Bernhardt stayed aloof from the process. Fred Widmere did not. They had explained the Geneva Convention to us during our trip. training and in the beginning we did what we thought was right and just turned the prisoners

over. But it was kind of hard after you'd been there a while and you started seeing, learning, finding out what real experience is all about. Here you are fighting an enemy who doesn't follow the Geneva Convention, but you have to abide by it. It's like being in a football team where you have to follow the rules to the letter and the other team can do whatever the hell they like. The voices of authority in the company, the platoon starts.

sergeants and officers acknowledged that this executing prisoners was a proper way to behave. Who were the grunts to disagree with it? We supported it. So they've started to execute prisoners, which is obviously against the Geneva Convention, but the way they're looking at it, they're seeing that the sergeants and the platoon commanders are like okay with it. So the grunts are, okay, I guess that's the way it's going to be. and Whedmere goes on to say

the first time I saw something really bad was the point at which we stopped taking prisoners we'd been there about a month and a half or maybe two months there was one guy Medina had shoot the prisoners instead of having everyone around and shoot them we would walk them down towards the they would walk them down towards the beach or behind some sand dunes

and shoot them a couple of shots and they were done as time went by things were done ears cut off mutilation one prisoner had his arms tied straight out on a stick one woman was a woman and one was a man there was no question that these two were via con

the woman was working as a nurse and we found them in a tunnel with all the medical supplies and we knew they were the enemy lit cigarettes were put inside the elastic of the guy's pants and we watched him dance around because they were burning his ass I think it was a bit of making him talk and a bit of venting our frustrations, a bit of both. I don't remember what happened to them whether they were turned over or shot. The more it went on, the more you didn't trust anyone. You didn't believe anybody because you didn't know who was who.

You didn't know who the enemy was. As we went on, more and more prisoners would be executed. I would say it was a regular occurrence. I did abuse someone, a prisoner, a papacy. I found myself doing the same things that had been going on all along. I found myself caught up in it. We caught his beard off. That was an insult.

A papasan with a beard is considered as the wise man, and to cut off their beard was a real sign of disrespect to them. You found yourself punching them around, beating them up, trying to get them to talk. I never did head anyone with a rifle. I have taken a knife to them. I never tortured anyone to death. I think I probably saw people tortured.

to death. So you hear this guy using this verbiage, you find yourself punching them around. It's almost as if it's not him. He's detached. He's like detached. Right? We talk about being detached. Well, he's detached from doing something that he knows he shouldn't be doing. Yeah, it seems like he comes back and kind of

checks back in every once in a while. It's like, dang, I kind of woke up and found myself doing this thing. Bernhardt, an outsider as usual, watch the downward spiral. It started with just plain prisoners. Prisoners, prisoners you thought were the enemy.

Then you'd go on to prisoners who weren't the enemy, and then the civilians because there was no difference between the enemy and civilians. It came to a point where a guy could kill anybody. During an interrogation in one village, Harry Stanley was standing only 10 feet away while Calley and another GI, Herbert Carter, interrogated an old farmer.

Lieutenant Callie asked him questions, and then Carter hit the old man in the mouth twice with his fist. Then Carter pushed the old man into a well, but the old man spread his legs and arms and held on and didn't fall into the well. Then Carter hit the old man in the stomach with his rifle stock. The old man fell, the old man's feet fell into the well, but he was holding on with his hands. Carter hit the man's fingers, trying to make him fall into the well. Then Lieutenant Callie shot the man with his M-16. For some G.I's instance like these showed that the official attitude to brutality was permissive.

What resulted was a moral vacuum, a moratorium on restraint and self-control. Common decency became optional, a matter of personal inclination. Even those who refused to be drawn in were left morally thrown off balance. Greg Olson was in the village when Callie and Carter threw the old man down the well. I was in the village. I remember seeing people butted in the head with rifles, but you start losing your sense of what's normal. You don't give up your morals, but you become a lot more tolerant. We believe this behavior was pretty commonplace.

I didn't think we were doing anything different from any other unit. You really do lose your sense, not of right and wrong, but your degree of right and wrong. And Michael Bernhardt, who watched what was happening from the sidelines, was already viewed with some mistrust by Medina, Callie, and others in the company. When I saw American soldiers committing acts that could be called atrocities if someone else had done them, I began to think that maybe I'd just been too naive all my life, that this is the way things really were. Little by little, I began to see that this group of men was getting out of control. Discipline was beginning to wear off. Without military discipline, they were alone in the country with no point of reference.

The things they had brought from their families and schools were far away and beginning. to disappear. Fred Widmer felt, Fred Widmer too, felt things going from bad to worse and felt himself drawn along with the tide. If it ever occurred to me that things were getting out a hand or that I was questioning what I myself might be capable of doing, I suppressed it. It did creep up in my mind because you still have those values of what is right and what is wrong that you have been taught all your life. I think the frustration got to me, but I also think I began to enjoy it. That's what's scary because at the time you find yourself enjoying it. I guess you could term it the superiority we had over them. It's a strange feeling. In retrospect, you look back on it

and wonder how you yourself could have done it. Twenty years later, when you look back at things that happened, things that transpired, things you did, you say, why? Why did I do that? That is not me. Something happened to me. You reach a point over there where you snap. That's the easiest way to put it. You finally snap. Somebody flicks a switch and you are a completely different person. There's a culture of violence, of brutality,

with people all around you doing the same thing, continuing down the spiral. Leonard Gonzalez, a member of second platoon, saw rapes committed every time the company went through a village. One squad got one girl, one lady Then they told me, go in there, and I said, no, I won't. So what I did is I went inside and she looked real bad. The only thing I can do for the lady is like, I got the canteen and I wiped her.

She was awful for spiring. I wiped her forehead. I tried to help her. She got scared of me. I was part of them. I tried to tell her I don't have nothing to do with it. I helped her to her feet. I took her to the well.

I got some water from the well. Then another squad heard about 13 guys who did their thing with this woman and were going to try her out and I told them to leave her alone. And then at that time I just walked off.

I said, forget it. I don't want to kill my own men. I tried to tell her, get out of here, go. She was going to run but after 13 guys got to her it's hard to walk they're losing it

there's no leadership they're losing it now they get into a they get in a minefield and they take some casualties in a minefield and here's Medina's account

of what happened in this minefield we started sweeping the area as best we could with mine detectors taking pieces of toilet paper and marking the mines that we found We had one individual that we could not evacuate that was dead. I took the medic that was with me, the platoon medic from First Platoon, and he and I moved through the minefield to where an individual was lying. He was split as if somebody had taken a cleaver and right up from his crotch all the way up to his chest cavity.

I had never seen anything like it that looked so unreal in my entire life. The intestines, the liver, and the stomach and the blood just looked like plastic. We took a poncho and we spread it out. and started, and the medic started to pick him up by the legs. I reached underneath his arms to place him under the poncho and we set him on top of another mine. The concussion blew me back. I fell backward. As I got up, the medic was starting to go to pieces.

I looked at him as if he had stood behind the screen and somebody had taken a paint brush with red paint and splattered it through the screen. He had blood all over him. I grabbed him as he started to pass me and I shook him and I said my God don't go to pieces on me You're the only medic I've got I have these people that are hurt I hit him I slapped him I knocked him to the ground and I helped him to get back up and I saw on his religious metal a piece of liver And I tried to get it off the individual before he seen it The individual was very shook up everybody was shaken the three men were dead another 12th suffered ghastly injuries.

Few could forget their own fear, or the screams of the wounded, or the gruesome task of loading the MEDAVAC helicopters. When you've been through a minefield and put the remains of your friends in body bags, nothing shocks you anymore. So that minefield costs them three dead and 12 severely wounded.

And we talk about IEDs a lot in here. We talked about them with Jody, Jody Middick, who got blown up by an IED. There's no one to fight. The bomb goes off and that's it. Who did this? Who do you blame? Well, let me answer that question for these guys.

Most of all, they blame the Vietnamese. Not the Viet Cong who they could not see or find, but the Vietnamese of the villages who did not warn them of the minefields and of the booby traps. Same thing my school teacher told me. They're starting to appoint. the blame to these

Vietnamese villagers. Lieutenant Callie noticed the change in the mood of the men. He had been on leave at the time of the incident, so he wasn't around when this happened. He had been on leave at the time of the incident

and had returned the LZ uptight in time to meet the helicopters, ferrying the dead and injured. From now on, the men in his platoon no longer gave candy to the Vietnamese children. They came across. while on patrol in the villages. Instead, Callie noticed with some satisfaction.

They kicked everybody aside, even the nice, sweet kids. He could hardly refrain from telling them, well, I told you so. Now, they are starting to, after that incident, they're starting to now assemble information and intelligence for this raid that they're planning in Milai. so and I think it's really important to take a look at the where this intelligence is coming from and how this because it paints a very important part of the picture of what these guys are being told back to the book an intelligence roundup for March 1968 prepared respectively summed up the state of knowledge was this although Sontin district remained relatively quiet during this period elements of the 48th and existing local force units probably roaming roamed the district countryside. The hills north and northwest of Mili area were probable base camps for elements of the 48th Battalion.

And it probably received supplies from the peninsula. So the 48th is an enemy unit, an enemy battalion. And you can hear the word probable. being used. Okay, they're probably in the area. The villagers probably support them. So there isn't a claim being made from higher, from above the chain of command. But you're going to hear that change. So above the chain of command, there's higher intelligence that's making these claims that there's probable VC there, that they're probably work in this area, that they're probably getting supported from the village as well. As this filters down, it turns from

probable to like definite. There is a strange discrepancy between what the Army thought it knew about the Viet Cong and what the task force thought it knew. Army intelligence made only tentative claims. By contrast, Ramsdale and for that manner, Kutak were almost pontifical. So these are the two intelligence guys at the task force level. So does that make sense? So you've got the higher army above them is telling them, hey, there's problem this, problem of that.

And these guys are basically starting to say, no, no, this is VC. This is what this is what's happening, factually. Is that kind of like the game of telephone, one of those deals? Yeah, it is. And it's also, you're going to find, as I go into this, that both these guys aren't experienced. So I'll get to it. There was a kind of perverse destiny that brought the two overweight and middle-aged American captains, Ramsdale and Kutak, together in Tet Kwang Nye City.

Both were new boys to the real world of intelligence assessment in a battle zone. Both were inexperienced, both desperately eager to establish a reputation. Ramsdale had provided intelligence to Kutak prior to Mili. Operation and the curious convergence of their views irresistibly suggests that it was indeed Ramsdell, who had provided intelligence for the attack on Milai itself. Suggestions that the 48th Local Force Battalion was up to 400 strong, that everyone in the village was Viet Cong or Viet Cong sympathizer, and that at 7 on Saturday morning,

all bona fide civilians would have left the village for the market. All these views were shared by Ramesdale and Kutak and accepted uncritically by Task Force Barker. So think about that. You got these guys saying there's 400, up to 400 enemy in the area, that the village is all Viet Cong sympathizers, and that on a Saturday, everyone that's their actual civilian will have left at 7 o'clock in the morning for the market. You can't make that claim about any group of civilians in the world, that everyone's going

to do something at the same time. Impossible that you could make that claim. Back to the book. Asked later about intelligence. indicating that no civilians would be left in the village at the time of the attack. Ramsdale replied that the civilians went to market early in the morning because of the heat. They testified it appears in a similar vein. In the civilian population area, there were several markets, large markets,

where all the people would gather each day because they had no refrigeration or anything like it. With hindsight, it appears naive, even simple-minded. Yet in 1968, this nugget of anthropological insect, site, along with the corollary that everyone who is not at the market was Viet Cong was deemed unchallengeable right by Ramsdale, considered impeccable by Kutak and passed on unamended to the bitter men of Charlie Company seeking revenge for their losses. This is just, this is a horrible. It's a horrible situation.

And I had, I had situations like that occur with me where it was early, my first deployment to Iraq, where we, got almost like a movie. We would get maps of a city area, and there'd be a red X on the target building. Hey, you're bad guys in this building. And I remember one time we went out, we hit the building with the red X on it. And we didn't find anything. Or the people that we got out of there turned out to be not the person we were looking for.

And as we did further analysis, we realized that the building was the wrong building. And after that, I got very critical about, okay, who put the red X on this building? Tell me who did that and why they did it. I want to know, I'm not just going off of, you put a red X on a building, it doesn't mean anything to me. I want to know who did that.

And I had another situation where we went in, and hit a building, you know, where there was suspected bad guy. We had intelligence on. This guy was a financier and had money and was giving it to the insurgents. And so we went and captured him and searched his house

and, you know, blew his door off. We caused impact to his house. And then when we got him back, after we talked to him, we figured out this guy was not bad. And as I pulled the string on where this intelligence came from, that eventually led somebody to put a red X on his house and described the guy and who he was, I found out that it was actually,

the guy owned a business, and he had fired one of his employees. And when he fired one of his employees, well, his employee went and told the Americans, hey, this guy's a bad guy. This guy's funding, you know, insurgents. Got a little disgruntled. So all you had to do is dig in

and find a little bit more about the information and you figured out it was a disgruntled employee. So guys out there in the field right now when you're always question your intelligence. Nothing against the intelligence, folks. They're going to do the best they can, but they're not the ones that are going to get the blood on their hands. So question the intelligence.

Find out what the sources are. Find out where the information came from. ask who drew that red X. Ask who said there's not going to be any villagers in the, in the, no civilians in the village after 7 o'clock in the morning. Ask those questions. Meanwhile, the losses, these guys are continued to take casualties.

So they took, what was it, three killed and 12 wounded, and now they got Sergeant Cox killed by a booby trap. They got a Dyson lost both legs. Hendrick's, it was blinded, suffered groin injuries, and lost an arm and a leg. So they're continuing to take casualties and on top of the casualties that they're taking,

you're starting to get an escalation of behavior, of negative behavior. And here's an example of that. Back to the book, A villager passing on a bicycle was beaten up but managed to escape. A woman working in the fields was shot when somebody shouted that she was carrying a weapon. When the squad came closer, they discovered she was unarmed and still alive. They shot her again and kicked her body to a pulp. somebody stole her ring.

They were now close to their base, and angry villagers stormed the camp and protest against the murder. Medina managed to hush it up. No one was charged with any offense. Medina said later that the woman had been discovered with a detonator still in her hand.

Callie commented that Medina wasn't about to lose men just because they'd kicked a Vietnamese kid or killed a damn innocent woman. He had to keep a combat effective unit. So now you've got clear cover-up going on by the chain of command. Hey, she had a detonator.

She didn't have a detonator. And it's very visible to see this downward spiral from a letter from Greg Olson, who, like I said, he was the faithful Mormon kid. And he writes a letter to his dad back in the States. Dear dad, how's everything with you? I'm still here on the bridge. We leave Saturday. One of our platoons went out on a routine patrol today and came across our...

155 millimeter artillery round that was booby trap it killed one man blew the legs off two others and injured two more and it all turned out a bad day made even worse on their way back to to daddy which is their name of their camp they saw a woman working in the fields they shot and wounded her then they kicked her to death and emptied their magazines in her head they slugged every little kid they came across. Why in God's name does this have to happen? These are all seemingly normal guys. Some were friends of mine.

For a while, they were wild like animals. It was murder, and I'm ashamed of myself for not trying to do anything about it. This isn't the first time, Dad. I've seen it many times before. I don't know why I'm telling you this. I guess I just want to get it all off my chest.

My faith in fellow man is all shot to hell. I just want my time to pass and I just want to come home. I really believe, as you do, Dad, there's a cause behind all this and if it is God's will for me to go, I would rather do it here than

home on a freeway. Saturday we're going to be dropped by air in an NVA stronghold. I'm hoping I'll be able to get out of here for a few days to go to a conference. Don't expect any letters for me for a while, but please keep writing them.

I love and miss you and mom so much. your son Greg so again highlighted in there the normalcy of the guys and how they're starting to slide the clear it's obvious to Greg Olson that what's happening is wrong and unfortunately he's not stepping up and saying anything he's not bringing it to the attention of anyone he's letting it happen back to the book with these most recent losses Charlie Company was down to 105 men since arriving in Vietnam three months before they had suffered 28 casualties including five killed three of them in action

all the casualties all the casualties come from mines booby traps and snipers they had never seen or encountered the enemy in any strength there had been no heavy contact they were battle scarred without being battle hardened so you can imagine again it's what my what's what my high school teacher told me they're there's viewing they're taking these casualties and it's very similar to iraq and afghanistan where i think in iraq it was 75% of the casualties are from iEDs so there's no one to shoot at after an id blows up oftentimes there's nothing to shoot at now with those casualties with that viewpoint they're starting to prepare as i said for this this assault on mili in back to the book all

no written record of the briefing survives witnesses all agree on the general thrust of Kutak's contribution this is the intelligence officer the 48th LF battalion was dispersed throughout the area but the latest intelligence the assemble officers were told suggested that VC headquarters and two companies totaling over 200 fighting men were located in mili four the civilian population were all active sympathizers with the VC. By 7 in the morning, most non-combatants would have left the village for the market. So just to make that clear what we're expecting.

They're expecting to go in to Milai and find over 200 fighting men. And all active sympathizers with the VC. Now, they start to ask some questions like, okay, at the task force level. Back to the book. what was to happen to the village itself. Task force officers left the meeting with a clear impression that Barker had ordered the destruction of all houses, dwellings, and livestock in the Mila area,

although there is some doubt as to whether this was a direct order or something that had been assumed. Kutak recalled Barker saying that the village was to be destroyed. He wanted the area cleaned out. He wanted it neutralized, and he wanted the buildings knocked down. He wanted the hooches burned, he wanted the tunnels filled, and he wanted the livestock and chickens were. runoff killed or destroyed. He wanted to neutralize the area. For Medina, also, those were Barker's

clear instructions. And what was to happen to the civilians? There was nothing to suggest that Barker explicitly ordered the murder of ordinary people of Milai. But the previous failures of the task force and the demand for more aggression, the intelligence picture of a community entirely controlled by the Viet Cong, the bland assumption that civilians would be gone to the market, the totally unjustified belief that innocent people had been warned to get out of the area, in other words, the entire scorched earth concept of the operation plan to neutralize the area, drove irresistibly to the conclusion that here was a free fire zone in which even the people were to be eliminated.

Now, that's, so that's the company command. getting the brief from the battalion commander, from the task force commander. That's the impression that they get. Now we start to get into your Chinese telephone game. Because now how does that get translated down the chain of command? And even with the battalion commander talking to the company commanders, it's not super solid what the actual orders were.

It's not super solid. No one said, hey, they said kill a woman and children. It's kind of implied, well, maybe he said he wanted everyone destroyed. What does destroyed mean? So now we get to where Medina is talking to his troops and his subordinate leadership, the company commander. Medina grabbed a shovel from a quarter-ton trailer and drew a map of Mili 4 in the dirt at his feet as he described the coming engagement. Tomorrow, he told them, was Charlie Company's chance to get even. Medina relayed what he had learned at Barker's briefing earlier in the afternoon.

The Viet Cong, the 48th Viet Cong battalion were in Mili with a strength of between 250 and 280. So actually, he just increased that number because the report that he was given was 200. Now he's saying between 250 and 280. This meant that Charlie Company would be outnumbered more than 2 to 1. But they were not to worry because helicopter gunships would be on the American side. He told them to expect a hell of a good fight. He told them that all innocent civilians would have gone to the market. market. He's just amplifying

what he was told. But what was going to happen to the village? I told them we had permission. Colonel Barker had received permission that the village could be destroyed since it was a VC stronghold. To burn down the houses, to kill all the livestock,

to cut any of the crops that might feed the VC, to cave the wells and destroy the village. And what was going to happen to the innocent civilians? Somebody at the briefing asked him, do we kill women and children? It was an astounding question that speaks volumes about the temper of the men,

but the fact that such a question was indeed asked is not disputed. Where testimony is divided is what Medina replied. My reply to that question was, no, you do not kill women and children. You must use common sense. If they have a weapon and are trying to engage you, then you can shoot back, but you must use common sense. But many of the men got a different message. This is Sergeant Hodges' recollection of the briefing.

This was a time for us to get even. A time for us to settle the score. A time for revenge. When we can get revenge for our fallen comrades. The order we were given was to kill and destroy everything that was in the village. It was to kill the pigs, drop them in the wells, pollute the water supply, kill, cut down the banana trees, burn the village, burn the hooches as we went through it. It was clearly explained that there were to be no prisoners. The order that was given was to kill everyone in the village.

Someone asked if that meant the women and children. And the order was everyone in the village. Because those people in that village, the women, the kids, the old men were VC. They were Viet Cong themselves or they were sympathetic to the Viet Cong. They were not sympathetic to the Americans. It was quite common. clear that no one was to be spared in that village. So pretty clear what Sergeant Hodges thought.

So Medina says, no, I didn't tell them. I told me they had to use their common sense. If they're shooting at you, then you kill him. Hodges didn't hear that. And back to the book, Sergeant Hodges was not alone in his interpretation of Medina's briefing. Many senior NCOs left the meeting convinced that the order was to kill everyone. Staff Sergeant Bacon, we were to kill all Viet Cong and all Viet Cong sympathizers in the village. Sergeant West.

It was a search and destroy mission. We were to kill everything. Staff Sergeant Fagan. Kill everyone. Sergeant Cowan. To kill everything that was in the village. Enlisted men, too. Glimps.

La Martina, Gonzalez, Lloyd, Parish, Moss later testified that this is what they heard. Flynn even remembered the question. Someone asked, are we supposed to kill women and children? And Medina replied, Kill everything that moves. Harry Stanley said Captain Medina told us that the intelligence had established that Mili 4

was completely enemy controlled he described the formations we were to use following day and told us to carry extra ammunition he ordered us to kill everything in the village the men in my squad talked about amongst ourselves that night because the order to kill everything in the village was so unusual we all agreed that Captain Medina meant for us to kill every man, woman and child

in the village. But not everyone agreed that Medina had ordered everyone in the village to be killed. Greg Olson, who's foreboding letter to his father had been posted only two days before, has a completely different recollection of the briefing. There clearly absolutely wasn't an order to go in and slaughter everybody in that village, and anybody that says so is a liar. Medina said that any villagers were to be rounded up and airlifted to refugee camps. That was specifically addressed in the meeting.

If I thought I was going to get on a helicopter that morning with clear orders that I was going to slaughter every living, breathing human being in that village, I'm sure to God it would have been so appalling and unthinkable. I mean, I'm not that stupid. I know they couldn't have forced me to do something like that. Others, too, denied there was any explicit order. It was like Medina's benediction, Michael Bernhardt said. He didn't actually say to kill every man, woman, and child in Milai. he stopped just short of saying that. He gave every other indication that that's what he expected.

Whatever Medina actually said, there can be no doubt about the impression he made to get the most of the men. To hurt pride, he offered satisfaction. To grieving soldiers, he offered a chance to strike back. To bitter and resentful men, he offered an end to the frustration. Medina let slip the dogs of war. Mili 4 was thrown in the path of their vindictiveness and fury. Charlie Company was going to get its revenge. The task force would get its body count.

This time, there would be no mistake. So that's the attitude that these guys roll into the operation with. And it is not the right attitude to have going into the situation. Because if Kishi haven't figured this out yet, the village that they're going into, there's no battalion of Viet Cong fighters. There's no fighters at all. And here they start their attack. March 16th, 1968, 7.15 in the morning.

Out in the fields, a farmer frantically raised his hands by way of both greeting and to show he had no weapon. He was immediately felled by a burst from a machine gun. Along with the gunships, almost everyone in first and second platoons was firing their weapons, and now third platoon was joining in. The moment of Vietnamese was spotted, volleys of fire were loosed off, and the enemy fell wounded or dying. It was apparent to burn heart as it was to virtually everyone gathered there on the ground that they were receiving no return fire at all. There was no incoming.

Burkhold came across a hut which had been raked with bullets. Inside, Burkhold discovered three children, a woman with a flesh wound in her side and an old man squatting down, hardly able to move. He had been seriously wounded in both legs. from six feet, Berkhold aimed his 45-caliber pistol and pulled the trigger, causing the top of the man's head to fly off. It was a site that would have forever

be etched in Maple's memory. Burkhold claimed to have shot the old man as an act of mercy. Harry Stanley saw that the fleeing villagers were offering no resistance. His friend Alan Boyce, who lived in New Jersey, only a couple of miles from Maples,

came up behind him with a Vietnamese foreigner, aged between 40 and 50 years in custody. He wore black pajamas and his shirt hung open so that Stanley could see his chest. Boyce pushed the man forward to where Stanley was standing beside the trail. Suddenly, and for no reason, Boyce stabbed the man with the bayonet attached to the end of his rifle. He fell to the ground grasping for breath. Boyce killed him and then grabbed another man, being detained, shot him in his. the neck and threw him into a well, lobbing an M-26 grenade after him. That's the way you've got to do it, he told Simpson.

Robert Lee, the platoon medic, joined in the frenzy but confined his efforts to slaughtering animals. He killed a cow that had been injured. Lee was from a farming community and didn't want to see the beasts suffer. Up front, he and the platoon sergeant Isaiah Cowan could see women and children being slain. They were stunned by what was happening all around them. The further they went into the village, the more bodies they found. To Conti, and he's another guy, Conti, the men appeared all psyched up when they landed. The shooting once it began created almost a chain reaction.

He joined in without killing anyone. Inside the village, his comrades appeared out of control. Families huddled together for safety in houses, in yards, and in bunkers only to be mowned down with automatic weapon fire or blown apart by fragmentation grenades. Women and children were pushed into bunkers and grenades thrown after them. At one point, wandering off on his own, Conti found a woman aged about 20 with a four-year-old child. He forced her to perform oral sex on him while he held a gun at the child's head, threatening to kill it. Half a dozen people from both platoons then witnessed a stocky, blonde-haired second platoon soldier from Kansas City called Gary Roshavitz. become hysterical when troops from First Platoon were walking a small group of villagers back for screening.

Roshavitz, age 25, was older than most of the grunts in the company. Standing almost six feet tall and weighing close to 230 pounds, he made a surprise grab for Roy Woods M16 and demanded the weapon as a trade for his M79, but Wood wasn't having any. Don't turn them over to the company, Roshavits appealed to those gathered there. Kill them. Wood, who is physically by far as the smaller of the two. men held tightly onto his rifle.

Roshavits then snatched a hold of Vernado Simpson's M-16, turned and shot a Vietnamese farmer in the head. Wood began feeling sick at the side of the man's brain spilling on the ground as he turned away. Roshavits shot two more peasants in the head before handing the gun back to Simpson. In the northern position of the village, second platoon had also run berserk, employing the routine combat assault technique used by Cali, Stephen Brooks men also approached line-abrest and three squads.

Firing as they moved, they came to dwellings and yelled out Lidei and Vietnamese for come here. The villagers at the villagers sheltering inside, homemade shelters or bunkers. Fragmentation grenades were tossed inside. Homes were sprayed with automatic fire. Children aged six or seven came toward them with their hands outstretched, saying chop chop.

They asked for food and candy they had received from other American soldiers on the two previous visits to the village. The soldiers skidthed them down. After one group of Vietnamese were killed in front of a hut,

the first squad leader, Sergeant Kenneth Shield, began telling his men that he didn't like what they were doing, but that they had to obey orders. The villagers had huddled together for safety, but the Americans poured fire into them,

tearing their bodies apart, One man firing a machine gun at random, other using M16s on automatic. Brooks radio operator Dean Fields witnessed Vernato Simpson shoot a woman with a baby from a distance of about 25 meters. Her arm was shot almost completely off at the wrist. All that held it on was a fragile piece of flesh. She ran into a hooch and someone yelled an order for her and the baby to be killed. Max Hudson, the weapon squad leader, formed a machine gun team with Floyd Wright. As soon as they passed the tree line, they were confronted less than 30 feet away by a middle-aged woman climbing out of a tunnel using both hands.

She was unarmed, but they opened fire and she fell back into the tunnel. Hudson and Wright took turns on the machine gun. Whenever they came across any Vietnamese, they opened fire, killing them. Hudson could see people firing all around him. The whole scene was one of chaos and confused. with people moving, yelling, and shouting. Some of the troops were afraid they would be shot by their own men. In a clearing near a small hooch,

a group of 15 Vietnamese had been gathered. Four women in their 30s, three in their 50s, three girls in their late teens, and five children ages between three and 14. Standing around were seven or eight soldiers from different squads, including Huto, Torres, and Roshavets. Gonzalez heard someone yell that if anyone is behind them, Vietnamese to take cover because they were going to open fire.

A shot rang out when a bullet penetrated the head of a young child being carried by its mother, blowing out the back of its skull. Others began firing until the entire group was dead. Gonzalez could stand no more. He turned away and vomited. Few words were spoken until someone said, let's move out. A soldier stooping over a tunnel, yelled. for the occupants to come out. Gonzalez moved closer and could hear people responding as if they were

about to comply, whereupon the soldier threw in a grenade and yelled fire in the hole, telling everyone to stand clear. Cali had been called twice that morning on the radio by an anxious Medina. What is happening over there? Medina demanded to know, challenging the slow progress of the first platoon. He wanted Callie to get his men back online and keep moving. This made the young platoon commander nervous. Throughout his time with the company, he had frequently been made the butt of Medina's jokes. Medina knew Cali couldn't command the respect of his men. Now, under pressure, Callie replied that large groups of civilians had gathered and were slowing the platoon down.

Never one to accept excuses, Medina told Callie simply to get rid of them. So when Callie came across Meadlo and Conti in the clearing and said, take care of them, his intention was clear. It was his way of getting Medina off his back. Conti thought nothing of the implications of Callie's request when he simply replied, OK. Like many in the company, he regarded the man as a joke and resented the way Callie tried to suck up to the men one minute

by calling them by their first names and then shouted and bawled at them the next. Conti felt his platoon commander had absolutely no leadership ability. Among the squatting Vietnamese were 10 to 15 men with beards and 10 women, women, as well as a handful of very elderly gray-haired women who could hardly walk. The rest were children of all ages, from babies up to early teens. Callie, who is carrying a bandolier of ammunition on one shoulder, said, I thought I told you to take care of them.

Me, though, responded, somewhat naively, We are. We're watching over them. No, reposted, Callie. I want them killed. He moved over to where Conti was standing beside Meadlow. We'll get online and fire into them. Conti and Meadlow looked at each other and backed off, neither of them wanting a part in what was about to happen.

Callie, losing his temper, beckoned them toward him. Come here, come here. Come on, we'll line them up, we'll kill them. Conti, searching for an excuse, pointed out that he was carrying a grenade launcher and he didn't want to waste ammunition. Perhaps he could keep guard over by the tree line in case anyone tried to get away, he suggested. Callie turned to Meadlow.

Fire when I say, fire. Conti stood behind them as Callie and Meadlo standing side by side blazed away. They stood only ten feet from their hapless victims, changing magazines from time to time. The Vietnamese screamed, yelled, and tried to get up. It was pure, carnage as heads were shot off along with limbs, the fleshier body parts were ripped to shreds.

Meadlow had taken 23 fully loaded magazines for his M-16 in his pack when they had left Dottie. He fired in a spraying motion. He noticed one man, dressed in red, fall dead as he fired the rifle on automatic until the magazine was exhausted. Then he reloaded. He switched to semi-automatic fire and loaded the third magazine. after a minute or so Meadlo couldn't continue tears flooded down his cheeks

he turned stuck his rifle in Conti's hand and said you shoot them Conti pushed the weapon back if they are going to be killed I'm not going to do it let him do it he said pointing at Cali by this time Conti could see

only a few children were left standing mothers had thrown themselves on top of the young ones in the last desperate bid to protect them from bullets raining down on them. The children were trying to stand up. Callie opened fire again, killing them one by one. Conti swore at him. Finally, when it appeared to be all over,

Cali calmly turned and said, Okay, let's go. Suddenly someone yelled out that more Vietnamese, five women and six children, some distance away, were making a break for the truth. tree line. Callie burst out. Get them. Get them. Kill them. Meadlow's face was flushed. His eyes were still full of tears when he arrived with Griesik at the ditch site and found Callie sitting down. We've got another job to do, he said, looking up with them. About 10 members of the platoon were

guarding 40 to 50 Vietnamese. Babies were crying and crawling around. James Dersie, a heavy beset Irish Italian from Brooklyn was looking at a man in white robes with a goatee beard whom he took to be a Buddhist monk praying over an elderly woman. She was seriously ill and had been carried through the village on a narrow wooden platform which the Vietnamese used as a bed. Callie was now on his feet. Harry Stanley appeared on the scene and tried to question the monk who was crying and bowing as he tried to make himself understood.

Callie couldn't understand him. Griesick, who had attended Vietnamese. Vietnamese language classes in Hawaii tried more questions and got nowhere. Callie was getting more and more impatient. Where had the Viet Cong gone? Where were the weapons? Where were the NVA? When the man shook his head, Cali struck him in the mouth with his rifle butt.

Just then, a child aged about two years and parted from its mother, managed to crawl up to the top of the ditch. Dersie watched horrified as Callie picked up the child, shoved it back down the slope, and shot it before returning to question. in the monk. The villagers pleaded for the holy man's life. Stanley asked the bearded man the same questions in Vietnamese that Callie was asking in English in an effort to defuse the situation, but the monk vainly replied that there were no North Vietnamese soldiers in the village. There were no weapons. Stanley translated these replies. Immediately Callie grabbed the monk, pulled him round, hurled him into the paddy, and opened fire with M-16. As the elderly Mama San lying prostrate tried to get up.

She too was killed. More Vietnamese shepherded by soldiers were arriving on the scene, and Callie indicated to me, low, and boys he wanted everyone killed. He began pushing peasants into the irrigation channel. Others joined in, using their rifle butts to shove wailing Vietnamese down the steep slope. Some jumped in by themselves. Others sat down on the edge.

moaning and crying, clearly aware that disaster was imminent. It was a pitiful sight. Until the time all the firing started, Herbert Carter had been kneeling beside Dersie, quietly playing with a couple of children. Dersie said incredulously, I think Callie wants them all killed. Carter said, oh no. He can send me to jail, but I'm not going to kill anybody, said Dersie, beginning to move away and wondering what would happen to him for refusing to fire.

Dersie was another one who liked to play with the children. Earlier in the day, he'd been devastated after he opened fire and killed someone running from the village. It turned out to be a woman carrying a baby, and Dersie was horrified and ashamed by what he had done. Olson had seen he was really cut up about it. A woman standing next to Robert Maples showed him a bullet wound in her left arm. He felt helpless. There was nothing he could do for her. Callie shoved her in the ditch and told Maples,

load your machine gun and shoot these people. Maple shook his head and replied, I'm not going to do that. Cali turned his M-16 on Maples as if to shoot him then and there. Maples was surprised and relieved when some of the other soldiers interposed to protect him. Cali backed off. Seconds later, he and Meadlow began firing.

A machine gun opened up and one of the squadly tried to usher the man into line so they could all fire simultaneously. Dersie stood completely frozen, watching disbelievingly as the Vietnamese tried frantically to hide under one another, mothers protecting babies. Screaming at Dersie above the sounds of the M-16 on full automatic, M-Lo continued pouring shells into the ditch. Crying hysterically once more, he stopped for a second. Why aren't you firing?

He pleaded with Dersie. Fire. don't you fire? The onlookers saw remnants of shredded human beings, hundreds of pieces of flesh and bone flying up in the air as the shallow ravine was repeatedly sprayed with bullets. Magazine after magazine was reloaded during the mass execution. And as all this horrendous scene is unfolding,

there is actually a photographer there. military photographer in Haberle and he's taking pictures and he it was almost like he was just instinctively shooting he kind of detached himself and here's what he said i knew it was something that shouldn't be happening but yet i was part of it i think i was in a kind of a daze from seeing all these shootings and not seeing any return fire yet the killing kept going on the americans were rounding up the people and shooting them not taking any prisoners It was completely different to my concept of what war is all about. I kept taking pictures.

That was my job as a photographer to take pictures, a normal reaction I have with a camera, just picking up and keep on shooting, trying to capture what is happening around me. I feel sometimes that the camera did take over during the operation. I put it up to my eye, took a shot, put it down. Nothing was composed. Nothing was pre-thought. Just the normal reaction of a photographer. I was part of it

Everyone who was there was part of it And that includes the general and the colonel flying above in their helicopters They're all part of it We all were Just a one big group Now as all this is happening You've got Medina who's the again the company commander He's sort of coming up from the rear

And he's starting to assess what he's seeing Back to the book While Medina might not have seen mass executions taking place, the evidence of his own eyes told him what everyone else could see that some kind of massacre had occurred. In fact, it was worse than a massacre. Too many of Medina's men were taking sword pleasure in sadistic behavior. Several became double veterans. G.I. slaying for the dubious honor of raping a woman and then murdering her. Many women were raped and sodomized, mutilated, and had their vaginas ripped open with knives or bayonets.

One woman was killed when the muzzle of a rifle barrel was inserted into her vagina and the trigger was pulled. Soldiers repeatedly stabbed their victims, cut off limbs, sometimes beheaded them. Some were scalped, others had their tongues cut out or their throat slit or both. Tommy Lee Moss saw Vietnamese place their hands together and bow to greet Americans only to be beaten with fists and tortured, clubbed with rifles, and stabbed in the back with bayonets. Martin Fagan saw bodies which had been shot in the head at point-blank range. He could tell because the penetration of an M-16 round created a shock wave inside the skull forcing the brain completely out. Other victims were mutilated with the signature C Company. or the shape of an ace of spades carved into the chest.

Fagan figured this had been done as a warning to the superstitious Vietnamese. It was widely believed that they regarded the ace of spades as a sign of bad luck. Troops from all three platoons carried out wanton and mindless acts of brutality. The second platoon were already amongst the most notorious rapists in Charlie Company. Even the platoon commander joined in on occasions. Roshavitz forced the women to undress with the intention of having sex with all of them. If they didn't strip, he said he was going to shoot them. He singled out one woman telling her to boom, boom him.

She became hysterical, and the other women panicked, yelling and screaming and begging for mercy. Roshavits decided to let them have it. He fired several rounds and killed them all. And now we got Haberle again. photographer and this is what he's witnessing. Just as soon as I turned away I heard firing. I saw people drop. They started falling on top of each other, one on top of another. I just kept walking. I did not pay attention to who did it. By that time I knew what the score was. It was an atrocity. I felt I wanted to do something to stop this as though as we were going through the village.

I asked some soldiers, why? They more or less shrugged their soldiers and kept on with the killing. It was like they were fixed on one thing, search and destroy, and that meant killing civilians. I noticed this one small boy had been shot in the foot. Part of the foot was torn off. He was walking towards a group of bodies looking for his mother. I put my camera up to my eye. I was going to take a photograph. I didn't notice a GI down beside me with his M-16 rifle pointed at the child.

Then suddenly I heard the crack and threw the vanguard. viewfinder I saw this child flip over on top of the pile of bodies. The GI just stood up and walked away. No remorse, nothing. The other soldiers had a cold reaction. They were staring off into space like it was an everyday thing. They felt they had to do it and they did it. That was their job.

It was weird, just a shrug of the shoulder. No emotional reaction. Now above this you had above this horror you had helicopters that were flying around they were some of them were gunships some of them were there to pick people up drop people off some of them were command and control helicopters where some senior leadership was flying around trying to observe the the battles that took place and we do end up with a with a real hero here a hero that's a heliolk helicopter pilot and his name is Hugh Clowers Thompson Jr. And he's flying around and I'll go to the book. Thompson marked several wounded people on the ground with green smoke a signal that they needed help. Returning to the Mili area about 9 a.m. after the first refueling, Thompson immediately

noticed that people who were previously injured. were now dead. There were groups of bodies as well as many dead water buffalo. Over the radio, he warned the gunships to fire only when they could positively identify enemy target. They had good visibility, as they hovered sometimes only four feet,

five feet off the ground. Gunner Lawrence Colburn in the doorway didn't want to look at the corpses. Out in the paddy field beside a dyke, 200 meters south of the village, they watched a small group of soldiers approach an injured woman of age 20.

Thompson had marked her with smoke. They were flying close enough for Colburn to look at her face as she lay half in and half out of the dike. She made a feeble gesture with her hand and was obviously in need of help. Thompson put the aircraft into a standstill hover only a few feet off the ground. The high gun ship told the ground forces on the radio, You have a wounded over where the bubble is hovering. Thompson and his crew watched as an infantry officer wearing captains. bars on his helmet came up to the woman prodded her with his foot and then killed her

those in the helicopter could hardly believe what they were seeing minutes later over on the eastern side of the village they saw dozens of bodies in the irrigation ditch movements from the ditch convinced them there were people still alive not far away a group of infantry men taking a cigarette break sat around on the ground and relaxed taking off their steel pots it was obvious There was no firefight taking place. So now what happens is Thompson, he's starting to get, he's starting to be totally disturbed by what he's seen down there.

So he lands the helicopter and gets out of the helicopter. And he goes over and talks to a young infantry officer. A young infantry officer came up and Thompson questioned him about what was happening on the ground. The officer said it was none of his business because he was in charge of the ground troops. several members of Callie's platoon observed Thompson's intervention Cali had gone to speak with the bubble helicopter pilot Stanley overheard Callie telling Sledge

afterword that the pilot hadn't liked what he was taking place he don't like the way I'm running the show but I'm the boss here Olson who wanted no part in the executions at the irrigation ditch had moved 150 meters out to the paddy field to set up a perimeter of defense he saw the pilot angrily shaking his arms and gesticulating.

Frustrated, Thompson lifted off again and circled the area for a few minutes. Almost as soon as he took off, his worst fears were confirmed. Andrada reported the sergeant was now shooting the people in a ditch. Thompson began thinking about what the Nazis had done in the last war, marching people to a ditch and blowing them away. Furious with himself and everybody else, he finally snapped. He flew over the, northeast corner of the village and spotted a group of about 10 civilians, including children,

running towards a homemade bomb shelter. Pursuing them were a group from second platoon, returning to the village from their murderous expedition. Based on all he had seen in the village that morning, it was obvious to Thompson what would happen when the troops got to the fleeing civilians. He landed his aircraft between the villagers and the soldiers and radioed the gunships he needed help. Screaming to his crew that he had to get the people out of the bunker, he issued an that bewildered Colburn. If the Americans began shooting on the villagers, Thompson said.

Colburn would turn his machine gun on the Americans. Open up on him. Blow him away, Thompson urged him. Colburn turned his gun around to face the GIs, though he was unsure whether he would be able to open fire on his own men. Concerned for their own safety, Colburn wasn't sure it was a good idea to land in the middle of a combat zone. The pilot confronted the lieutenant in charge, Stephen Brooks.

he said he wanted to help get the peasants out of the bunker. Brooks told him the only way to do that was with hand grenades. Thompson shouted that he would personally get them out and told the lieutenant to stay put. With that, he went across the bunker and gingerly coaxed the civilians to come out. Crew members in the gunships overhead heard Thompson announce over the radio that an old man was sitting in the path of the troops near the door of a small bomb shelter. Thompson's voice was choking with emotion. He swore obscenities, cursed, and pleaded with the aero crew to come down and help rescue civilians.

One pilot initially queried at the request, and Thompson threatened that if the infantry opened fire on the civilians, his machine gunner would turn his guns on the Americans. Danny Millions, a warrant officer on the low gunship, realized the delicate nature of the drama unfolding below, and, knowing that Thompson couldn't talk directly with the ground troops, radioed the high gunship to tell the internet. infantry to stop killing millions and Brian Livingston the another pilot landed their ships and flew the Vietnamese two men two women and five or six children four miles away to the safety of the road which ran west I mean this is a you can't get any more drama than that and eventually Thompson gets back to base and I'll go to the book they arrived back at Dottie at about 11 a.m.

Thompson got out of the aircraft and threw his helmet on the ground. He called his section leader what had happened, and when millions in Livingston landed, they confirmed it. A group of them sought out their company commander, Major Fred Watkey, in the aviation section's operation van. They told him everything they had seen. Wocky walked up the hill to the low-ceiling tent of the tactical operation center and passed the information on to Barker.

He, in turn, quickly got on the radio. to his executive officer, Major Charles Calhoun, who was flying in a helicopter over the battle zone. Calhoun was instructed to find out what was happening and get it stopped. There had been allegations that civilians had been shot. Barker wanted assurance from Medina that nothing of this kind was happening. The order went out to Charlie Company to ceasefire. And they did. And almost as quickly as it started, it stopped.

and it shows you that this whole time when all this horror was taking place, anybody could have stopped it had they stepped up and said something and spoke. Now, it might have been hard for someone that's a junior enlisted guy that's 18 years old that thinks he's carrying out the mission, but any of those people in the leadership position and even some of the folks that weren't leadership positions if you're there and you start to say no this isn't going to be happening I mean and you did there were some guys on the ground that resisted but no one was able to actually stop it

and it's one of those bizarre things when I when I when I hear that that all it took was that order to ceasefire okay we'll stop shooting it it shows you the power of leadership and the responsibility of leadership. Now, as this story goes forward,

the first thing that happens is a big cover-up. And they talk about this operation like it was just a great victory over the VC. And in fact, a message, I'm going to the book here, a message of congratulations for the Pinkfield

operation. That's what the operation is called Pinkfield, was received from General West Moreland himself. In a post script, the brigade commander described the Mili operation as having been an outstanding success. The praiseworthy role of units in the 11th Infantry Brigade directly reflects your expert guidance, leadership, and devotion to duty, he wrote to Medina, copying the memo to Barker. The quick response and professionalism displayed during this action has enhanced the brigade's

image in the eyes of higher commands. So there you go. Within a few hours, the Army's PR machine was pumping out a colorful image of daring do by the American troops. The MACV communique issued later the same day from Saigon gave brief details the operation announcing that American Division Forces had killed 128 enemy, 6 miles northeast of Quining City. U.S. troops surrounded Reds kill 128. And there's another headline that went out that. said, T.F. Barker crushes enemy stronghold. That attitude continues.

Now, Barker, the battalion commander, ends up being killed. Before he's killed, he releases his assessment of the operation, and this is what you start to see cover up written all over this. Here's, here's Barker's official report. This operation was well planned, well-executed. and successful. Friendly casualties were light and the enemy suffered heavily. On this operation, the civilian population supporting the VC in the area numbered approximately 200. This created a problem in population control and medical care of those civilians caught in the fire of opposing

forces. However, the infantry unit on the ground and helicopters were able to assist civilians in leaving the area and in caring for and or evacuating the wounded. Just lies. Just lies. another piece. Barker was genuinely concerned that civilians be protected in future operations and there's no way he could have known the dreadful atrocity being committed by Charlie Company

at the time it was happening. But it's clear he quickly became part of the cover-up. He knew civilians had died and a lot of them. Now, so this starts to gain a little bit of traction. People are starting to talk about there's rumors.

Even though these big nice headlines come out and the official report comes out, but people start to know about it. And so they start sending Charlie Company on all kinds of crazy long-term operations out in the field. And they start to feel like,

well, I'll go to the book. GIs felt they were being sent out in the hopes that they all might be killed. They tried to bury us out there, Widmer, bitterly remembered. After Mili, we went out in the field for three months straight.

We never came back into the villages. Our trips to the base camps were few and far between. They had a problem and dealt with us by trying to hide us out in the jungle, hoping we'd all get killed, but we didn't. So a guy, like I said, people are talking about it. There's rumors about it. And there's a guy named Ridenhauer who checks in to Charlie Company, and he starts hearing stories.

he starts hearing stories he starts they start telling them they start talking and this is why you can't ever cover anything up this is why cover ups never work never try and cover anything up because it's going to come it's going to come out it's going to come out if you try and cover something up it's going to come out that's the way it works so this guy uh ridinghauer after he hears enough and he talks to all these different people that are more involved and they tell them what they did and what went down and he kind of gathers all that information. And here we go back to the book. Ridenhauer, he writes a letter.

He writes a letter that explains what he had learned, what he'd found out. And here we go. Ridenhauer posted the letter on April 2nd, 1969 to Udall and 30 prominent men in Washington, D.C., including President Nixon, the Secretary of Defense, Melvin Laird, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,

Edward Kennedy, Barry Goldwater, Eugene McCarthy and William Fulbright. He sent the letters registered mail thinking that staff opening them would be bound to take the contents more seriously. And here's a little excerpt from the letter. Gentlemen, it was in late April 1968 that I first heard of Pinkville and what allegedly happened there. I received that first report with some skepticism, but in the following months I was to hear similar stories from such a wide variety of people that it became impossible for me to disbelieve that something rather dark and bloody

did indeed occur sometime in March 1968 in a village called Pinkville in the Republic of Vietnam. So that's how the story breaks. They start to investigate it. Within the Pentagon, they start to investigate it. This book is great. It goes into a ton of detail

on what that's like, how that takes place. The people that are running it And there's good, honest, solid, you know, army leadership that says, oh, no, we're going to, we're going to find out what happened and we're going to do something about it. So the cover up isn't throughout the chain of command. There's people that try and put a stop to it. Now, the other thing that turns very interesting on this is obviously when it hits the public. And one of the most shocking impacts to the public took place on television. And if you remember at this time, and I don't know if this was like for you, because you're a little bit younger than me.

But when I was a kid, we had three TV channels. There was no 57 or 147 or 1,000 TV channels. There was no internet. We didn't really, there wasn't really radio shows anymore. So if the family was going to do something at night at 6 o'clock at night or 7 o'clock at night together after dinner, there was a good chance they were going to sit down and watch TV. And now you go back this in 1969. so it's even more focused on television. And so what happens is this story breaks on TV with an interview,

and I'll go to the book with Meadlow's Confession. Television was for most Americans quintessentially a medium of entertainment. Meadlo's confession was truly an extraordinary departure from the vapid diet of soap opera's comedy programs and quiz shows. News, however, was important to American audiences. Walter Cronkite was a national institution. Meadlow's interview was delivered virtually without warning to an audience of millions of parents and children waiting excitedly for news of Apollo 12's astronauts returned from the moon and the splash down into the Pacific Ocean. So that's what they're, everyone thinks that's what they're going to go, oh, let's get the kids to watch the news.

And we'll find out about, yay, yay America. Back to the book. Instead, their living rooms appeared the gawkes figure. of a young man from Indiana. Meadlow brought to the audience a raw truth about Vietnam. They would prefer not to have known. He chillingly described lining up the first group of villagers and shooting them down, expending four clips of ammunition in the killing.

There were 17 bullets to a clip, which meant Wallace deduced 68 shots. At the ditch execution site, Miedlo said he was ordered. to fire single shots to conserve ammunition. Wallace wanted to know why he did it. And here's the interview. Why did I do it? Because I felt like I was ordered to do it. And it seemed like that at the time.

I felt like I was doing the right thing because I lost buddies. I lost a damn good buddy, Bobby Wilson. And it was on my conscience. So after I'd done it, I felt good. But later on that day, it was getting to me you're married right children

two how old the boy is two and a half and the little girl is a year and a half well obviously the question comes to mind the father of two little kids like that how can you shoot babies

I didn't have the little girl I just had the little boy at the time how do you shoot babies I don't know it's just one of them things How many people would you imagine were killed that day? I would say 370. What did these civilians, these particularly the women and children, the old men, what did they do?

What did they say to you? They weren't begging or anything? No, no, or right? They were begging and saying no, no, and their mothers were hugging their children, but they kept on firing. Well, we kept on firing. They was waving their arms and begging. Did you ever dream about all this that went on in Pinkville?

Yes, I did. And I still dream about it. What kind of dreams? I see the women and children in my sleep. Some days, some nights, I can't sleep. I just lay there thinking about it. So that's not exactly the friendly news that you're expecting to see about the Apollo mission. Now, this thing goes to trial.

And again, you've got to get into the book to see how all this breaks down. But a couple highlights. Here's Lieutenant Callie during the trial and how he testified on what he did. And it's a good insight into his mindset. Here we go, Lieutenant Callie. I was ordered to go in there and destroy the enemy. That was my job that day. That was my mission.

I was given. I did not sit down and think in terms of men, women, and children. They were all classified the same, and that was the classification that we dealt with just as enemy soldiers. I felt then, and I still do, that I acted as I was directed, and I carried out the orders that I was given, and I do not feel wrong in doing so. And we get very used to the media. I mean, we're in a media circus nowadays, because there's so much media. there's social media, there's cable media, there's internet media.

I mean, there's a circus of media now. And you get a lot, I would say, you can get a lot more distracted. I mean, news stories here don't last that long, but this was a big news story. And it was really dividing the country in a way, even more so than the country was already being divided by the Vietnam War. But, and I'll go to the book here, to many Americans, Cali was a hero. and they believed that with the guilty verdict he was found guilty, a great injustice had been perpetrated upon the army.

And in Vietnam, they gave an example here in Vietnam that soldiers at K San had hastily raised a defiant sign that said, A-trop, first calf, salutes William Cali. So you got people that are saying, hey, what, you know, Cali did the right thing out there. On top of that, this was a good example. of what the attitude of some Americans were it was at a a World War II veteran went into an army recruiting office in Mobile, Alabama to make an extraordinary request. He had flown bombing missions

over Germany which had killed innocent civilians and wanted to be arrested for war crimes. Despite, and another good example that somebody sent a goat, a Billy goat, a living Billy Goat and sent it to the White House and it had a jacket on and the jacket said scapegoat on it. And this is pretty cool. The response that the Army and the government had to this, Cali is not a scapegoat nor a poor lieutenant singled out to bear the entire burden of a difficult war. Declared a high-level Army memorandum circling amongst senior staff at the White House. his act stand alone in infamy among known atrocities for the U.S. forces into war. If Cali is let go or let off with a slap on the wrist, the message to all soldiers must read anything goes.

The implications for the army, let alone the nation, are incalculable, but clearly intolerable. So they did hold the line and recognize that this was. not good. And at the same time, you still got these people that were saying that, look, this is a war. And here's a quote from the book, take by way of example, the following, the American soldier in an officially sanctioned wrath is a thing so ugly and dangerous that it would take a Kipling to describe him. Not a description of Mi Lai, but the observation of James H. Blunt. young lieutenant later to become a judge on the behavior of troops in the Philippines 60 years before Vietnam.

Here's another comment about what that war was like, the war in the Philippines. Our men have been relentless, have killed to exterminate men, women and children, prisoners and captives, active insurgents and suspected people from lads of 10 up, an idea prevailing that the Filipino was little better than a dog. and another comparison here from the book in the Dakotas General William Tecumseus Sherman had written

to General Ulysses S. Grant we must act with vindictive earnestness against the sue even to the extermination, men, women and children. Nothing else will reach the root of the case. I was talking about the Indian Wars there.

And then another one. Just a description that sort of explains how horrible war is. And this one was from World War II. What kind of a war to civilians suppose we fought anyways? We shot prisoners in cold blood, wiped out hospitals, strafed lifeboats, killed or mistreated enemy civilians, finished off the enemy wounded, tossed the dying into a hole with the dead,

and in the Pacific boiled the flesh off enemy skulls to make table ornaments for sweethearts or carve their bones into letter openers. That was written by an American War correspondent, Edward L. Jones. Now, where those ideas become so disturbing, and again, war is hell. War is dark. War is evil. Horrible things happen. And again, when you have a lack of leadership, things get even worse.

And it can happen even to these apparently normal guys. And here's Michael Bernhardt talking about what it was like and what he thought of people after he got home. I had seen people who looked like everybody else, normal people doing atrocious things. And I really wasn't sure how anyone would have acted in the same situation. I thought I knew human nature. I thought that people were basically good and that they couldn't do this. I thought most of the values people held were pretty solid. That when we defined things as good or bad, that they were good or bad,

and that we would know when something was really bad. But I had seen that this was not the case. I wasn't sure I could trust anyone again. I wasn't sure I could ever get close to anyone or confide in anyone very closely because of what I'd seen over there. and going back to the leadership piece, and this is from the book, what steps were taken to halt the run of beatings, thefts, rapes, tortures, and murder,

which prodded Charlie Company down the road to Mili? None. Who, among the chain of command that found on its bottom rung, Lieutenant William, Callie, and rose through Medina, Barker, Henderson, and Costa gave any kind of moral lead or example that might have prevented the moral destruction of the company? No one.

In place of clear leadership, there was paper leadership. The rules of engagement, numerous codes of conduct, and all other directives, all of which contained the loftiest intentions. There was nothing wrong with these regulations. In spirit, they were a recognizable expression of the American ideal at war, a blueprint for order in the midst of hell. They simply never became part of the soldier's reality because they weren't never seriously enforced.

And without emphatic enforcement, they corresponded as much to the world of the common grunt as roadmaps of Mars. That total lack of leadership. That lack of leadership. moral courage and as we close this out it goes in the book here and says once again the darker side of war has gone underground mili is no longer a public burden or concern the burden of guilt and the burden of responsibility have fallen onto the

soldiers themselves shit that men of Charlie Company used to tell each other rolls downhill and we'll close out with the words from Varnato Simpson who's in his own little private hell with his memories of this as he sits shaking from side to side in his chair alone in his house in Jackson, Mississippi. How can you forgive? I can't forgive myself for the things even though I know that it was something that I was told to do but how How can I forget that or forgive? It's easy for you to say, well, go ahead with your life.

But how can you go ahead with your life when this is holding you back? I can't put my mind to anything. Yes, I'm ashamed, I'm sorry, I'm guilty, but I did it. You know what else can I tell you? It happened. happened and as we think about this book and and you should go and get this book and you should read this book and you should experience this level of darkness in the world so that we can all remember to be vigilant against this power of darkness which i suppose we have to admit that that darkness is

every man's soul lurking and waiting waiting for a moment to strike out but we we need to we need to counter that that evil with and we need to do that with the power of leadership and you can see in these situations where leaders led men to do things that they knew were wrong they knew they were wrong, things that they didn't want to do, killing children as tears are streaming down their faces. And if you can lead men to do things that they know are wrong, imagine the power and the influence you have as a leader to lead people to do things that are right and that people know are right and that are good. And you are a leader. I am a leader. No matter what you're stationed in life or your position or your rank, you are a leader. When you step up and lead, you are a leader.

And you can make a difference and you can have an impact and you can affect the outcomes of so many things in the world by stepping up and leading away from the evil and away from the darkness. And toward the light. And I know that was a, that's a rough book. And this is a rough podcast. And like I said, I was, I was questioning whether to actually do this or not. And at certain points, when I was reading this, I mean, this is my fourth time reading it, I think. And even when I was reading it just now on the podcast, for this recording, I could, I could,

hear a numbness in my voice. I could hear it as I'm talking about the killing and the gunning down and the it's so much and I know it's going to be brutal. I know people are going to be impacted by this and maybe not everyone's going to make it through this and I understand that. But we owe it to ourselves. To know history and to know and understand evil. Understand how quickly it can come about. And to see these indicators and to know that if you're in a leadership position,

you start to see things going sideways, you've got to put a stop to them before they get out of hand, before they turn into this. Maybe at some point we'll look for some topics that are a little bit more, I guess, lighthearted. Lighthearted. But I'll tell you, my only issue with that is, you want a topic that's lighthearted,

you can find them anywhere. You can go get them anywhere. There's a whole, actually there's a whole section for a podcast. That's called comedy. Right? It's called comedy. That exists.

There's no section that says the darkness. I guess there is one. It's called Jocko podcast. You want to hear about the darkness? You want to hear about things that are going on in the world that aren't good? This is it. And we're the people that are dealing with reality. And,

you know, I know this is not. for everybody and that's okay that's okay you know we're talking about heavy topics here and the reason we're talking about the dark is because we want to be enlightened we want to know about these things i don't think we're going to have time for q and a because i just talked about that book for a really long time um so what we'll do is do a q and a for the next podcast And for this one, we'll let it stand on its own. And I know it might be a rough podcast to think about wanting to hear more of them.

But if you do want to hear more of these podcasts, Echo, what can these folks do to support the podcasts? Well, as I always recommend, sure, support the podcast, but you can also support yourself. with supplementation on it on it has the best supplements the actual supplements that I take jaco takes

on it.com slash jaco you can get 10% off so support yourself physically and financially in that way I would recommend what do you think

well what's the number one you think krill oil I think it depends on who you are I think if you're Me, it's cruel oil.

All you, alpha, I like. Yeah, and they're just, anyway, so alpha brain, good for your brain. Makes you think quicker. It makes you like, you know, you searched. Did you just say alpha brain? Because I got the last I'm right here for. As Jaku drinks, Alpha Brain instant, by the way. Makes you think, you know, like when you search for words, like in your, you know,

when you're trying to think of a word sometimes? Yes, yes. Alpha brain alleviate that. The pathways to the words are a little bit closer. Yeah, yeah. If you want to get it. Actually, you can read all about it. It's called a neutropic alpha brain.

Yes. Good free brain. Anyway, acrylic oil, good for your joints. That's one Jocko takes. That's why he's so functional, I would say, for lack of a better term. Functional. I like that word. And warrior bars.

That's a new one right there, the warrior bars. That's not like some, you know, they've been having, well, actually, neutropics, pretty new, too. But, you know how you have protein powder. That's been around. But warrior bar, that's a, that's a, that's a, twist on stings. Well, what's good about, what's good about, like, you talk about protein powder?

That's like a powder, right? Or you get a protein bar, that's a thing that's been manufactured. Right, like a power. Yeah. The Warrior Bar is like food. Yeah, yeah. So that makes it a little bit better in my mind. Yeah.

Because I want to eat food. Yeah, so it's kind of like in the direction of a beef jerky situation, but even more. Anyway, look at it. The thing is, well, there's two major differences between beef jerky and warrior bar. and that is beef jerky dry Warrior bar not dry delicious yeah delicious

yeah and then Shroom Tech good for like high intensity kind of prolonged stuff Jiu Jitsu if you're into it wrestling Metcon Metcon You're in the crossfit

Oh there you go Shroom Tech boom Yeah Improve your output Your performance utilize oxygen better Anyway it's really good It's like really good

Also another way To support the podcast If you're in the mood to Before you do your Amazon shopping, go to Jocco Podcast.com and click on the Amazon link. What does that cost you? That doesn't cost you anything except for literally, literally three seconds of your time. Three seconds and you support the podcast.

Yep. I like that. And one like click, maybe like a one-tenth of a calorie, maybe finger-click. I like that. But yeah, super easy. Are we asking people to donate money there? No, no, no, no. We just, Amazon's going to donate the money.

Yeah. They're going to support the podcast, like collective. Yeah, it's good. So, boom, there you go. I guess the main thing is to remember to do it. You know, when you're trying to get that duct tape real quick, oh, I got to make that time so he can ship that same day. You know, then you got to, you just want to,

maybe take some alpha brain that'll help you remember. I like that. Anyway, or if you want some Jocko stuff, like some cool shirts, jocco store.com. Now, I'm seeing a new shirt. Is that correct here? Yes, we have a new shirt, the trooper shirt. It's got a name? Are we naming shirts now?

Are we there? We have to name it. So this is something people don't echo Charles. He is an artist, right? He's an artist. And so that's why he has to name the T-shirt. You just have to name it because that makes you feel like it's a piece of art. Yes, it's a piece.

Because you just said the trooper shirt, as if that's the thing. But here's the thing, though. With this shirt and with all the shirts, It's not just like, oh, I'm going to call it the trooper shirt because I think that sounds cool. It's like there's different lay. It's not just a shirt with a saying on it. Like, Discipline Equestring. So you're saying it's not just called the trooper t-shirt.

It actually is the trooper. Yeah. And you're wearing it right now. If you want to see this on YouTube, you can check it out. Boom. Three colors. Ooh, that's a unique one. Usually don't have two colors.

Normally I would protest something like that. No, but you can protest it, and this is why. So the people who signed up on the insiders group, the email list, people that are enlisted troopers of Jocko podcast. Exactly right. How do they do that? Well, on jocco store.com right in the front, you just put your email address. And I don't spam.

That's not what it's for. This is what it's for. This is one of the things that it was for, and the people who are on the list know this, where, hey, I got a new shirt design, idea, you know. I don't know what colors really did. What are the best colors? I know what colors I like. Yeah, I'll do a black one.

But so what I did was I sent an email to everybody and said, what, here's the design, here's what kind of will look like, what color shirts are we doing? What color shirts do you guys like? So there was a vote. There was input received. Yeah, like a, yeah, and the consensus was these three colors. It's like a dark red.

Oh. Which actually turned out even better than I thought, and I was enthusiastic about the red. And the OD green. I support OD Green. That way, if you have to, you never know when you might have to go tactical. It is tactical.

I'm into dual-purpose things. Yeah. Things that can be good for normal situations or tactical situations. That's why I like OD Green T-shirts. Yeah, just in case you get a spring into getting after it, spontaneously. And then, of course, we've got the black, but that was the consensus overall.

The green, there was a charcoal, had a strong, strong, you know. But, yeah, the green, the red, and the black. But anyway, yeah, it's a cool one. Check it out if you want to look at the details of it. They're good. Anyway, if you want to support the podcast that way, get a shirt. This trooper shirt isn't the only one, but, man, I'm pretty fired up about it. It looks good, I think.

Anyway, there's other ones on there, too, that are cool. And coffee mugs and stickers, if you're down. I like that. But, yeah, that's the way. Those are the ways. And for the people who have been and do, Dang. To say thank you would be like not even doing it halfway justice.

Yeah, definitely thanks everybody for doing that. And you know what's weird? You always talk about like how you got to see the dark to appreciate the light, right? I actually, just because we just got done with that dark, dark, darkness of a book, in just having a conversation right now, I'm so happy. Right. Just to be like here and talking. and we're selling some cool t-shirts and drinking some...

Just to be just in this situation and know that we have this goodness around us is really good. So I think it is worth venturing into the dark so that you can appreciate the light. If you want to hear more of this kind of things, obviously you've got the podcast. You can also pick up a book written by myself and my brother Laif Babin. it's called Extreme Ownership. You can buy the book or you can buy the audio book, which is actually Laif and I reading it. So you'll get some more information in there,

and everything I talk about is in that book. I mean, it's the basic principles of combat leadership that we put in there. Let me add one thing about that book, Extreme Ownership. It's good, it's like, dang, this is, you feel, well, I don't know, everyone's different, but me, I felt like more of an adult. after like kind of incorporating these like that.

But here's the thing that you do take away is the people around you will notice that you're a, like, better person to be around. And I thought I was like pretty nice anyway, but you'll feel people like gravitating towards you more. Because like any abrasive, and everyone has varying levels of abrasiveness in them, even if it's just a teeny tiny little bit. Everyone has some. But what that does, it makes you work with people. in a way less abrasive way. So people want to be around you when things go down. I would say that's a very good assessment.

And I'll tell you that I always felt, especially when I was in the military, in the SEAL teams, when I was doing something, people wanted to come with me. You know? Yeah, it was all good. We all wanted to get after it together. So that's probably an indicator of the principles in the book at work in my life.

Yeah, you know how some people, I mean, I don't know, maybe us, whatever, where, you know, you'll have a small little conflict or a little something, little friction with somebody. Conflict? Maybe at work or even at home or whatever. I would say it's pretty rare.

Like, I'm not, like, if there was some friction that came up between me and anyone, even my friend, my wife, or something, it would stand out so much nowadays. Like, it would stand out. Because you become a better person. Yeah. You become better person.

Yeah. And that's at the end, you know. But like I said, it's like if you follow it, if you're like, dang, I, you know, I value this and I'm going to, you actually incorporate it. As time goes on, that's how it is. Where if you get friction or some adversarial situation, even if it's not yours, you're like, dang, I see that from a mile away, you know, and it sticks out. so it's not I mean, I mean,

some people it's part of their everyday thing you know road rager I don't know but it's good man it's good

like that well thanks appreciate it check it out you can get it on Amazon after you click through the website

you know closing it up everybody if you want to talk to us more beyond that you can get us on the inner webs

echoes at echo Charles I am at Jocko Willink that's on Twitter the Facebookie, and even have a little bit of the Instagram going on. I actually answer most of the, actually every single thing that comes on Twitter I'll respond to. I'm going to see how long I can keep that up for.

I don't know how long it's going to last. It's getting pretty hardcore right now. But I'm definitely reading everything that's coming in, and we appreciate all the feedback we get from you guys, and you guys bring it a little light to our world as much appreciated. And thanks for, bringing that light to us. And most of all, thanks for going out there and getting after it.

And so until next time, this is Echo and Jocko. Out.