The briefing itself was professionally crisp. The headquarters staff of Task Force Barker listened inside the crowded briefing tent as Colonel Henderson gave what amounted to a pep talk. It was a short talk, and Captain Gamble was later able to recall much of it before the Peers commission. “He generally reviewed what was going to occur the next day, and he mentioned that it was a very important operation, and the Vietcong unit that was located in that area. They wanted to get rid of them once and for all and get them out of that area. He stressed this point, and he wanted to make sure that everybody and all the companies were up to snuff and everything went like clockwork during the operation.”
Captain Medina later testified that Colonel Henderson wanted the companies to get more aggressive. Medina told the Peers commission, “Colonel Henderson... stated that in the past two operations the failure of the operations was that the soldier was not aggressive enough in closing with the enemy. Therefore, we were leaving too many weapons and that the other enemy soldiers in the area, as they retreated, the women and children in the area would pick up the weapons and run and therefore by the time the soldiers arrived to where they had killed a V.C. that the weapon would be gone.” Captain Kotouc testified that Henderson had said that “when we get through with that 48th Battalion, they won’t be giving us any more trouble.”
The troops expected to engage the Vietcong but instead found women, children, and old men, many of them still cooking their breakfast rice over outdoor fires.Photograph by Ronald L. Haeberle / The LIFE Images Collection / Getty
After Henderson spoke, Kotouc gave a quick summary of the intelligence situation, including the special report that all civilians would have left My Lai 4 by seven in the morning. Major Calhoun next presented a map review. Then Barker stood up. Kotouc recalled Barker’s words vividly. “Colonel Barker said he wanted the area cleaned out, he wanted it neutralized, and he wanted the buildings knocked down,” Kotouc told the Peers commission. “He wanted the hootches [huts] burned, and he wanted the tunnels filled in, and then he wanted the livestock and chickens run off, killed, or destroyed. Colonel Barker did not say anything about killing any civilians, sir, nor did I. He wanted to neutralize the area.”
Captain Medina testified that Barker “instructed me to burn and destroy the village; to destroy any livestock, water buffalo, pigs, chickens; and to close any wells that we might find...”
Who told Task Force Barker that all the civilians of My Lai 4 would leave the hamlet and be on their way to market shortly after 7 A.M. on March 16th? From whom did the task force receive information that four hundred members of the Vietcong 48th Battalion would be in the village of Son My on March 16th? These two questions remained unanswered throughout the Army’s lengthy hearings on the massacre at My Lai 4. Witnesses were consistently asked if they knew of any documents or people that had provided such information; the answers were invariably vague. “No, sir, I cannot cite any document,” Captain Kotouc said in response to such a question from a member of the Peers commission. “But it was through interrogation of people, people I had talked to. This was always—this was the part we were trying to figure out, how they moved in the area. They all came and went about the same time.... If I recall, part of it [the intelligence] came from Colonel Barker. Information, I think, he received from his contacts or somewhere like that. It is very difficult for me to pin it down.”
Undoubtedly, the men of the task force had some reasons of their own for believing that the 48th Battalion was in the Son My area; evidence of the unit’s presence—old documents, for instance, and civilians who perhaps knew of some of the unit’s recent movements—could be found at any time throughout the Batangan Peninsula, which was, after all, the base of operations for the 48th. Barker made no further attempt to confirm the enemy unit’s location, because he felt that none was needed. If Barker or any of his aides had checked, they would have found that every intelligence desk at the provincial headquarters in Quang Ngai placed the 48th Battalion at least fifteen kilometres, or nine miles, west of the city. They would also have learned that the unit was considered to be in poor fighting condition, because it had suffered heavy losses while attacking Quang Ngai during the Tet offensive. “Whatever was left of them was out in the mountains,” Gerald Stout, who was then an Army intelligence officer with the Americal Division and is now a law student at Syracuse University, told me in an interview. His information was based in part on highly classified reconnaissance flights over mountain areas.
There was no conspiracy to destroy the village of My Lai 4, or to kill the villagers; what took place there had happened before in Quang Ngai Province and would happen again—although with less drastic results. The desire of Colonel Barker to mount another successful operation in the area, with a high enemy body count; the belief shared by all the principals that everyone living in Son My was living there by choice, because of Communist sympathies; the assurance that no officials of the South Vietnamese government would protest any act of war in Son My; and the basic incompetence of many intelligence personnel in the Army—all these factors combined to enable a group of normally ambitious men to mount an unnecessary mission against a nonexistent enemy force and somehow find evidence to justify it.
The assault on My Lai 4 began, like most combat assaults in Vietnam, with artillery and helicopters. Colonel Barker arrived over My Lai 4 in his command-and-control helicopter just in time to see the first barrage of artillery shells fall into the hamlet. Colonel Henderson’s helicopter—filled with high-ranking officers—flew over the hamlet a few minutes later; trouble with a helicopter had delayed the Colonel’s takeoff from his headquarters, at Duc Pho. General Koster flew in and out of the area throughout the early morning, watching the men of Charlie Company conduct their assault. The task-force log for March 16th, which was submitted to the Peers commission in evidence, shows that Lieutenant Calley’s first platoon landed precisely at 7:30 A.M. at the landing zone outside My Lai 4. There were nine troop-carrying helicopters, and they were accompanied by two gunships from the 174th Aviation Company, which, with their guns blazing, had crisscrossed the landing zone moments before the combat troops landed, firing thousands of bullets and rockets in a fusillade designed to keep enemy gunmen at bay. Of course, there were no enemy gunmen, but it didn’t matter that day: within minutes the statistics began filling the task-force daily log. At seven-thirty-five, Charlie Company officially claimed its first Vietcong; the victim was an old man who had jumped out of a hole waving his arms in fear and pleading. Seven minutes later, the gunships—known as Sharks—claimed three Vietcong killed; the dead men were reportedly seen with weapons and field gear. By eight, seventeen more Vietcong were said to have been killed. At three minutes past eight, Charlie Company said that it had found a radio and three boxes of medical supplies. At eight-forty, Charlie Company notified headquarters that it had counted a total of eighty-four dead Vietcong. By this time, My Lai 4 was in ruins. Lieutenant Calley and a number of the men in his platoon were already in the process of killing two large groups of civilians and filling a drainage ditch with the bodies. The second and third platoons were also committing wholesale murder, and some men had begun to set fire to anything in the hamlet that would burn. Wells were fouled, livestock was slaughtered, and food stocks were scattered.
The two Sharks from the 174th also committed murder that morning. After the artillery shells began falling, hundreds of civilians streamed from the hamlet, most of them travelling southwest toward the city of Quang Ngai. The two gunships flew overhead and began firing into the crowd. The time was about seven-forty-five. It was noted by Captain Brian W. Livingston, a pilot from the 123rd Aviation Battalion, who was also flying in support of the mission. Livingston later flew over and took a close look at the victims; they were women, children, and old men—between thirty and fifty of them. Scott A. Baker, a flight commander with the 123rd, also watched the civilians leaving the village. He told the Peers commission later that the Sharks made a pass over the group with their guns firing and that moments later he saw twenty-five bodies on the road to Quang Ngai. The troops from Charlie Company had yet to move that far south, Baker said.
The killing continued for at least ninety minutes after eight-forty, but no more enemy kills for Charlie Company appeared in the task-force log. Charlie Company’s body count officially ended at eight-forty in the morning on March 16th, with a report that it had killed eighty-four Vietcong and had captured documents, a radio, ammunition, and some medical supplies. The Sharks had reported a total of six enemy kills. Later that day, Bravo Company concluded its operation with an official body count of thirty-eight. (The total number of dead Vietcong allegedly slain by both the ground and air units over My Lai 4—a hundred and twenty-eight—would make the front pages of American newspapers the next morning. It was the most significant operation of the war for the 11th Brigade.)
The smoke over My Lai 4 could be seen for miles. First Lieutenant James T. Cooney was flying Colonel Henderson’s helicopter over My Lai 4; he told the Peers commission, “I did notice several hootches burning, several buildings burning, possibly rice stores. I do remember there being burning going on on the ground at that time.” Chief Warrant Officer Robert W. Witham was flying General Koster’s helicopter; he similarly recalled “smoke and things like this, artillery.” Even Captain Johnson—the Americal Division’s liaison officer at Quang Ngai, about five miles to the southwest, saw the smoke. “I remember seeing smoke in the area and knowing that Task Force Barker was in the area,” he told the Peers commission. “I accepted this. I assumed that I knew what was happening.” The pilots saw it, but the officers they were flying claimed they did not. General Koster, asked by the Peers commission if he recalled seeing the village “pretty much up in smoke at that time when you flew over,” responded simply, “No, sir, I don’t.” Colonel Henderson was asked a similar question, and replied, “I did not see My Lai 4 in flames or having been burnt or burning.”
Warrant Officers Jerry R. Culverhouse and Daniel R. Millians were piloting a helicopter that morning in support of Charlie Company. Culverhouse and Millians, who were attached to the 123rd Aviation Battalion, were part of a new concept in the Vietnam air war. B Company of the 123rd was known as an aero-scout company, and its mission that day was to cut off enemy troops attempting to flee Task Force Barker’s trap in My Lai 4. The pilots usually teamed up with a second gunship, and both usually flew above a small observation helicopter. On the morning of March 16th, the observation helicopter was manned by Chief Warrant Officer Hugh C. Thompson, Jr., of Atlanta. Above the gunships, in turn, were two or three helicopters carrying infantrymen. The concept called for the observation craft to flush out the enemy, so the gunships could force them to halt. If the enemy avoided the gunships, the infantrymen would be landed (the 123rd pilots described this process as “inserting the animals”) to engage the Vietcong. Culverhouse and Millians arrived at their duty station sometime after nine and joined up with Captain Livingston. The hamlet was still aflame. They began flying back and forth across My Lai 4 and the nearby paddy fields, on the prowl for Vietcong. Culverhouse later told the Peers commission, “It appeared to us there it was fairly secure. We heard no shooting and didn’t receive any fire ourselves... And we immediately noted the bodies surrounding the village.... there were numerous bodies scattered both in the inner perimeters of the village and in the outer perimeters leaving the village.... I was especially... amazed at one group of bodies encountered... over on the east side of the village there was an irrigation ditch, which appeared to me to be about six or seven feet wide.... [and] probably five or six feet deep.... there were numerous bodies that appeared to be piled up. In some places, I don’t know, maybe four or five or I suppose as high as six deep.... For an area about—around thirty to thirty-five yards the ditch was almost completely filled with bodies.”
Later, at Thompson’s insistence, Culverhouse and Millians landed their helicopter and removed some civilians from a bunker. Thompson was in a rage: he had spent the morning watching Charlie Company commit murder. Finally, observing about ten women and children huddled in fear as Lieutenant Calley and his men approached them, Thompson landed his craft, ordered his two machine gunners to train their weapons on Calley, and announced that he was going to fly the civilians to safety. “The only way you’ll get them out is with a hand grenade,” Calley replied. Thompson radioed to Culverhouse and Millians and asked them to land their helicopter to begin evacuating the civilians. They descended. For combat helicopter pilots, the decision to land was heresy, because the aircraft are exceptionally vulnerable to enemy fire during the slow moments of descent and ascent. As the helicopter landed, Thompson and his door gunner began coaxing the civilians into the craft.
Captain Livingston testified before the Peers commission that he had heard Thompson make three separate radio transmissions about unwarranted killings, beginning sometime after nine. Thompson complained twice about a captain who had shot and killed a Vietnamese woman, and his third complaint was about a black sergeant who had done the same thing.
General Koster habitually kept up with the swirl of action in his area of responsibility by monitoring three or four radio frequencies; he was constantly on the alert for the first signs of trouble or enemy contact anywhere. Such signs can always be heard over the airwaves—calls for reinforcements, medical helicopters, more ammunition, more firepower. The General’s helicopter had an elaborate radio console, and, if he chose, he could tune in on communications between helicopters and ground forces, the task force and the companies, or the brigade and the task force. Despite the information available to him, Koster, in his testimony to the Peers commission, could not recall any details of the My Lai 4 operation. Asked if he had seen the hundreds of Vietnamese civilians fleeing the hamlet that morning, the General replied, “I can’t tie it to this particular operation. I’ve flown over several of them, and this one doesn’t distinguish itself from any other as far as this type of thing is concerned.” Colonel Henderson, however, testified that he saw from six to eight bodies that might be civilians during his early-morning flight over My Lai 4. He recalled checking immediately with Colonel Barker and being told that the victims had been killed by artillery fire. Those were the only bodies he reported seeing, although he flew over My Lai 4 on at least three occasions that day. At least one other passenger aboard his aircraft, however, testified to having seen many more. Sergeant Adco*ck, Henderson’s radio operator that day, told the Peers commission that he had observed from thirty-five to forty bodies in all during his trips over My Lai 4. The command-and-control helicopter, he said, usually flew at an altitude of fifteen hundred feet—out of the range of small-arms fire—but had travelled much lower during the morning trips over the hamlet, occasionally going “low enough to make the rice wave.” The other passengers on the flight were Major Robert W. McKnight, the 11th Brigade operations officer, who testified that he had seen perhaps five dead bodies; Colonel Luper, the brigade’s artillery commander, who said he had seen from fifteen to twenty bodies; and Air Force Lieutenant Colonel William I. MacLachlan, who was assigned to coördinate air strikes, if necessary, and who said he had seen only a few bodies. None of the passengers, including Adco*ck, specifically recalled hearing anything about Americans’ murdering Vietnamese.
The only known complaints made before nine that morning came from Thompson and other members of the 123rd Aviation Battalion. The helicopter unit, normally stationed at the Americal Division headquarters, at Chu Lai, had set up a special operations van and refuelling station at Landing Zone Dottie, the headquarters area (named after Colonel Barker’s wife) for Task Force Barker, to increase the support it could provide for the task force. Former Specialist Fifth Class Lawrence J. Kubert, who was serving as the operations sergeant for the aero-scout company of the battalion, told the Peers commission that he and others in the van had heard pilots’ complaints early that morning about the excessive shooting of civilians by the Sharks from the 174th Aviation Company. The complaints were relayed to the task-force operations center at Dottie, only three hundred yards away, with a warning that most of the persons fleeing the village were women and children. Kubert recalled that Colonel Henderson, identifying himself by his radio code name, Rawhide Six, subsequently warned the combat units by radio, “I don’t want any unnecessary killing.” A similar statement from Henderson was heard by two aero-scout plots during the morning. Kubert said he assumed that the warning was directed at the gunships.
By 9 A.M., Colonel Henderson was back at the task-force operations center. He had spent more than an hour over My Lai 4, leaving for only a few moments shortly after eight to watch Bravo Company begin its assault on My Lai I—a target it never reached. Within the next thirty minutes, the Colonel was joined by most of the senior officers of the task force and the 11th Brigade. Major Calhoun, the task-force operations officer, and Master Sergeant William J. Johnson were monitoring the radios in the operations center. Captain Charles R. Lewellen, the assistant operations officer, who ran the night shift at the task-force operations center, had stayed up to transcribe center, stayed up the reports of the operation with his tape recorder. A copy of that tape was later made available to the Peers commission, and it provided a minute-by-minute timetable for the first hours of action. The tape also helped prove to the satisfaction of the Peers investigators that a coverup—involving the manipulation of battlefield statistics—had taken place between eight-thirty and nine-thirty at Landing Zone Dottie.
At that time, Colonel Barker was still flying over the combat area; he had been out there for more than an hour. At eight-twenty-eight, according to the Lewellen tape, Barker had radioed Captain Medina, saying, “I’m heading back to refuel. Have you had any contact down there yet?” Lewellen’s tape did not record Medina’s response, but Barker, apparently informed that the company was making a body count, said, “Dig deep. Take your time and get ’em [the Vietcong] out of those holes.” Medina gave him the body count, and Barker asked, “Is that eight—ah, eight-four K.I.A.s?” Having been told that it was, Barker radioed Sergeant Johnson, “Returning to your location to refuel.” A few minutes later, Barker landed at Dottie and rushed to the operations center, arriving just as a clerk was noting in the official task-force log, “Co. C has counted 69 V.C. K.I.A.” The map coördinates for My Lai 4 were listed alongside the entry, which was filed at eight-forty. The log statistics were not cumulative, and the new report of sixty-nine kills, added to the earlier claims of fifteen, gave Charlie Company its total body count of eighty-four.
By this time, the operations center should have been in a state of jubilation, but most of the men there were aware that none of the normal sounds of combat were coming from the radios—just a steadily climbing total of enemy kills. The only American casualties reported by nine o’clock were a lieutenant and some enlisted men from Bravo Company who had triggered land mines. The Peers commission, during one of its interrogations of Colonel Henderson, suggested what really was going on: “They [Charlie Company] went through this place in less than an hour. By the time you were ready to come back [to Landing Zone Dottie], they had been practically through the village.... There were dead civilians all over the place. There wasn’t any resistance. There wasn’t a shot fired after that.... Hootches were burned by this time.” About nine, Specialist Fifth Class Kubert relayed the reports from the pilots over My Lai 4 to the task force.
