Glenn Beck - Miracles and Massacres - True and Untold Stories of the Making of America

The last man was Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson Jr. Thompson flew a little OH-23 helicopter on recon and rescue missions, risking his life every day and night, flying low cover and drawing enemy fire so the troops on the ground could get early warning of any ambush up ahead. He saved a lot of men with the risks he took. Life expectancy was short for such pilots and their crews, but he was damned good at what he did and as brave as they came. No one ever saw Hugh Thompson sweat.

• • •

Morgan Campbell’s first month in Vietnam passed with almost no fighting at all.

When Charlie Company visited villages on their patrols, the troops were welcomed by the Vietnamese locals. The infantry would march in and establish a safe perimeter, give some candy to the kids, and help old ladies with their chores. It was Boy Scout–type stuff, building goodwill and winning hearts and minds.

Where’s the war? That’s what the men asked themselves on the long hikes back to base. It was a good time, if any time spent in a war can be called that. Between hitting the bars and beaches off duty it felt more like their training stint in Hawaii than a battle zone, but the peace was deceptive. They all knew it couldn’t last.

And it didn’t.

Tet Offensive

January 31, 1968

The widespread violence came without warning, in the midst of a mutual cease-fire agreed to in observance of the Vietnamese New Year’s celebrations. In the largest coordinated enemy campaign to date, eighty thousand communist troops stormed into more than one hundred cities and vital strategic targets across South Vietnam.

The Americans and their allies were taken completely by surprise. While some of the lost territory was quickly regained, the war had suddenly and permanently been redefined. The Vietcong and the North Vietnamese Army had made it clear to the world that they were more than a match for any invading force, superpower or not, and they were in it for the long haul.

A few days earlier, Charlie Company had been reassigned to Task Force Barker. This battalion-sized unit was stationed along the coast in the central region and their circle of operations included a particular stronghold of enemy activity. The place was called Pinkville because of the odd color that was used to label it on their tactical maps.

On the second night of the Tet Offensive, Morgan Campbell and Charlie Company were camped close enough to Quang Ngai City to see in the distance the very forces they’d soon be fighting. It was the Vietcong Forty-Eighth Battalion—the VC equivalent of the Green Berets—rumored to be the most elite and organized unit the enemy possessed, and Quang Ngai was thought to be their home turf.

It would be Charlie Company’s job to go out, meet the Forty-Eighth Battalion head-on, and destroy them.

Pinkville

February–March 1968

In a daily briefing before a routine patrol, one of the brass actually had the stones to quote Chairman Mao with a straight face.

The enemy is the fish , he’d said, and the civilians are the sea .

Mao had been preaching the gospel of guerrilla warfare when he said something similar, but now his saying was being repurposed as warning to the troops. The major’s point was that you can’t always tell who’s who, so you can no longer trust anybody Vietnamese. There were stories of old ladies and even little kids walking up to a sentry, giving him a big hug, and then pulling the pin on a grenade hidden under their smock.

Over the weeks since Tet, something fundamental had shifted in the atmosphere.

As the fighting had intensified, the locals started to change. Before the offensive they’d welcomed the Americans into their villages. Now that Quang Ngai was a free-fire zone, and regular bombing and shelling had begun across the region, honest friendliness was replaced with tight-lipped suspicion and distrust. The soldiers could feel themselves being watched from every shadow.

The locals knew where the minefields and booby traps were set, and where the snipers of the Forty-Eighth were hiding—but they didn’t tell. They’d prefer to keep their silence and let a man walk right into a trap and lose his leg or his life.

As time went on, and reports of daily casualties mounted, there was a growing feeling among the American troops that if the civilians were aiding and abetting the enemy, then weren’t they the enemy as well?

The war that Morgan Campbell and Charlie Company had trained for was different than the one that was closing in all around them. There were no uniformed opponents and few, if any, solid strategic goals. They’d go out on patrol every day, waiting for the inevitable attack and hoping the odds would be with them. The VC Forty-Eighth was fighting a war of attrition, picking off their enemies man by man and then retreating into the impenetrable jungle, knowing that the Americans couldn’t fight what they couldn’t see.

Yet even with those strategies in play, and entire villages of locals working against them, Charlie Company still hadn’t taken any major losses as the war escalated. But that changed fast.

One morning, a patrol led by Lieutenant Calley was ambushed by sniper fire down by the river. No sooner had they dived for cover when Calley ordered the platoon to get up and cross the river, right out in the open, and go after the sniper nest dug in on the other side. The men knew it would be slow and dangerous wading through the water, but they followed their orders. They’d hardly taken one step forward when a well-placed bullet hit Billy Weber in the side.

It didn’t look so bad at first. He was shot through the kidney, though, the organ was shattered, and the guy who got him must have known that his target would die slowly and in a lot of pain. The field medic did what he could, but nothing outside of morphine was going to help. It took almost an hour before Billy Weber finally died.

Throughout the ordeal some of the men were firing back, just shooting randomly up into the hills, yelling for the enemy to come out and fight. But that sniper had already done his job and had slipped back into hiding again.

With Weber’s death, the men of Charlie Company knew that their charmed existence in this war was finally over. Throughout February, they lost a man almost every day, yet it still seemed like there was nobody out there to fight. The VC were ghosts. They would hit hard and then melt back into the jungle and the villages around Quang Ngai.

Somewhere close to the middle of March, the First and Second Platoons were out on patrol when they walked into different minefields at the same time. The first one blew, boom , and as men went in to help the injured they’d step on another mine, and then another, and another. Through it all, Captain Medina ran with his troops right among the worst of it, shouting orders, pulling soldiers to safety, leading as though he were invincible.

Charlie Company had started out with 140 able soldiers. Now they were down to 105.

• • •

What Charlie Company lacked was a crystal-clear military objective and an enemy they could face and fight. Brigade commander Colonel Oran Henderson arrived on the scene and, with Captain Medina by his side, delivered both at a March 15 mission briefing.

The new intelligence, Henderson told Charlie Company, was rock solid: the Forty-Eighth Vietcong Battalion was using a nearby group of villages called My Lai as a base of operations from which to launch attacks against the American forces. If Charlie Company struck fast and hard, Medina and his death-dealers could take them out once and for all. The mission would take place the following day.

After Colonel Henderson left on a reconnaissance flight with the other unit commanders, Captain Medina stepped up to add his own perspective to the briefing. The Americans would be outnumbered two or three to one, but the good news was that almost all of the civilians in the area had already fled the zone. Anyone they encountered, he told them, was to be considered a combatant, either VC or VC sympathizers.