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

Lieutenant Calley chimed in here and there like a teacher’s pet, and the room soon became electric, taking on the tone of a pep rally rather than a mission briefing.

Every soldier was told to pack three times the ammunition that would be carried on a normal raid. They would go in strong and blow away everything that moved, laying waste to the crops and the livestock, fouling the wells, and burning the place to ashes so that the village would be useless to any surviving enemy.

Medina implored Charlie Company to remember who and what they’d lost so far: Billy Weber and all the others. They were to gut up and go in with one stone-cold intent: to kill people and break things, to search and destroy until not even a stick was left standing. This was their chance to even the score.

My Lai, Vietnam

Early morning, March 16, 1968

As Morgan Campbell and the rest of Charlie Company strapped into the transport helicopters they heard Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson, the recon pilot, reporting over the radio. He’d flown in first, as usual, braving enemy fire so the infantry could get a picture of what they were about to face. His door-gunners had strafed the tree line on either side of the target village and, according to Thompson, theirs was the only gunfire to be seen or heard. There wasn’t an enemy in sight. Then again, there was nothing so unusual about that.

They were almost to the landing zone when Medina gave his last orders.

“I don’t give a damn what recon says, this is a hot zone we’re landing in. Maybe the hottest you’ve seen so far. The colonel’s in the command craft up above us, and believe me, he knows what’s what. You hesitate and you’ll get us pinned down in there, understand? Remember your orders! This is your fight to win! You’ve heard the old-timers talk about Iwo Jima? Well, this is yours, boys, right here today!”

• • •

The helos had barely touched grass when Morgan Campbell and all the others jumped out and hit the ground running. There was sporadic gunfire as the men fanned out and headed in toward the hamlet. Campbell saw movement among the trees and fired into them before moving on while others backed him up and laid down heavy suppression fire so they wouldn’t get flanked in the advance.

Somebody ran past the window of a hut and Campbell swung his M60 around and cut the place up. Every fifth round was a tracer, and that allowed him to shoot from the hip with enough accuracy to hit what he was aiming at. Fleeing the hail of lead, two people burst through the door and Campbell shot them down just as his first ammo belt ran out.

As Campbell knelt and reloaded, he saw the rest of his company moving into the hamlet. There were people running away from them, some with hands in the air, and they were easily killed as the troops went house to house and cleared each dwelling of danger.

Campbell turned and saw a soldier he’d had dinner with the night before. The man walked up behind a young Vietnamese woman with an infant in her arms and shot her point-blank through the chest.

By then, some of the huts were burning. The helicopters overhead whipped up the smoke, hurting visibility and casting a dark, eerie shadow over the village. Campbell thought back to what he’d just seen. Or, more precisely, what he thought he’d seen. He couldn’t be so sure anymore.

Campbell stood up and felt the deadly hesitation that Captain Medina had warned them about. He shook it off, assessed the scene again, and continued his advance. The sound of gunfire was dying down, but intermittent shots still echoed throughout the village.

By the time he reached the center of the village it looked like their orders had changed. With Lieutenant Calley directing, a few hundred people had been rounded up and were being marched to the east, toward a long drainage ditch that ran the length of the clearing. When they got there the scene grew still. The Vietnamese stood with their backs to the ditch and a line of soldiers facing them. Morgan Campbell walked over and joined his friends in that line.

Some of the wounded Vietnamese were being dragged to the edge and tossed into the ditch by other soldiers. As those bodies began to stack up, an OH-23 landed nearby, and seconds later, Hugh Thompson walked up in his flight suit and got right into Calley’s face.

“What the hell’s going on here, Lieutenant?” Thompson shouted. Calley outranked him but it looked to Campbell as though military hierarchy was not on Thompson’s mind just then. “These are unarmed civilians; you can see that, can’t you?”

“This is my business,” Calley said. “We’ve got our orders.”

“Orders? Whose orders?”

“I’ve got my orders, Thompson, and you’ve got yours. Intel tags all these people as the enemy—”

“Intel? Tell me, Lieutenant, have you never known intel to be dead wrong before?”

“I told you, I’ve got my orders! Now get the hell out of here so we can damn well do our job!”

“You ain’t heard the last of this,” Thompson spat, heading back for the radio in his aircraft.

When the helicopter had taken off again, Calley walked up to Campbell and the others, and he said, “Now, men, let’s do what we came here to do.”

• • •

More than any other detail in those next minutes, Campbell remembered the feel of pulling the trigger—the unholy ease of it. He hadn’t been the first to start shooting all those people—grandmothers and grandfathers, women and boys and girls, almost no one of fighting age at all—but once he’d brought himself to make that one small motion with his right-hand index finger, the hardest part was behind him. From then on he killed efficiently and without hesitation.

As people died and fell to the ground there was nowhere for the others to run. Many began to jump down into the drainage ditch, some shielding their children with their own bodies. A few started forward, pleading, their arms outstretched as if they could stop the bullets with their hands. They were cut down like all the others.

When his ammo ran out, Campbell knelt to reload, then stood again and stepped to the edge of the ditch to scan for survivors. Each time he saw movement, he fired.

At last the ditch grew quiet; a still sea of arms and legs and bodies and faces with empty, staring eyes. Morgan Campbell looked around when it seemed like it was over and realized he was the only soldier remaining at his post and ready to fire.

It appeared that some of the men had put down their weapons and refused Calley’s orders. Others seemed to have simply fled the area. Another dozen or so were following the lieutenant as he chased a small group of villagers that had somehow been missed in the sweep of the town.

Campbell followed them, watching the pursuit. The survivors ran toward a bunker with the small contingent of Charlie Company in hot pursuit.

Campbell caught up just as the Vietnamese disappeared underground. Calley called out for his grenadiers to advance on the bunker, and that’s when Hugh Thompson landed his helicopter again, right between the soldiers and their unarmed, fleeing prey.

Thompson’s door-gunners unharnessed their machine guns and stepped out, facing their fellow Americans. It was a standoff; neither side took aim, but neither side looked like it was going to back down, either. And then the unarmed pilot walked out between all those guns and made an announcement.

“I’m going to go over to that bunker, now,” Thompson shouted, so all the soldiers could hear him clearly, “and I’m going to fly those civilians out of here myself. And Lieutenant, if you make a move to shoot them or me, by God you’d better be ready to take the consequences!”

Campbell continued to watch as three, then seven, then maybe fifteen people were brought out of the bunker. It was far too many to fit into his helo, but Hugh Thompson wasn’t going to leave anyone behind. He called down a pair of gunships to help ferry the group away.