When was my lai uncovered

Pitttman, the provost marshal of the unit, testified before the Peers commission that he could not recall giving the military policemen under his command any instructions or training in their obligations to report war crimes. On two or three occasions, Pittman said, he did report instances of prisoner mistreatment to both Lipscomb and Henderson. At a staff meeting, Lipscomb or Henderson always responded the same way—not by ordering an investigation but by putting out instructions against such practices.

Roberts, who worked in the public-information office, near headquarters, recalled. Plans to blow up the mess hall—perhaps only half serious—were constantly being developed by the headquarters clerks. Some G. Shortly before Lipscomb, a West Pointer, retired, the brigade public-information office presented him with a scrapbook of photographs and news clippings highlighting his service with the 11th Brigade.

Similar scrapbooks were made up for most senior officers who left the unit. Former Sergeant Ronald L. If a general is smiling wrong in a photograph, I have learned to destroy it. My experience as a G. I stopped and destroyed the negative. F or a non-West Pointer, Colonel Barker had everything going for him.

In January, , General Koster had pulled him out of his job as operations officer of the 11th Brigade and given him command of a three-company task force of four hundred men that had been put together to find and destroy the enemy in the Batangan Peninsula area, in the eastern part of Quang Ngai Province. Few operations had ever been mounted against the village of Son My, which was widely considered to be the staging and headquarters area for the Vietcong 48th Battalion, one of the strongest units in Quang Ngai.

The area was heavily booby-trapped, and the men of Task Force Barker—the Colonel followed a custom by naming the unit after himself—suffered as a result. By March 15th, about fifteen G. For example, four men in Charlie Company were killed and thirty-eight were wounded in those ten weeks, but the Peers commission determined that only three of the casualties, including one death, had resulted from direct contact with the enemy.

As a result, our public-information coverage was kind of slim. They were getting contact, and we were getting good copy out of it. Specialist Fourth Class Donald R. Hooton, one of the Bravo Company infantrymen, had a different point of view. But the G. He made sure that his troops received at least one hot meal a day in the field. There were other reasons for the widespread admiration of Barker. Then, when Henderson assumed control of the brigade, on March 15th, he was still not assigned a new administrative aide, so he was forced to do his paperwork at night.

Such treatment undoubtedly galled Henderson, and so did the relationship between Koster and Barker. There were fifteen thousand lieutenant colonels in the Army in and fewer than three hundred battalions to command. Without battalion-command experience in Vietnam, a young lieutenant colonel could not expect promotion. But by the time Henderson took over the brigade, General Koster had promised the next battalion command to Barker.

Barker, like all commanders, spent most of his working day in a helicopter, and he tried to catch up on his paperwork at night. The administration of the task force therefore fell to the operations officer, Major Charles C. Calhoun, who was serving his second tour of duty in Vietnam. The task-force headquarters was severely underequipped and understaffed; it had only one typewriter assigned to it, and one clerk to do its typing.

As a result, there was neither the staff nor the time to prepare the required task-force version of the rules of engagement or to instruct the troops about the Geneva conventions. The unofficial task-force rule seemed to be simply not to commit any illegal actions directly in front of the commanding officer. After the second mission, Colonel Barker gave his superiors a glowing report. Friendly casualties were light and the enemy suffered a hard blow.

However, many enemy soldiers were able to escape with their weapons and the weapons of the enemy dead. This was caused by several factors. Although the air strikes were timely and effective.

Air evacuation of wounded was a contributing factor in allowing the enemy time to escape, since supporting fire had to be stopped each time a medevac helicopter was brought in. The ground units were not as aggressive later in the battle as they were earlier. Aggressiveness increased again at the insistence of the Task Force commander, but during the lull several V. It was probably inevitable that Barker would decide to conduct another operation in Son My.

It just was something that had to be done before the area would be under control. Hall, the task-force communications sergeant, recalled that Barker had unsuccessfully sought permission from brigade headquarters to use Rome plows, monstrous twenty-two-ton bulldozers capable of levelling hundreds of acres per day, to destroy the area. General Koster acknowledged to the Peers commission that though he was assured that the forthcoming task-force assault would be even more successful than the two previous operations Barker reported that he expected to find four hundred Vietcong in the area , he really knew very little about the plan for it.

He was consulted about the mission, he said, simply because he was the only one who could authorize the use of helicopters, which Barker considered necessary.

As Barker initially explained it to Koster, the main target was the village of My Lai 1, the center of the Pinkville area, where intelligence said the 48th Battalion had its headquarters.

Although Koster approved the mission, he did not attempt to analyze it. Of course, that place was nothing but a bunch of rubble anyway. I knew they had gone in there on many occasions and tried to blow the dugouts and tunnels, and I knew that this was a continuing thing. Every time we went through there we tried to blow a few more of them. At no point was there any formal, written plan outlining the tactical aspects of the operation.

Trexler, the division intelligence chief. The population was at least five hundred. It was a hopeless situation for the civilians in Son My, whatever their political affiliations, if any. Captain Charles K. Wyndham, who served until March 16th as the civil-affairs officer for Task Force Barker, told the Peers commission that he had never participated in any planning for the handling and safety of civilians before any operation with the task force.

At one point in the planning for the operation, some unchallenged intelligence information about the civilians in My Lai 4 was received at the task-force headquarters: the residents would leave their hamlet about 7 A. Since none of the planning details of the operation had been presented to higher headquarters, it was impossible for staff officers there to evaluate the intelligence information with any degree of sophistication. However, amid all the conflicting testimony before the Peers commission, a consensus did emerge that there was no basis for assuming that all the residents of My Lai 4 would leave the village about seven in the morning to go to market.

In fact, former First Lieutenant Clarence E. Dukes, an intelligence officer at Americal Division headquarters, testified later that precisely the opposite might have been expected.

Most of your male population would have moved out to their daily work. Luper was serving then as commanding officer of all the artillery units attached to the 11th Brigade. He wanted the preparation fire north of his landing zone, which would have put it on My Lai, the village of My Lai.

There is a difference between the sacrifice of American troops and the sacrifice of some civilians in this area. Another justification cited for the shelling of the village was that such action had been cleared by the South Vietnamese authorities responsible for the area of operations.

The Vietnamese considered the whole area to be dominated by the Vietcong and had long since declared it a free-fire zone. Captain Wayne E.

American and Vietnamese authorities in Saigon began an uprooting of the people of Son My and neighboring villages in February, , expecting to relocate four thousand civilians; at its end, there were twelve thousand people shifted from the area. Kotouc, the task-force intelligence officer, scheduled a complete operational briefing on the mission in a small tent just outside task-force headquarters.

Gamble, the commanding officer of the four-cannon artillery battery stationed at Landing Zone Uptight, about five miles north of My Lai 4; and Major Frederic W. Watke, the commanding officer of the aero-scout company of the rd Aviation Battalion, which was stationed in the Americal Division headquarters area, at Chu Lai, and which would fly support for the mission. Riggs, was assigned no significant role in the operation.

Also present at the briefing was Colonel Henderson, who had formally taken command of the 11th Brigade only hours before. 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. 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. 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.

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. Colonel Barker did not say anything about killing any civilians, sir, nor did I. He wanted to neutralize the area. 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.

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? Witnesses were consistently asked if they knew of any documents or people that had provided such information; the answers were invariably vague.

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. 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.

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.

General Koster flew in and out of the area throughout the early morning, watching the men of Charlie Company conduct their assault. There were nine troop-carrying helicopters, and they were accompanied by two gunships from the th 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.

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 th 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 rd 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 rd, 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. 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.

I do remember there being burning going on on the ground at that time. I assumed that I knew what was happening. 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 rd Aviation Battalion, were part of a new concept in the Vietnam air war.

The pilots usually teamed up with a second gunship, and both usually flew above a small observation helicopter. Thompson, Jr. 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. 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. And we immediately noted the bodies surrounding the village. I was especially. For an area about—around thirty to thirty-five yards the ditch was almost completely filled with bodies.

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.

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. 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.

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. The only known complaints made before nine that morning came from Thompson and other members of the rd Aviation Battalion. 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 said he assumed that the warning was directed at the gunships.

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. Johnson were monitoring the radios in the operations center. A jury of six men and six women delivered the verdict 23 months after Laci Peterson, who was pregnant, disappeared on Christmas Eve from Modesto, California.

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