Excerpt
Cover-Up
1
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Three Hundred
Forty-Seven
Early on March 16, 1968, a company of Americal Division soldiers was dropped in by helicopter for an assault against a hamlet known as My Lai 4, located in the bitterly contested province of Quang Ngai, on the northeastern coast of South Vietnam. The one hundred GIs and officers stormed the hamlet in military-textbook style, advancing by platoons; the men expected to engage the 48th Viet Cong Battalion there, one of the enemy’s most successful units, but instead, found women, children, and old men—many of them still cooking their breakfast rice over outdoor fires. During the next few hours the civilians were ruthlessly murdered. Many were rounded up in small groups and shot; others were flung into a drainage ditch at one edge of the hamlet and shot; and many more were shot at random in and about their homes. Some of the younger women and girls were raped, and then murdered. After the shootings the GIs systematically burned each home, destroyed livestock and food, and fouled the area’s drinking supplies.
None of this was officially told by the company—Charlie Company—to its task force headquarters; instead, a claim that 128 Viet Cong were killed and three weapons were captured eventually emerged and worked its way up to the highest American headquarters in Saigon, where it was released to the world’s press as a significant victory.
The GIs kept what they had done largely to themselves, but there were other witnesses to the atrocity. The first investigations which followed erroneously concluded that twenty civilians had inadvertently been killed by artillery and heavy crossfire between American and Viet Cong units during the battle. The investigation involved all the immediate elements of the chain of command: the company was attached to Task Force Barker, which in turn reported to the 11th Light Infantry Brigade, which was one of three such units making up the Americal Division.
Task Force Barker’s victory remained just another statistic until April, 1969, when an ex-GI named Ronald L. Ridenhour wrote letters to the Pentagon, the White House, other government offices, and twenty-four Congressmen describing the murders at My Lai 4. Ridenhour had not participated in the attack on the hamlet but he had discussed the operation with a few of the GIs who did. Within four months many details of the atrocity had been uncovered by Army investigators, and in September, 1969, a young lieutenant named William L. Calley, Jr., was charged with the murder of 109 Vietnamese civilians. No significant facts about the Calley investigation were made public at the time; instead, the Army released an inaccurate and misleading statement that gave no hint of the number of murders involved in the case. But the facts gradually did emerge, and in mid-November a series of newspaper stories was published partially revealing the extent of the massacre. Subsequent stories told enough about My Lai 4 to create a world-wide outcry. A few weeks after the first newspaper accounts, the Army announced that it had set up a panel to determine what had kept the initial investigations in the spring of 1968 from learning of the atrocity. The panel was officially called “The Department of the Army Review of the Preliminary Investigations into the My Lai Incident,” unofficially known as the Peers Inquiry, after its director, Lieutenant General William R. Peers. The three-star general, then fifty-six, had spent more than thirty months as a troop commander in Vietnam.
Peers and his team of assistants, which included two New York lawyers, quickly determined that they could not adequately explore the cover-up of the atrocity without finding out more about what had, in fact, happened on the day the troops were at My Lai 4. On December 2, 1969, the investigating team began interrogating officers and enlisted men of the units involved—Charlie Company, Task Force Barker, the 11th Brigade, and the Americal Division. Four hundred and one witnesses were interrogated—about fifty in South Vietnam, and the rest in a special operations room in the basement of the Pentagon before Peers himself and a panel of military officers and civilians that varied in size between three and eight men. The interrogations inevitably produced much self-serving testimony. To get at the truth, the Peers Panel recalled many witnesses for subsequent interviews and confronted them with conflicting testimony. Only six witnesses before the Panel refused to testify, although all legally could have remained silent; few career military men can appear to be hiding something before a three-star general.
By mid-March the Peers Panel had compiled enough evidence to recommend that charges be placed against fifteen officers; a high-level review subsequently concluded that fourteen of them should be charged, including Major General Samuel W. Koster, who was commanding general of the Americal Division at the time of My Lai 4. By 1970 Koster was superintendent of West Point, the military academy, and the filing of cover-up charges against him stunned the Army. One other general was charged, along with two colonels, two lieutenant colonels, four majors, two captains, and two first lieutenants.
Army officials told newsmen that the Peers Panel accumulated more than twenty thousand pages of testimony and five hundred documents during its fifteen weeks of operation. The resource material alone, it was said, included thirty-two books of direct testimony, six books of supplemental documents and affidavits, plus volumes of maps, charts, exhibits, and internal documents. It was carefully explained that none of this material could be released to the public, to avoid damaging pre-trial publicity, until the legal proceedings against the accused men were completed; a process, officials acknowledged, that might take years. In addition, it was explained that upon release, the materials would have to be carefully censored to ensure that no material damaging to America’s foreign policies or national security was made available. In May, 1971, fourteen months after the initial report, officials were still quoted as saying that “It might be years” before the investigation was made public. By then, charges against thirteen of the fourteen initial defendants had been dismissed without a court-martial.
Early in the spring of 1971 I was provided with a complete set of more than thirty volumes of the testimony, documents, and other materials of the Peers Panel. What follows is based largely on those papers, although I supplemented them with documents from different sources, including the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division (C.I.D.), which had the main responsibility for conducting the initial investigations into both the My Lai 4 massacre and its cover-up. I further interviewed scores of military and civilian officials, including men who had been witnesses before the Peers Panel, and some who should have been but were not called to testify or refused to do so. I also discussed some of my findings with former members of the Army who were directly connected with the Panel.
There is no question that a serious concern for the rights of possible court-martial defendants does exist at all levels of the Army, but a careful examination of the accumulated testimony and documents makes equally clear the fact that it is the Army itself that is most adversely affected by the material. Many documents indicate that military officials have deliberately withheld from the public important, but embarrassing, factual information about My Lai 4. For example, the Army has steadfastly refused to reveal how many civilians were, in fact, killed by Charlie Company on March 16, a decision that no longer has anything to do with pre-trial publicity. Its spokesmen have told many newsmen that the information is not available. Yet in February, 1970, a census of civilian casualties in My Lai 4 was secretly undertaken at the request of the Peers Panel by the Criminal Investigation Division. After an analysis of existing data, the C.I.D. concluded in a memorandum to General Peers that Charlie Company had slain 347 Vietnamese men, women, and children in My Lai 4 on March 16, 1968, a total twice as great as had been publicly acknowledged. In addition, the Peers Panel subsequently learned that Lieutenant Calley’s first platoon, one of three which made the attack upon My Lai 4, was responsible for ninety to one hundred and thirty murders during the operation—roughly one-third of the casualties. The second platoon was determined to have murdered as many as a hundred civilians, with the rest of the deaths attributed to the third platoon and the helicopter gunships.
Even more striking, however, than the detailed evidence of widespread murder and cover-up in connection with My Lai 4, was the revelation during the hearings that all of the Army’s command and control and reporting systems were inadequate, at least in the Americal Division as of 1968. The officers at the top were shown to have little understanding of the problems and activities of men in the platoons and companies below. Atrocities could be committed almost at will throughout the operating area of the Americal Division, with no means for even detecting them at higher headquarters.
Thus, the Peers Panel discovered that the attack on My Lai 4 was not the only massacre by American troops in Quang Ngai Province that morning. Three infantry companies, the Army investigators learned, had been committed to the “Pinkville” operation by Task Force Barker headquarters. Alpha Company had moved into a blocking position above My Lai 4, where it theoretically would be able to trap the Viet Cong as they fled from the American assault. Bravo Company, the third unit in the task force, was ordered to attack a possible Viet Cong headquarters area at My Lai 1, about one and a half miles east of My Lai 4. Its men, too, were told to prepare for a major battle with an experienced Viet Cong unit. But there were no Viet Cong at My Lai 1.
