Colonel P was a commander of combat troops. In conducting operations, he always put the safety of his men first. And the commander’s concern can easily be seen in the fact that his brigade, which engaged the enemy eight to ten times per week, brought the heaviest losses to the enemy and the least loss to friendly forces. In a situation where one must kill or be killed, the motto he established was quite proper. It is true that he was presented at the farewell party with an old skull found in the jungle.
The fighting spirit of American soldiers was enhanced by their wrath when they experienced casualties from the sniping and booby traps commonly used in unconventional warfare. A third of the casualties in the Americal Division resulted from mines, sniping, and booby traps in and around the Vietnamese hamlets. So, the annihilation strategy of search-and-destroy became the operative policy for the region, and the goal was to reduce an entire sector to ashes. A letter from one of the privates in the division contained the following:
Today we went out on operations. I don’t feel so proud of myself, and I don’t feel proud of my friends or my country anymore. We torched all the houses in sight. They were thatched huts built with palm branches, almost like cattle pens, where the families lived. Our commander said he didn’t like the walls and roofs, so we burned everything to ashes. There’s a popular joke among the men: “Whatever is dead, and doesn’t have white skin, is Viet Cong.”
Company C arrived in Vietnam the previous year after one year of training in Hawaii. Most troops in the company were volunteers, ranging in age from eighteen to twenty-two. Ten of them had the educational level of first-year college dropouts. Thirteen of the 130 soldiers in the company scored in the upper range when given the army I.Q. test. Excellent health. Good appetite. Won a trophy in a football tournament. The atmosphere in Company C quarters was optimistic and docile; the men were partial to comic books.
Commander, Company C, Captain Ernest L. Medina: Age 33. Born 1936 in Springer, New Mexico. Lost his mother at an early age. Until age sixteen, worked as a day laborer on a big ranch on the slopes of the southern Rockies in Colorado. Falsified his age to enlist. Began as common infantryman. Nicknamed “Mad Dog,” not for malicious behavior but as a term of endearment reflecting enthusiasm and courage during basic training. Officer training school at Fort Benning in 1964, graduated with honors and commissioned as second lieutenant. Promoted to captain in 1966. Volunteered to serve in Vietnam as field commander hoping for battlefield promotion to major. Gave priority to rations and other supplies for his unit to uphold company morale. Typical American professional officer, taking initiative in all activities.
Leader, 1st Platoon, Company C, Second Lieutenant William C. Calley: Age 21. Born in Palm Beach, Florida. Enlisted after flunking out of Palm Beach Junior College. Employed as a busboy in restaurant and as a railroad-crossing gateman. Fired for his negligence in letting a 47-car freight train pass during rush hour, causing traffic to stop for thirty minutes. Thereafter unemployed until July 1966, when entered Officer Candidate School in New Mexico. To impress subordinates, bragged about having worked as a private detective in Miami. Nickname: Surfside Six, after TV suspense show. Dreams of being a hero.
Testimony from Investigation
Lt. Gen. Frank A. Barker (Division Commander): To execute Gen. Westmoreland’s strategy of search-and-destroy operations, each brigade headquarters organized Barker commando teams of one company from each of their three battalions. Capt. Medina’s Company C was one of the special commando teams under my command, and was posted at the landing strip at Doti last January 26. The important task assigned to these commandos was to pressure the Pinkville sector several miles northeast of Quang Ngai city. Yes, “Pinkville” is our troops’ name for that place. Was it because of a strong political presence of the Reds? No, it was because on the strategic maps, the region northeast of Quang Ngai was a conspicuous reddish color. Yes, that’s right, the color meant it was a densely populated area.
Capt. Medina: We were told the area had been a VC den for the past twenty-five years. The villagers in the area had been given several orders to evacuate, and it was designated a free-fire zone. But I ordered my men not to fire on the villagers if they came into the open in the middle of an engagement. But that day when my platoons had retreated about four or five hundred meters and our radio operator was hit by enemy fire, I ordered them to go back up over a four-foot high bank.
Seymour M. Hersey: We’d been bivouacking in the field for about three weeks and were almost collapsing from exhaustion. We began wondering if it wasn’t our captain’s fault that we always got dirty, dangerous missions. Medina was always foaming at the mouth, bragging about our company being a model fighting machine. Somebody openly griped that Medina cared more about getting a promotion for himself than he did about the safety of his troops. Then again, Medina loved to blow his own horn in front of Lt. Gen. Barker, saying how the VC were terrified of Company C. Our morale was sunk in the mud. We hadn’t gotten a single fresh reinforcement and forgot what it was like to sleep in a dry spot. We got cold toward the Vietnamese. If little children tagged after us begging for gum or money we literally kicked them away. We got up at dawn, ate cold C-rations, packed up and marched till noon, and ate the same C-rations for lunch. Then we kept on trudging all day until stopping to eat C-rations in the evening. The hot sun and the thirst nearly drove us out of our minds. Medina interrogated lots of suspected VC, saying he’d pry some information out of them. Once his men brought an old man over to Medina while he was lying on his stomach on a rock. With a sudden scream like he was spooking a herd of cattle, Medina grabbed the old man by his neck and started rolling. The old man was so terrified that he shit his pants. It was around February 15 that we started getting cruel.
Greszek: When we arrived at the entrance of a hamlet, one of the men, Carter, offered a cigarette to an old peasant. As the old man was about to put the smoke in his mouth, Carter suddenly started beating him on the head with his gunstock. The old man’s chinbone was smashed and his ribs broken, but nobody interfered. A few hours later we fired some shots at a shadow running across the field. Two of our men went closer, emptying the whole clips of their M16s before they discovered it was just an old woman on her way home to the village with a bunch of vegetables she’d picked. Lt. Calley radioed in a report that we’d killed a VC. A few minutes later two suspected VC guerrillas were brought before Calley. I had Vietnamese language training in Hawaii so I was going to interrogate the prisoners. Before I started the questioning, another platoon member dragged an old man over to us. I found the old man was carrying an ID card issued by the Vietnamese government, so I said to Calley: “Sir, I don’t think this one is a Viet Cong.” But Calley started waving his M16 around and ordered the soldier to take care of the old man. “Why are you killing this old man?” I asked Calley, but he only said that all Vietnamese are the same trash. That was when Carter came over.
Carter: All I did was threaten to push the old man into the well, prodding him with my gun. The old man planted his feet wide apart and wouldn’t budge. That was when Calley fired.