Boyce: Calley radioed to Medina to report that he’d caught an old VC trying to jump into a well. Medina ordered us to make a complete search of the well, saying it might be an entrance to a VC tunnel network. But by then the well was all bloody and none of us would go in. Calley called back and said there was no underground passage in the well. February 25, that was our company’s worst day. We lost six and twelve were wounded after walking into an enemy minefield north of Pinkville. Most of the casualties were from Calley’s first and third platoons. Capt. Medina was awarded a Silver Star for rescuing the wounded. But the minefield was one clearly marked on the maps we had. The losses could’ve been avoided. Sgt. Cohen was the one who had hurried us into that field, he was responsible.
Hersey: It was around then that Company C seized a woman with a baby on her back and raped and killed her. One of the soldiers took snapshots of the whole thing with his Instamatic.
Gary Apollo: On March 14, two days before the My Lai operation, our company suffered casualties again. We hit some booby traps while passing along a thickly wooded trail. Sgt. Cox detected a bomb, but it went off while he was disarming it, killing him and putting out the eyes of a nearby soldier. After evacuating them by helicopter, we were so enraged that we torched all the houses in a village on the return route to our base. Still angry, we went into a village on the edge of a secure zone and killed and robbed a woman. The villagers reported that incident to the Vietnamese police. Medina received a protest from the police. He was upset that what happened had been uncovered, but he didn’t punish any of his men for what they did.
Lt. Gen. Barker: My only concern was to sweep out the enemy — the Viet Cong were known to have about 280 veteran troops in that area. I relied on Capt. Medina. He and I did a helicopter over flight of the whole Pinkville region and then set up the operations plan.
Calley: Around 0700, the women and children of My Lai hamlet would go to the markets in Quang Ngai city or in Son Dinh to sell things, so, taking advantage of that time, we were given a search-and-destroy mission, with orders to burn My Lai hamlet, destroy the bunkers and tunnels, and slaughter the cattle.
Medina: I never gave an order to kill women or children.
Nguyen Phu: As a staff sergeant dispatched to Company C as an interpreter, I didn’t believe what I was hearing. Even when I heard the soldiers saying they were going to wipe out a village the next day and would take revenge by killing every single Viet Cong they saw, I thought those American soldiers were just boasting.
Medina: Maybe Lt. Calley took the operations orders as a license to go into My Lai and have his men take their revenge.
Brooks: At dawn on March 16, Lt. Calley’s 1st platoon and the 2nd platoon under my command moved into Pinkville by helicopter. Calley’s was the advance force. After gunships bombarded the My Lai area with hundreds of rockets and bullets, Calley’s platoon jumped down into the rice fields. The rice shoots were billowing in the breeze, almost ready for harvesting. My Lai was a hamlet with suspected VC sympathizers, with a population of about seven hundred.
Lt. Gen. Barker: At the time I was in a helicopter about 1000 feet overhead, supervising the sweeps.
Brooks: As our platoon approached the hamlet, we saw several men, apparently VC, running away to avoid the shower of fire from the gunships. We also started firing from the ground. A woman and a child fell.
Sledge: We in Calley’s platoon entered My Lai from the south, moving toward the center of the hamlet. The villagers didn’t even try to flee; they just stood there watching us running. They seemed to know that if they ran away we would fire at them. There was no fear on their faces; they just blankly watched us. It was a little after 0800. Some of them were about to have breakfast. We began rounding up the villagers.
Stanley: The massacre began spontaneously with no warning. One from the platoon was pushing a Vietnamese in civilian clothes and just stabbed him from behind with a bayonet. The Vietnamese collapsed on the ground, gasping for breath. So many people got killed that day it’s hard to remember how they died. After he finished bayoneting that man, Carter dragged out another man in his fifties who had been captured, dumped him into a well and then threw a live grenade down after him. Then we went over to a kind of public hall where incense was burning and found about twenty old women and children crouching together there. They were all shot with a few volleys of gunfire. The villagers didn’t really try to resist. When about eighty were rounded up in the village square, they all begged for mercy, shouting “We no VC! We no VC!”
Boyce: Lt. Calley handed the villagers over to us and said, “You know how I want you to handle this!”
Sledge: “Clean up the trash!” was Calley’s order to us.
Boyce: We were about ten or fifteen feet away from them when Lt. Calley opened fire first. We had to use four or five twenty-bullet clips apiece.
To Chuok: I’m forty-eight years old. I’ve seen all the wars. I make my living as a farmer. I have no interest in the Liberation Front or in the ARVN. All my life I’ve been praying for the smoke of the war to go far, far away from our village. That day when the American soldiers came to our village, our family was eating breakfast. As ordered by the soldiers, we left our house and along with many others swarmed into the square. The Americans made us gather closer and sit down. Even then we had no reason to fear them. We were joking and laughing, nobody showing any sign of alarm. Only when we saw them setting up machine guns did we sense what was going on and begin to wail and beg for mercy. Some of us showed the Americans our government ID cards, but they only said “Sorry.” The firing began. I was hit in the leg but got buried under the corpses and kept my life by playing dead. In a few seconds I lost my wife and two daughters. After lying there about an hour, I pushed my way out from under the dead bodies and ran into the jungle. None of them felt any danger at first. The villagers even welcomed the soldiers. I’ve lost my village and my family forever. There’s nowhere for me to return to. Never again will I welcome American soldiers.
Conti: We were all nervous and excited. Once the firing started, it went on and on in a kind of chain reaction. Most of us thought we would be engaged with enemy combat troops, but it didn’t work out that way. At first, we saw a few men running away, but before we knew what we were doing, we found ourselves recklessly gunning down everyone in sight. It was like collective madness. Everybody was firing. When we went into that village, the command system broke down and everyone was swept up in that strange burning fever.
Brooks: Upon hearing the gunfire, we, the 2nd platoon, rushed into the village and started killing and destroying at random, shooting our flamethrowers everywhere.
West: We, the 3rd platoon, intercepted some villagers who were scared by the sound of shooting and trying to run away in all directions. We shot them. It was useless for them to try to escape the envelopment because the gunships were waiting in the air just overhead. We thought there was a firefight underway with enemy forces in the hamlet. That crazy bastard Lt. Calley is responsible for that. By 0815 Capt. Medina was right behind my 3rd platoon.
Medina: Until after 1000. I had not set foot in the village, and I hadn’t killed a single civilian.
Carter: As he entered My Lai, Medina did shoot a few civilians to death. As the 3rd platoon was entering the hamlet, we found a woman and someone had forced her down on the ground. Capt. Medina shot her with his M16. I saw the scene from about fifty feet away. There was no need to shoot her. Then we ran into a soldier who had rounded up about twenty Vietnamese — men, women and children — and Medina ordered the soldier to “kill them all, down to the last one.” Later Medina caught a boy of about seventeen who was driving a water buffalo. He yelled at the boy to run away, but the boy just stood there. Then Medina just started firing at the boy with his rifle.