Seymour Hersh

12. Scoop Artist Meets the Viet Cong

125 CHAPTER 12 Scoop Artist Meets the Viet Cong “God Will Punish You, Calley” Winning the Pulitzer Prize changes a reporter’s life. Legendary columnist Mike Royko, who worked briefly for Sy Hersh when he ran a suburban Chicago newspaper, won his Pulitzer in 1972. When a colleague earned the prize, Royko summed up what it meant: “Congratulations, you’ve just written the first line of your obituary.” No matter what else he did for the rest of his career, Hersh would be known as the man who won the Pulitzer Prize for uncovering the My Lai atrocity. As 1982 Pulitzer winner John White observed. “It’s the dream everyone has—it’s like going for the moon and reaching it.” And that’s how it was for Sy Hersh. He and David Obst, who had syndicated the My Lai stories, moved into a three-room suite of offices in the National Press Building in Washington. Hersh got himself a New York agent to handle his affairs. “A good agent,” he said, “who made sure I made as much as I could if I were a top-flight reporter for one of the big newspapers.”1 The Pulitzer led to a book contract with Random House from which the newspaper rights alone earned Hersh $40,000. As he crisscrossed the country in search of evidence on the cover-up of My Lai, Hersh became a college campus sensation. The notoriety of My Lai and the antiwar fervor on campuses put him in great demand, and his speaking fee rose to $1,500. Similar to a politician who develops a stump speech when he campaigns, Hersh perfected a moving My Lai message. In early 1970, for example, Hersh visited a State University of New York college in the small village of New Paltz, seventy miles north of New York City. The college of five thousand students was a hotbed of radicalism as students took over an administration building. Hersh’s visit packed seven 126 SCOOP ARTIST MEETS THE VIET CONG hundred into the college’s largest auditorium. The often unkempt Hersh was dapper in jacket and tie. He carried note cards but, typically, rarely glanced at them. “He uses old-fashioned free association,” commented Robert Katz, Hersh’s booking agent for twenty years. Hersh’s mind works at lightning speed as he jumps from thought to thought, although always with an overall theme. “He doesn’t prepare his talks,” offered David Jackson , a reporter with the Chicago Tribune who watched Hersh get ready to speak. “His mind just starts going.” This night in New Paltz, “it was a My Lai talk but the framework was American foreign policy,” recalled Gerald Sorin, a history professor who attended. Sorin said Hersh told the audience: “America is not innocent. It was a broader framework than just My Lai.” But within the framework Hersh wove some of his most startling massacre anecdotes.2 He explained how Charlie Company, William Calley’s unit, lost soldiers on patrols. “Everyone would talk in terror of their private parts being blown up,” he said. “They were increasingly angry.” Finally they were told that the next day they would encounter the “enemy” face to face. That night, “the kids did what those kids did: they toked up,” and he put his hands to his face as if he were smoking a joint. At 3:30 in the morning “they got on a chopper” and went to the village of My Lai, “to kill or be killed.” But they met only old men, women, and children making morning tea. So, “they put ’em in ditches and shot and shot and shot,” Hersh said matter-of-factly. “What I am telling you is empirical.” He would know—he spoke to sixty-two of the sixty-seven soldiers involved. It was the white soldiers who did most of the shooting, he said. Twenty-five black and Hispanic soldiers “shot, but they shot high. It just wasn’t their war. If the whitey wants to go do this . . .” And then, as the audience sat silently, he said a Vietnamese mother who wasdeadhadcradledhersmallchildtoprotecthim.Whentheshootingwas done the boy crawled out and ran. “Plug him,” Calley told Paul Meadlo, the soldier who went on national television. Meadlo refused. “Calley, with this great show of bravado, ran behind the kid in front of everybody and shot him in the head,” Hersh said. “Big man on campus.” More silence. Hersh, barely pausing, said the next day Meadlo stepped on...