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2. The Scoop Heard ’Round the World
- University of Nebraska Press
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14 CHAPTER 2 The Scoop Heard ’Round the World “Shoot Anything That Moves” “It must have been a beautiful area, before the war,” wrote Seymour Hersh about Quang Ngai Province. Beautiful, but also, he added, one of the most “dangerous regions in all of Vietnam.” Fertile farmlands and green rice paddies were set in the foothills of the Annamese Mountains with the white sandy beaches of the South China Sea in the distance. But it was also a region filled with bitter and suspicious villagers, many of whom sympathized with the Viet Cong. And why not? Since the early 1960s their homes had often been burned by Vietnamese troops who wanted them to choose between the National Liberation Front Viet Cong and the U.S.supported South Vietnamese government. Thousands of tons of bombs and napalm had made refugees out of 138,000 Vietnamese and destroyed 70 percent of the province’s dwellings. William Calley’s Charlie Company arrived in the province, which included the tiny village of My Lai, in the winter of 1968 to root out peasants who had gone over to the wrong side. In three months the company never had any direct confrontations with enemy forces, but booby traps and sneak attacks had taken their toll, killing five Charlie Company soldiers and injuring twenty-eight. And each time the Americans were attacked, the Viet Cong sneaked away.1 As Sy Hersh sat with Rusty Calley, some of the story of what happened on March 16, 1968, began to emerge. It is not clear how much Calley told Hersh—or how much of the horrible day he could fathom telling anyone. Undoubtedly his lawyers told him to be careful not to incriminate himself . But Hersh had also promised Latimer not to write anything until the lawyer had read his story. And he likely made promises to Calley that he would not convict the accused soldier in his stories. “I thought about how THE SCOOP HEARD ’ROUND THE WORLD 15 dumb he was. I could have really ripped him off,” Hersh said. A year after the story came out, Hersh wrote: “To this day I have not written all that Calley told me.”2 But he learned enough to piece together what became the biggest news story of the year. Angry, frustrated, and nervous, the men of Charlie Company, Hersh discovered, prepared a series of assaults on the enemy in an area known as Song My, which was a collection of rural hamlets including My Lai. For some reason it was labeled Pinkville on the army maps. Later testimony was mixed, but some soldiers recalled that they were explicitly told to kill anyone they encountered, young or old. “This was a time for us to get even. A time . . . when we can get revenge for our fallen comrades,” recalled Sgt. Kenneth Hodges.3 Early in the morning the men fanned out through the villages to flush out underground bunkers and small huts, looking for the enemy. All they found were old women and men, young mothers and children, and lots of animals. When they saw something move, the soldiers fired randomly into the surrounding fields and jungle, but there were no return volleys. It did not stop the assault, however. For reasons that would be unclear for quite some time—orders from above? a policy of leaving behind no survivors? the civilians were collaborators with the enemy?—the soldiers began to round up civilians. The killings began without warning. If the villagers did not come out of their houses, the soldiers threw in grenades. When they did come out, they were shot. At one point, Calley fired into the head of a monk who was praying over a sick old man and killed him. Soon after, Calley ordered three or four of his soldiers to push civilians—women, children, old people—into a ditch. When they tried to get out, Calley began shooting them. A lot of the women threw their bodies over the children, but the soldiers kept shooting . When some children tried to crawl out, Calley and his men shot and killed them. A two-year-old boy miraculously was unhurt and crawled away. Calley grabbed the child, threw him in the ditch and shot him. “I guess you could say the men were out of control,” one soldier said. It was an understatement. The shooting and killing and raping went on all morning. “Just like a nazi-like thing,” one soldier said. In the end...