In 1971, a court-martial panel of six Army officers at Fort Benning, Ga., convicted 1st Lt. William L. Calley Jr. of murdering at least 22 Vietnamese civilians, including women and children, at My Lai. He was sentenced to life at hard labor, but President Nixon, responding to public outrage over the conviction, reduced the sentence to three years under house arrest at the young officer's on-base apartment.
Calley was the only U.S. soldier convicted in the My Lai massacre (his company commander, Capt. Ernest Medina, was acquitted), even though there was ample evidence that more than 300 Vietnamese had been slaughtered and that his superiors either knew or should have known about the atrocities. That may help explain why so many Americans at the time saw Calley as a scapegoat.
As a young reporter, I sat in the court-martial room for more than three months listening to former members of Calley's platoon recall in gripping detail the horrible things that happened in the village of My Lai. The military insisted that the My Lai massacre was an isolated incident, and most Americans believed it was. However, anyone who heard the sickening testimony of this case couldn't help but have doubts.
Calley testified that he had been indoctrinated to treat all Vietnamese as the enemy. The children, he explained, were "even more dangerous" than the men and women because they looked so innocent. His fear of the Vietnamese, he said, turned into hatred as his company took heavy casualties. At one point during the Tet offensive, he said it "dawned on me that we weren't playing games, that we weren't supposed to be a bunch of Boy Scouts out there playing." Calley never used the word "kill." Instead, he employed the word "destroy" or the phrase "waste 'em."
We don't know if My Lai was the last time American soldiers spun out of control, but we do know it was not the first, thanks to an eight-month investigation by the Blade, a newspaper in Toledo, Ohio.
Last month, the Blade published a four-part series spread over 15 pages on how an elite Army unit called Tiger Force committed atrocities in and around Quang Ngai province in 1967 that in some ways were even more horrifying than what happened at My Lai. The Blade's investigation found that over a seven-month period Tiger Force soldiers murdered hundreds of noncombatants, including women and children and old men who pleaded for their lives. Some of the victims were tortured and mutilated. One soldier cut off the ears of his victims and made a necklace out of them. Others took scalps and kicked the gold teeth out of the mouths of Vietnamese they had executed.
Most of the horror stories come from the participants. "Nobody out there with any brains expected to live," former Tiger Force Sgt. William Doyle, now 70, told the Blade. "So you did any goddamn thing you felt like doing - especially to stay alive. It didn't matter if they were civilians. If they weren't supposed to be in an area, we shot them. If they didn't understand fear, I taught it to them."
Other Tiger Force veterans struggle even now to rationalize the killings and find peace. Former Sgt. Ernest Moreland told the Blade: "The things you did, you think back and say, "I can't believe I did that.' At the time, it seemed right. But now you know it was wrong. The killing gets to you. The nightmares get to you. You just can't escape it."
According to the Blade account, two soldiers tried to stop the killings, but their complaints were ignored by their commanders. In 1971, as the My Lai courts-martial, the Army launched an investigation that lasted 41/2 years, the longest war-crimes investigation of the Vietnam War. The inquiry concluded that 18 Tiger Force soldiers had committed as many as 20 war crimes. But no one was charged and the investigation was quietly closed and the records sealed. Ironically, the one Tiger Force soldier officially punished was a sergeant who reported the decapitation of an infant to his superiors.
With U.S. soldiers fighting and dying in Iraq, the Blade editors knew publishing the story could open up the paper to charges that it was undermining military morale in a time of war. That sensitivity may explain why the story has received so little national attention. Most news organizations have ignored the story or used an Associated Press summary. One exception is Seymour Hersh, the reporter who broke the story of the My Lai massacre more than 30 years ago. In last week's New Yorker magazine, Hersh reports on the Blade's "extraordinary investigation" and wonders why its findings remain "all but invisible."
The Blade's executive editor, Ron Royhab, told Hersh: "We can't have this kind of information and sit on it, because then we'd be a party to a coverup."
Most American soldiers served with honor and courage in Vietnam, and they did not commit war crimes. What Tiger Force soldiers did is an ugly story that many Americans don't want to hear. But when something goes this horribly wrong, we need to hear the truth, no matter how painful it is.
