Read The Vietnam Reader Online
Authors: Stewart O'Nan
—Leonard Gonzalez (Court-Martial Testimony)
Exhibit Eight: John Wade’s Box of Tricks, Partial List
Deck of playing cards (all the jack of diamonds)
Thumb tip feke
Photographs (12) of father
Pack of chewing gum
Bronze Star with V-device Purple Hearts (2)
Army Commendation Medal
Combat Infantryman’s Badge
Waxed rope
Adhesive false mustache
Vodka bottle(empty)
Book:
Mental Magic
Book:
Feats of Levitation
Q: What were they firing at?
A: At the enemy, sir.
Q: At people?
A: At the enemy, sir.
Q: They weren’t human beings?
A: Yes, sir.
Q: They were human beings?
A: Yes, sir.
Q: Were they men?
A: I don’t know, sir. I would imagine they were, sir.
Q: Didn’t you see?
A: Pardon, sir?
Q: Did you see them?
A: I wasn’t discriminating.
Q: Did you see women?
A: I don’t know, sir.
Q: What do you mean, you weren’t discriminating? A: I didn’t discriminate between individuals in the village, sir. They were all the enemy, they were all to be destroyed, sir.
53
—William Calley (Court-Martial Testimony)
It is a crucial moment in a soldier’s life when he is ordered to perform a deed that he finds completely at variance with his own notions of right and good. Probably for the first time, he discovers that an act someone else thinks to be necessary is for him criminal … Suddenly the soldier feels himself abandoned and cast off from all security. Conscience has isolated him, and its voice is a warning. If you do
this, you will not be at peace with me in the future. You can do it, but you ought not. You must act as a man and not as an instrument of another’s will.
54
—J. Glenn Gray
(The Warriors)
The violation of human connection, and consequently the risk of a post-traumatic stress disorder, is highest of all when the survivor has been not merely a passive witness but also an active participant in violent death or atrocity.
55
—Judith Herman (Trauma and Recovery)
Q: Did you receive any hostile fire at all any time that day?
A: No, sir.
56
—Frank Beardslee (Court-Martial Testimony)
Q: Did you obey your orders?
A: Yes, sir.
Q: What were your orders?
A: Kill anything that breathed.
57
—Salvatore LaMartina (Court-Martial Testimony)
John! John! Oh, John!
58
—George Armstrong Custer
Fucking flies!
—Richard Thinbill
I just went. My mind just went. And I wasn’t the only one that did it. A lot of other people did it. I just killed. Once I started the … the
training, the whole programming part of killing, it just came out … I just followed suit. I just lost all sense of direction, of purpose. I just started killing any kinda way I could kill. It just came. I didn’t know I had it in me.
59
—Varnado Simpson (Charlie Company, Second Platoon)
Q: Then what happened?
A: Lieutenant Calley came out and said take care of these people. So we said, okay, so we stood there and watched them. He went away, then he came back and said, “I thought I told you to take care of these people.” We said, “We are.” He said, “I mean kill them.” I was a little stunned and I didn’t know what to do.… I stood behind them and they stood side by side. So they—Calley and Meadlo—got on line and fired directly into the people … It was automatic. The people screamed and yelled and fell. I guess they tried to get up, too. They couldn’t. That was it. The people were pretty well messed up. Lots of heads was shot off. Pieces of heads and pieces of flesh flew off the sides and arms.
60
—Dennis Conti (Court-Martial Testimony)
The dismounted troopers then ran downhill and slid into the ravine where their bodies were found … [T]hey must have felt helplessly exposed and rushed toward the one place that might protect them. Yet the moment they skidded into the gully they were trapped. All they could do was hug the sides or crouch among the bushes, looking fearfully upward, and wait. A few tried to scramble up the south wall because the earth showed boot marks and furrows probably gouged by their fingers, but none of these tracks reached the surface.
61
—Evan S. Connell
(Son of the Morning Star)
Q: Can you describe them?
A: They was women and little kids.
Q: What were they doing?
A: They were lying on the ground, bleeding from all over. They was dead.
62
—Rennard Doines (Court-Martial Testimony)
Q: Did you have any conversation with Lieutenant Calley at that ditch?
A: Yes.
Q: What did he say?
A: He asked me to use my machine gun.
Q: At the ditch?
A: Yes.
Q: What did you say?
A: I refused.
63
—Robert Maples (Court-Martial Testimony)
Q: Did you ever open your pants in front of a woman in the village of My Lai?
A: No.
Q: Isn’t it a fact that you were going through My Lai that day looking for women?
A: No.
Q: Didn’t you carry a woman half-nude on your shoulders and throw her down and say that she was too dirty to rape? You did that, didn’t you?
A: Oh, yeah, but it wasn’t at My Lai.
64
—Dennis Conti (Court-Martial Testimony)
Every man has some reminiscences which he would not tell to everyone, but only to his friends. He has others which he would not reveal even to his friends, but only to himself, and that in secret. But finally there are still others which a man is even afraid to tell himself, and
every decent man has a considerable number of such things stored away.… Man is bound to lie about himself.
65
—Fyodor Dostoevsky
(Notes from Underground)
Married veterans or guys who married when they got back had difficulties, too. Waking up with your hands around your wife’s throat is frightening to the vet and to the wife. Is he crazy? Does he hate me? What the hell’s going on?
66
—Patience H. C. Mason
(Recovering from the War)
Like I told you, he used to yell things in his sleep. Bad things. Kathy thought he needed help.
—Patricia S. Hood
Something was wrong with the guy. No shit, I could almost smell it.
—Vincent R. (Vinny) Pearson
… the crimes visited on the inhabitants of Son My Village included individual and group acts of murder, rape, sodomy, maiming, assault on noncombatants, and the mistreatment and killing of detainees.
67
—Colonel William V. Wilson (U.S. Army Investigator)
37
In Richard Hammer,
The Court-Martial of Lt. Calley
(New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegen, 1971), p. 272.
38
Report of the Department of the Army,
Review of the Preliminary Investigations into the My Lai Incident,
Volume I, Department of the Army, March 14, 1970, p. 3-3. Hereafter referred to as The Peers Commission.
39
In Hammer
, The Court-Martial of
Lt
Calley,
pp.161-162.
40
CBS Evening News, Nov. 25, 1969, in Michael Bilton and Kevin Sim,
Four Hours in My Lai
(New York: Viking, 1992), p. 263.
41
J. Glenn Gray,
The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle
(1959; reprint, Harper Torchbooks, 1970), p. 186.
42
Col. William V. Wilson,
American Heritage,
February 1990, p. 53.
43
In Hammer,
The Court-Martial of Lt. Calley,
p. 151.
44
Ibid.,
p.91.
45
Ibid.,
p. 269.
46
Ibid.,
p. 155.
47
Herman,
Trauma and Recovery,
p. 1.
48
In Hammer,
The Court-Martial of Lt. Calley,
p. 101.
49
The Geneva Convention on the Laws of War,
1949, article 3, section 1.
50
In Hammer,
The Court-Martial of U. Calley,
p. 104.
51
Ibid.,
p. 177.
52
Ibid.,
p. 193.
53
Ibid
., p. 263.
54
Gray,
The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle,
pp. 184-185.
55
Herman,
Trauma and Recovery,
p. 54.
56
In Hammer,
The Court-Martial of Lt Calley,
p. 93.
57
Ibid.,
p. 188.
58
Evan S. Connell, Son
of the Morning Star
(San Francisco: North Point Press, 1984), p. 307. Connell writes that “John” was the name “ordinarily used by whites when addressing an Indian.” At the Little Big Horn, on June 25, 1876, one terrified trooper “was heard sobbing this name, as though it might save his life.
John! John! Oh, John!
This plea echoes horribly down a hundred years.”
59
In Bilton and Sims,
Four Hours in My Lai,
p. 7.
60
In Hammer,
The Court-Martial of Lt Calley,
pp. 122-124.
61
Connell,
Son of the Morning Star,
p. 309.
62
In Hammer,
The Court-Martial of Lt Calley,
p. 112.
63
Ibid.,
p. 114.
64
Ibid.,
p. 127.
65
Fyodor Dostoevsky,
Notes from Underground,
translated by Ralph E. Matlaw (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1960), p. 35.
66
Mason,
Recovering from the War: A Woman’s Guide to Helping Your Vietnam Vet, Your Family, and Yourself,
p. 181.
67
Wilson,
American Heritage,
p. 53. The number of civilian casualties during operations in Son My Village on March 16, 1968, is a matter of continuing dispute. The Peers Commission concluded that “at least 175-200 Vietnamese men, women, and children” were killed in the course of the March 16th operation. The U.S. Army’s Criminal Investigation Division (CID) estimated on the basis of census data that the casualties “may have exceeded 400.” At the Son My Memorial, which I visited in the course of research for this book, the number is fixed at 504. An amazing experience, by the way. Thuan Yen is still a quiet little farming village, very poor, very remote, with dirt paths and cow dung and high bamboo hedgerows. Very friendly, all things considered: the old folks nod and smile; the children giggle at our white foreign faces. The ditch is still there. I found it easily. Just five or six feet deep, shallow and unimposing, yet it was as if I had been there before, in my dreams, or in some other life.