MY LAI: AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY

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West, 23, a Charlie Company sergeant. "I was frustrated, same as the rest of the guys." On the way in, he said, "some individuals jumped out of a hedge 15 to 20 yards ahead of us. They had what we thought were guns. It was a surprise and we opened fire. When something like this happens, you don't stop to ask questions." West learned that his group had slain four women and two old men. Their "guns" turned out to be the traditional sticks that peasants use to carry belongings.

A Close Group

West, a squad leader in a platoon commanded by Lieut. Jeffrey La Cross, followed Calley's platoon into My Lai. "Everyone was shooting," he says. "Some of the huts were torched. Some of the yanigans [his term for young soldiers] were shooting kids." In the confusion, he claims, it was hard to tell "mama-sans from papa-sans," since both wear black pajamas and conical hats. He and his squad helped round up the women and children. When one of his men protested that "I can't shoot these people," West told him to turn the group over to Captain Medina. On the way out of the village, West recalls seeing a ditch filled with dead and dying civilians. His platoon also passed a crying Vietnamese boy, wounded in both a leg and an arm. West heard a G.I. ask: "What about him?" Then he heard a shot and the boy fell. "The kid didn't do anything," says West. "He didn't have a weapon."

West describes Charlie Company as a close group in which "we cared about each individual." The men, he told LIFE, considered Captain Medina a tough soldier whom they knew, approvingly, as "Mad Dog" Medina. The captain, he contends, "didn't give an order to go in and kill women or children. I don't think any of us were aware of the fact that we'd run into civilians." When the shooting started, he said, the men "might have been wild for a while, but I don't think they went crazy."

Like a Little Island

Another soldier in the group following Calley's was SP4 Varnado Simpson, 22. "Everyone who went into the village had in mind to kill," he says. "We had lost a lot of buddies and it was a V.C. stronghold. We considered them either V.C. or helping the V.C." His platoon approached from the left flank. "As I came up on [the village], there was a woman, a man and a child, running away from it toward some huts. So I told them in their language to stop, and then they didn't and I had orders to shoot them down and I did this. This is what I did. I shot them, the lady and the little boy. He was about two years old."

A detailed account came from Paul David Meadlo, 22, a member of Calley's platoon. As they walked toward the village, he told CBS, "there was one gook in a shelter, he was all huddled down in there—an older man. And Sergeant Mitchell hollered, 'Shoot him.' And so the man shot him." (Sergeant David Mitchell, 29, one of Galley's squadron leaders, has been charged with assault with intent to commit murder, but a court-martial has not yet been ordered.) Meadlo says his group ran through My Lai, herding men, women, children and babies into the center of the village—"like a little island."

"Lieut. Calley came over and said,