MY LAI: AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY

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Sergeant Michael Bernhardt said no one shot at the G.I.s. "We met no resistance, and I only saw three captured weapons. As a matter of fact, I don't remember seeing one military-age male in the entire place, dead or alive." He claims Calley's men were "doing strange things—they were setting fire to the hootches and waiting for people to come out and then shooting them; they were gathering people in groups and shooting them. I saw them shoot an M79 [grenade launcher] into a group of people who were still alive."

Private Michael Terry reported how he and Private William Doherty found few animals or people alive when they got to the village about noon. "Billy and I started to get out our chow, but close to us was a bunch of Vietnamese in a heap and some of them were moaning. Calley ['s platoon] had been through before us, and all of them had been shot, but many weren't dead. It was obvious that they weren't going to get any medical attention, so Billy and I got up and went over to where they were. I guess we sort of finished them off."

Did any soldier try to stop the slaying? One saw what was happening, then shot himself in the foot so he could get out of it—and he was the only U.S. casualty of the day's action. At one point, a private stopped firing his M60 machine gun into a group of 20 people, refused to resume on Calley's orders—so Calley took the gun over and blasted away. Bernhardt said he had refused to take part, but feels guilty because "I just stood back and let it happen." One helicopter pilot, Warrant Officer Hugh Clowers Thompson Jr., 27, saw 15 children hiding in a bunker. He landed, ferried them to safety, returned to pick up a wounded boy. Amazingly, the Army —apparently without determining who the children were hiding from—awarded Thompson the Distinguished Flying Cross for "disregarding his own safety" to rescue them. The only danger to Thompson that day was from the free-firing U.S. infantrymen. Thompson promptly complained to his superiors that there had been unnecessary killing at My Lai—but a cursory Army investigation turned out a whitewash.

Why did they deliberately slay so many defenseless civilians? West claims that the orders read to them by the company commander, Captain Medina, were "to destroy Pinkville and everything in it." Another member of the company, Lenny Lagunoy, 25, said Medina had told them to "kill everything that moves." "Well, hell," adds Meadlo, "I was just following the orders of my officer like any good soldier—what's the good of having officers if they've nobody to obey them?" More thoughtfully, he explains: "It just seemed like it was the natural thing to do at the time. My buddies had been getting killed or wounded. What it really was—it was just mostly revenge." Contends Corporal William Kern, who says he walked through My Lai when it was all over: "You can't just blame Calley's platoon; you've got to blame everyone. It was a tree-fire zone. And you know, if you can shoot artillery and bombs in there every night, how can the people in there be worth so much?"

Of all the eyewitnesses willing to talk publicly about the action so far, only one has expressed doubts that a large-scale massacre