Jocko Podcast 31 with Echo Charles - "Four Hours in My Lai" Book Review

2016-07-15T19:21:58Z

Join the conversation on Twitter: @jockowillink @echocharles 0:00:00 - Book Review. Four Hours in My Lai, by Michael Bilton and Kevin Sim 2:22:22 - Cool Online / Onnit stuff - Onnit.com/Jocko

AI summary of episode

And as I pulled the string on where the intelligence came from that eventually led somebody to put a red X on his house and described the guy and who he was I found out that it was actually he the guy owned a business and he had fired one of his employees and when he fired one of his employees well his employee went told the Americans hey this guy's a bad guy this guy's funding you know insurgents got a little disgruntled so all you had to do is dig in and find a little bit more about the information and you figured out it was a disgruntled employee so guys out there in the field right now when you're always questioning your intelligence nothing against the intelligence folks they're going to do the best they can but they're not the ones that are going to get the blood on their hands. And if you can lead men to do things that they know are wrong, imagine the power and the influence you have as a leader to lead people to do things that are right and that people know are right and that are good. But me, I felt like more than adult after like incorporating these, like the, but here's the thing that you do take away is the people around you will notice that you're a, like, better person to be around. And we owe it to ourselves to know history and to know and understand evil and to understand how quickly it can come about and to see these indicators and to know that if you're in the leadership position and you start to see things going sideways, you've got to put a stop to them before they get out of hand before they turn into this. And when I talked to my one of my teachers in high school that was a Vietnam vet, and he just said, you know, the thing that they didn't show very well, because they show the guys coming in and really be people, killing people, burning villages. Because I felt like I was ordered to do it and it seemed like that at the time I felt like I was doing the right thing because I lost buddies. And I thought I was like pretty nice anyway, but you'll feel people like gravitating towards you more because like any abrasion, and everyone has varying levels of abrasiveness in them. Makes you think, you know, like when you search for words, like in your, you know, when you're trying to think of a word, sometimes. Now so this starts to gain a little bit of traction people are starting to talk about there's rumors of even though these big nice headlines come out and the official report comes out but people start to know about it. And some people, I mean, I don't know, maybe us whatever, where, you know, you'll have a little, small little conflict or a little something, little friction with somebody. Now they start to ask some questions like okay what at the at the task force level back to the book what was to happen to the village itself task force officers left the meeting with the clear impression that Barker had ordered the destruction of all houses, dwellings and livestock in the me lie area although there is some doubt as to whether this was a director or something that been assumed. The war and the Philippines are men have been relentless, have killed to exterminate men, women and children, prisoners and captives, active insurgents and suspected people from lads of 10 up and idea prevailing that the Filipino was little better than a dog. The people that are running it and there's good, honest, solid army leadership that says, oh no, we're going to find out what happened and we're going to do something about it. So question the intelligence find out what the sources are find out where the information came from ask who drew that red X ask who said there's not going to be any villagers in the in the no civilians in the village after seven o'clock in the morning ask those questions. I want to know who did that and I had another situation where we went and hit a building where there was suspected bad guy we had intelligence on the sky was a finance year and had money and was given it to the insurgents and so we went and captured them and searched his house and you know blew his door off so we we caused impact to his house. Yeah, and that's at the end, but like I said, it's like, if you, if you follow it, if you are like, dang, I value this So there's continuing to take casualties and on top of the casualties that they're taking you're starting to get an escalation of behavior of negative behavior and here's an example of that back to the book a village you're passing on a bicycle was beaten up but managed to escape a woman working in the fields was shot when somebody shouted that she was carrying a weapon when the squad came closer they discovered she was unarmed and still alive they shot her again and kicked her body to a pulp somebody stole her ring. Now as this story goes forward the first thing that happens is a big cover up and they talk about this operation like it was just a great victory over the VC and in fact a message I'm going to the book here a message of congratulations for the pink feel operation. I had seen people who looked like everybody else, normal people doing atrocious things. Meanwhile the losses these guys are continue to take casualties so they took was it three killed and twelve wounded and now they got sergeant Cox killed by a booby trap they got a dice and lost both legs Hendrickson's blinded suffered growing injuries and lost an arm in a leg. We are a good nation filled with, for the most part, good people, but not all good people. So you got people that are saying, hey, what, you know, Callie was Callie did the right thing out there. 100% any situation that you're in, if you've got your troopers and your subordinate leadership with the mindset that they would rather lie to you than tell you the truth about what's happening, you're never going to be able to make good decisions, because you're making your decisions based on lies. I know people are going to be impacted by this and maybe not everyone's going to make it through this And the training that I received preparing for war did a great job and we improved upon that the more combat experience we got, the better we got it training and preparing guys for war.

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Episode transcript

[00:00:00] This is Jockel Podcast number 31, with echo Charles and me, Jockel Willink.
[00:00:11] Bernardo Simpson watched three men, including Huto and Hudson, going to a hut with a girl
[00:00:18] aged about 17.
[00:00:21] Her trousers were forcibly removed, the girl was held down while she was violated.
[00:00:27] Simpson observed this from the door.
[00:00:30] Fagan was also part of the girl's ordeal.
[00:00:35] When they were finished, the helpless captive were shot dead.
[00:00:41] Her face completely blown away.
[00:00:44] Tora stabbed several people with a bowie knife and was seen by Huto raping a girl.
[00:00:51] She was crying, fighting, and resisting him.
[00:00:56] The other soldier held her down.
[00:01:00] For Simpson, the crucial moment was when he shot the woman and baby soon after entering
[00:01:06] the village.
[00:01:09] I went to turn her over and there was a little baby with her that I had also killed.
[00:01:15] The baby's face was half gone.
[00:01:18] My mind just went.
[00:01:20] The training came to me and I just started killing.
[00:01:24] Old men, women, children, water buffaloes, everything.
[00:01:31] We were told to leave nothing standing.
[00:01:34] We did what we were told.
[00:01:35] We guardless of whether they were civilians.
[00:01:38] They was the enemy, period, kill.
[00:01:43] If you don't follow a director or you can be shot yourself, now what am I supposed to do?
[00:01:49] You're damned if you do and you're damned if you don't.
[00:01:53] You didn't have to look for people to kill.
[00:01:56] They were just there.
[00:01:59] I cut their throats, cut off their hands, cut out their tongue, their hair, scalp them.
[00:02:05] I did it.
[00:02:07] A lot of people were doing it and I just followed.
[00:02:09] I just lost all sense of direction.
[00:02:13] I just started killing any kind of way I can kill.
[00:02:16] It just came.
[00:02:18] I didn't know I had it in me.
[00:02:20] After I killed the child, my whole mind just went.
[00:02:25] It just went.
[00:02:27] And after you start, it's very easy to keep on.
[00:02:31] The hardest is to kill the first time, but once you kill, then it becomes easier to kill
[00:02:35] the next person and the next one and the next one.
[00:02:38] Because I had no feelings, no emotion, nothing.
[00:02:43] I just killed.
[00:02:45] I wasn't the only one that did it.
[00:02:47] A lot of people in the company did it.
[00:02:48] I hung them up all types of ways.
[00:02:50] Any type of way that you could kill someone, that's what they did.
[00:02:54] That day in Mealai, I was personally responsible for killing about 25 people personally.
[00:03:02] I don't think beforehand, anyone thought we would kill so many people.
[00:03:06] I mean, we're talking about 4 to 500 people.
[00:03:10] We almost wiped out the whole village, a whole community.
[00:03:14] I can't forget the magnitude of the number of people that we killed and how they were killed
[00:03:19] killed in lots of ways.
[00:03:22] Do you realize what it's like killing 500 people in a matter of 4 or 5 hours?
[00:03:28] It's just like the gas chambers, what Hitler did.
[00:03:31] You line up 50 people, women, old men, children, and just mow them down.
[00:03:38] And that's the way it was.
[00:03:40] We were 25 to 50 to 100, just killed.
[00:03:44] We rounded them up, me and a couple of guys just put the M16 on automatic and just mowed
[00:03:50] them down.
[00:03:59] Good evening, Echo.
[00:04:01] Good evening.
[00:04:04] Well, that was an excerpt from a book called Four Hours in Mealai by Michael
[00:04:15] Building and Kevin Sim.
[00:04:20] And when I was prepping for this, I mentioned to a couple of people that I was going
[00:04:27] to do Mealai on the podcast next.
[00:04:31] And surprisingly, a lot of people didn't know what it was.
[00:04:35] And I thought everybody knew about Mealai.
[00:04:41] Mealai is a war crime.
[00:04:45] It's an atrocity.
[00:04:48] And what makes it so hard to talk about is that it was an atrocity and a war crime that
[00:04:54] was committed by American soldiers.
[00:05:00] Now, of course, there's people out there that like to claim that America is this evil and
[00:05:07] periodic empire, which I am telling you, it is not by any stretch.
[00:05:16] America isn't an incredibly benevolent nation with a conscience and a soul that, as a whole,
[00:05:26] is good.
[00:05:28] And have we done some things in the past that don't reflect that?
[00:05:32] We absolutely have.
[00:05:33] But for the most part, we have stood up for the week.
[00:05:36] We have liberated the oppressed.
[00:05:38] We defeated the Nazis.
[00:05:39] We defeated the imperial Japanese army.
[00:05:42] We give aid and military assistance and education and money to less fortunate people all
[00:05:47] over the world all the time.
[00:05:51] We are a good nation filled with, for the most part, good people, but not all good people.
[00:06:07] And people inside of people, inside of humans, there can be something very dark.
[00:06:19] And sometimes that darkness can override the light.
[00:06:30] And that is exactly what happened in a small village in Vietnam called Me Lie on March 16th,
[00:06:40] 1668, that 0715 in the morning, a massacre in atrocity.
[00:06:55] The murder of hundreds and hundreds of old men, women and children unarmed begging for mercy.
[00:07:06] Not stabbed, blown up, raped, tortured, killed, murdered.
[00:07:21] And no, I don't like talking about this, especially when it's Americans that are committing
[00:07:31] this sin.
[00:07:34] And we talk about the Nazis in Germany and we talk about the Cheshins in Grasini and we
[00:07:39] talk about the Japanese in the Malaysian jungle and the Houtusian Rwanda.
[00:07:45] I don't like that, but this is us.
[00:07:56] And so the question comes, it came into my mind.
[00:08:01] Do I do this?
[00:08:02] Do I talk about this?
[00:08:05] Can I talk about this?
[00:08:07] And the bottom line is not can I.
[00:08:11] But we have to, we have to cover this.
[00:08:14] We have to talk about it.
[00:08:15] We can't ignore it.
[00:08:16] We can't deny it.
[00:08:17] We have to take ownership of it.
[00:08:21] To admit it, to air it out and to keep it in the front of our minds to ensure that we do everything
[00:08:32] we can to make sure nothing like this ever happens again.
[00:08:44] War is hell.
[00:08:48] And me lie is the ninth circle of hell, the worst part.
[00:08:59] And let's go there to make sure we remember.
[00:09:05] And start by looking at the path that led there.
[00:09:13] And in order to look at the path that led there, we're going to start just by a little
[00:09:17] bit of broad strategy.
[00:09:20] Because there's plenty of blame to go around.
[00:09:24] And when you look at the broad strategy in the way it was laid out, here's a little
[00:09:29] piece on General Westmoreland who was running the strategy in Vietnam.
[00:09:34] General Westmoreland's strategy of attrition also had an important effect on our behavior.
[00:09:40] Our mission was not to win terrain or seize positions, but simply to kill.
[00:09:47] To kill Communists and kill as many of them as possible, stack them up like cordwood.
[00:09:53] Victory was a high body count.
[00:09:56] The feet, a low kill ratio, wore a matter of arithmetic.
[00:10:02] The pressure on unit commanders to produce as many corpses was intense and they in turn
[00:10:07] communicated it to their troops.
[00:10:10] It's not surprising, therefore, that some men acquired a contempt for human life and a
[00:10:15] predilection for taking it.
[00:10:20] So that's the environment that you're in.
[00:10:24] The environment that's being encouraged to kill.
[00:10:28] Kill as many as possible.
[00:10:31] That's coming from the top.
[00:10:32] That's the broad strategy.
[00:10:34] Not to win this hill.
[00:10:36] It's a kill.
[00:10:39] And who are you talking to and who's receiving this?
[00:10:41] Here's a little piece on Charlie Company, which is the Army Unit that this is based
[00:10:48] on and that committed this atrocity.
[00:10:51] We were kids, 18, 19 years old.
[00:10:54] I was 21 years old at the time.
[00:10:56] I was one of the oldest people around there among the common grunts.
[00:11:01] Most of them had never been away from home before they went to service and they end up
[00:11:05] in Vietnam.
[00:11:06] Many of them because they thought they were going to do something courageous on behalf
[00:11:09] of their country.
[00:11:12] So young kids.
[00:11:15] And nowadays, if you're young kid, you're 13, 14, 16, 18, you know, guess what?
[00:11:21] You might not have traveled around the world, but you've seen the world because you
[00:11:25] have television.
[00:11:26] You have the internet.
[00:11:27] You can see all these parts of the world.
[00:11:29] You can see all different cultures and people.
[00:11:31] Well, when you're from Iowa in 1967, you don't know anything about this.
[00:11:38] So you're getting next thing, you know, six months later, you're in Vietnam.
[00:11:44] And here is a little bit of where you're going to get your attitude from.
[00:11:50] Back to the book, to the troops of Charlie Company, to American troops in general, all
[00:11:55] Vietnamese were Gooks, Dinks, Dopes, and Slopes.
[00:12:00] So just you could not find the Vietnamese who were their enemy soon struck out wildly
[00:12:04] at the Vietnamese who were supposed to be their friends.
[00:12:08] How can you tell the enemy, Varnoto Simpson, said, they all look the same.
[00:12:13] Which another MII veteran added, in the end, everyone in that country was the enemy.
[00:12:21] In all wars, it is common for the enemy to be dehumanized.
[00:12:25] But in Vietnam, American soldiers also dehumanized their allies.
[00:12:30] Charlie Company had not been in Vietnam long before the pattern of brutality leading to
[00:12:36] me lie began.
[00:12:38] Their own losses and injuries hastened the process.
[00:12:42] Retrid, fear, racism, and revenge turned to beatings torture, rape, murder.
[00:12:50] All these offenses were committed with impunity by individuals and groups from Charlie
[00:12:54] Company in the weeks before the massacre.
[00:12:57] Finally, at MII, they discovered that having dehumanized the Vietnamese, they had also dehumanized
[00:13:05] themselves.
[00:13:09] So you're going to see this escalation.
[00:13:12] And it's just like we talked about with the Russian soldiers in Chechnya and how it starts
[00:13:19] when they don't shave.
[00:13:20] And then they don't clean their weapon and then they don't stand watching and then the
[00:13:23] next thing they're not doing, they're doing their duty and they're being overrun.
[00:13:26] You're going to see a similar escalation here around the lack of discipline, but it's
[00:13:32] in the way that they treat the local populace.
[00:13:36] And you know, I had one of my high school teachers was a Vietnam veteran and when I was
[00:13:44] going to high school, the movie Platoon came out.
[00:13:49] And you can tell, actually, you can tell that the movie Platoon, the book we did,
[00:13:53] Platoon leader by Jim McDonald, there's so many scenes in that book that you can tell all
[00:13:58] of them are read that book and put some of those scenes in the movie.
[00:14:01] There's no doubt about it.
[00:14:02] There's even a character named Barnes in the book and in the movie.
[00:14:08] Well Platoon also showed, you know, a very, it portrayed the Americans in a very rough
[00:14:16] light in many of the situations.
[00:14:19] And when I talked to my one of my teachers in high school that was a Vietnam vet, and
[00:14:24] he just said, you know, the thing that they didn't show very well, because they show
[00:14:28] the guys coming in and really be people, killing people, burning villages.
[00:14:35] And what he said was, you know, Jaka, we would walk around a village and one of our guys
[00:14:41] would hit a booby trap every day, every other day.
[00:14:45] And the villagers are out there walking on the same trails, but they're not getting blown
[00:14:49] up.
[00:14:50] And so after weeks and then months of this happening of me losing two guys, three guys,
[00:14:57] six guys getting blown up, getting killed, losing their legs, losing their arms, losing their
[00:15:02] lives, and the Vietnamese villagers, they're not hitting anything.
[00:15:07] Eventually in in our minds, they become guilty.
[00:15:13] Now when you have leadership that can explain and restrain and control, you can keep that
[00:15:21] stuff controlled.
[00:15:24] But when you have leadership that buys into that attitude, you end up in a very bad
[00:15:28] situation, which is where we're heading here in Mely.
[00:15:36] Now back to the strategy.
[00:15:38] The aim of American strategy was simple to kill via Kong and such large numbers that they
[00:15:43] would not be replaced, or could not be replaced.
[00:15:46] But how was this to be achieved without, at the same time, killing large numbers of civilians?
[00:15:52] This was a problem to which no one on the American side ever discovered a satisfactory answer.
[00:15:58] It was the biggest failure of the war.
[00:16:00] It was a failure magnified enormously by American strategic thinking.
[00:16:06] The Westmoreland Vietnam was a war of attrition, a meat grinder, as they called it in the
[00:16:11] Pentagon.
[00:16:13] The object he explained was to bleed the north to waken in the communist mind, the notion
[00:16:17] that they were draining their population, to the point of national disaster for generations
[00:16:23] to come.
[00:16:24] To achieve this goal and to win a war of attrition, Americans had to kill via Kong fighters
[00:16:30] faster than the communist could replace them.
[00:16:33] As Bifit's a great industrial power, the war was to be fought on an industrial scale.
[00:16:39] Westmoreland like Patton before him intended to construct a killing machine so formidable
[00:16:44] as to be irresistible.
[00:16:47] It sheer size and power would pulverize the enemy in this submission.
[00:16:53] So there you go.
[00:16:55] Once again, it's very clear what the goal was from a strategic level.
[00:17:00] And this kind of spells out how determined they were to do that.
[00:17:09] Back to the book.
[00:17:10] From the beginning of American involvement, it would become common practice for patrols
[00:17:14] to call for artillery or an air strike if they received even sniper fire from a village.
[00:17:19] Irrespective of whether civilians also sheltered there.
[00:17:23] By the end of 1966, fighter bombers were making up to 400 such shorties a day.
[00:17:30] Added to B-52 raids in the country, this meant that around 825 tons of bombs were delivered
[00:17:37] every day.
[00:17:39] A figure that doubled by the tonnage of high explosive fired off by artillery.
[00:17:46] The solution in Vietnam, General Dupri, told the visiting amissary from the Pentagon,
[00:17:53] is more bombs more shells more napaum, till the other side cracks and gives up.
[00:17:59] And that's what they got.
[00:18:01] In 1967, an article in Life Magazine claimed that the cost of killing a single vehicle
[00:18:06] in Gorilla was $400,000, which included the cost of 75 bombs and 150 artillery shells.
[00:18:13] No nation in history had waged a war with such little regard to expense.
[00:18:19] Only days before Mely, Robert McNamara, the retiring secretary of defense, would remind
[00:18:26] an audience gathered to record his farewell from the Pentagon that more bombs had been dropped
[00:18:30] on Vietnam than on the whole of Europe during the whole of World War II.
[00:18:39] So that's crazy.
[00:18:41] Especially for me, from my perspective, having been in the war in Iraq and having known
[00:18:47] guys that fought NAF Afghanistan, this idea that they take sniper fire from a village and
[00:18:54] then call in the air strikes on the village is just something that would not happen.
[00:18:58] Then that's why when people frame America as being this power that just goes and crushes
[00:19:06] and kills all these civilians, I know for a fact it's not true.
[00:19:10] Yes, obviously it happened in Vietnam, but we go through great lengths.
[00:19:15] There were some times I'm telling you, almost sometimes absurd lengths to protect the civilian
[00:19:20] populace in Iraq in Afghanistan.
[00:19:22] I could bring so many people on here on this program, just seals.
[00:19:27] But I could bring anybody from all kinds of every branch of the military to come here
[00:19:31] and say, oh yeah, here's a situation.
[00:19:33] My guys were pinned down under fire.
[00:19:35] We tried to get bombs dropped on this building.
[00:19:37] No one would do it.
[00:19:38] We couldn't do it.
[00:19:39] We weren't allowed to do it.
[00:19:40] And that's the reality today.
[00:19:43] And part of that is we've matured as a nation, obviously we see that that's a problem.
[00:19:48] I mean, this is the way we should fight.
[00:19:51] Sometimes we go too far in one direction.
[00:19:53] This was obviously too far in the other direction.
[00:20:00] In Iraq, I remember you mentioned something about the enemy in Iraq.
[00:20:07] Would you use the civilian populace?
[00:20:09] Oh, there's no doubt about it.
[00:20:11] They're like, they literally used kids as shields.
[00:20:15] They knew our rules of engagement.
[00:20:18] They knew that if they stayed in buildings that were close to a mosque or were close to a
[00:20:22] hospital that we wouldn't bomb it, that we wouldn't hit it with armor.
[00:20:26] So they were very smart about how they took advantage of our rules of engagement.
[00:20:32] And then we had to adjust our tactics.
[00:20:34] So there's no doubt.
[00:20:36] The enemy figures out what your rules of engagement are and then they start to press
[00:20:39] you in the seams of that rules of engagement, to try and take advantage of it, to the best
[00:20:43] their ability.
[00:20:44] Do you think that that's kind of an indicator that they cared about their civilians less
[00:20:51] than you cared about their civilians?
[00:20:53] That is 100% accurate.
[00:20:55] Of course.
[00:20:56] I mean, the al Qaeda insurgents and now the ISIS in Iraq, they don't care about civilian casualties.
[00:21:03] And all, they don't care.
[00:21:05] They literally don't care.
[00:21:06] Their own civilian.
[00:21:07] Their own civilian.
[00:21:08] That's crazy.
[00:21:09] The civilians, again, this is something I never gets portrayed correctly.
[00:21:13] The civilians don't want ISIS in charge.
[00:21:15] The civilians didn't want al Qaeda in charge.
[00:21:17] They knew what that would lead to.
[00:21:21] And yeah, al Qaeda would use their children as shields.
[00:21:25] I mean, I literally had snipers of mine that shot al Qaeda guys carrying machine guns in
[00:21:33] one hand and a baby in the other hand.
[00:21:36] And luckily, we had really good snipers.
[00:21:41] So back to the book here, we get to talk a little bit about the company, the company
[00:21:49] that this is about Charlie Company.
[00:21:52] And a company is the company soldiers generally around 150 people.
[00:21:57] And you'll have three, generally you'll have three platoons in there.
[00:22:02] So your platoons are going to be 40, 50, maybe 60 people.
[00:22:04] Sometimes it's actually a lot more flexible than people realize.
[00:22:07] Sometimes an army company will have five platoons.
[00:22:10] But generally three platoons, what they'll have.
[00:22:13] So we're talking here, probably about 150 guys in Charlie Company.
[00:22:16] And they're guys, they lay out that kind of going to a quick background of the different
[00:22:22] guys.
[00:22:23] And really what an end up showing you is a cross section of America.
[00:22:28] Some highlights, they got a guy named Fred Widmer from North of Pittsburgh.
[00:22:34] He got a guy named Kenneth Hodges from Dublin, Georgia, a farmer's boy.
[00:22:40] You got a guy from Portland, Oregon named Greg Olson, who's a Mormon, a devout Mormon.
[00:22:47] And from a good family, you got another guy named Harry Stanley from Gulfport, Mississippi,
[00:22:55] who was brought up by his mom, who believed in hard work, school, and church on Sundays.
[00:23:01] So you're looking at a fairly normal cross section, Michael Burnhart, came from a middle
[00:23:06] class Catholic family from Long Island.
[00:23:09] So you got just the troops, just a cross section.
[00:23:13] And then you get to one of the leaders in Charlie Company, in charge of Second Platoon.
[00:23:22] And his name was William Laws Callie, Lieutenant Callie.
[00:23:30] And he's going to end up being our the monster here.
[00:23:36] So back to the book, who was Callie?
[00:23:39] In the early 70s, a small industry grew up trying to find the answer.
[00:23:44] Toilers at this trade looked for a monster, but all they found was a non entity.
[00:23:49] A bland young man burdened it seemed with his much ordinaryness as any single individual
[00:23:55] could bear.
[00:23:56] And almost too much of a conventional and common place to retain what is necessary for
[00:24:01] human identity.
[00:24:04] To press Callie to the press, Callie was just about as average in American as ever came
[00:24:10] out of the non-discripped middle class streets of Miami.
[00:24:14] He could be any young American.
[00:24:16] He was the quiet American.
[00:24:18] It was noted with astonishment that he emerged from a background which most would regard
[00:24:23] as coming close to the American ideal.
[00:24:27] Elsewhere it was said that his life could have been lifted from the cover drawing of the
[00:24:31] old Saturday evening post.
[00:24:34] His averageness had made him so invisible at one college he attended that all anyone could
[00:24:39] remember about him was that he paid his rent regularly.
[00:24:45] The many who combed through his life found no shred of deviance.
[00:24:49] And even a single distinctive feature other than his height, 5-4, 5 feet forages.
[00:24:56] He'd come from a stable family.
[00:24:58] He'd been neither particularly popular or unpopular.
[00:25:01] He had no particular talents and few if any enthusiasm.
[00:25:05] Water skiing was the closest he ever got to violence.
[00:25:11] Throughout a long education, he'd shown no aptitude for learning his college career
[00:25:16] simply fizzled out.
[00:25:21] That's one of the things.
[00:25:22] You can see this guy is white bread, plain plain.
[00:25:28] That's what they find about him.
[00:25:33] The company itself, they say back to the book Charlie Company was very average.
[00:25:39] Charlie Company actually reflects Kelly in the fact that Charlie Company as a whole is pretty
[00:25:44] normal for a company of army soldiers in Vietnam.
[00:25:47] An investigation ordered by the Army Chief of Staff in 1970 revealed that 87% of Charlie
[00:25:53] companies and CEOs were high school graduates nearly 20% above the Army's norm.
[00:25:58] Most of the men in Charlie Company were between 18 and 22 years old.
[00:26:01] Nearly half the company was black.
[00:26:03] The peers reported that there was little to distinguish Charlie Company from other
[00:26:07] rifle companies.
[00:26:08] The men were generally representative of the typical cross section of American youth
[00:26:12] assigned to most combat units throughout the Army.
[00:26:15] They brought with them the diverse traits, prejudices, and attitudes typical of the various
[00:26:19] regions of the country and segments of society from whence they came.
[00:26:27] Normal people.
[00:26:29] And why it's important to remember that as we dive into this and as this story develops,
[00:26:35] you're going to see these normal people do completely demonic things.
[00:26:47] And now we talk a little bit here about there in Hawaii and they're going through some
[00:26:52] training to prepare them for Vietnam.
[00:26:59] Back to the book, what most Charlie Company veterans remember about the training was its
[00:27:03] unreality and how little it prepared them for what they had to face in Vietnam.
[00:27:08] For Fred Wittmeer, it seemed they had been preparing for World War II or Korea.
[00:27:14] Cali thought they could go to Vietnam and be Audi Murphy's, kicking the door, running the
[00:27:19] hooch, giving it a good burst kill.
[00:27:23] For Nato Simpson said, you can't have no type of training, can compare with what wars
[00:27:29] like none.
[00:27:31] There's no such thing as preparedness for war.
[00:27:34] We trained and we were so psyched up and they programmed you to kill and to go to Vietnam,
[00:27:40] you know, but once you get there, it's a different situation.
[00:27:48] Now I spent my last three years in the military training guys for war and I'll tell you
[00:27:54] right now, we trained guys really well for war.
[00:27:57] And the training that I received preparing for war did a great job and we improved upon
[00:28:01] that the more combat experience we got, the better we got it training and preparing guys
[00:28:05] for war.
[00:28:08] But you can see how important the training is and the training has got to be realistic
[00:28:16] to the situation that you're going to be put in.
[00:28:19] And clearly, you know, they're then saying that this was like World War II or Korea, well
[00:28:23] in World War II and Korea, there's vast differences between what you're dealing with
[00:28:26] Vietnam.
[00:28:27] World War II or Korea, you're fighting against enemy uniformed troops that are on the other
[00:28:32] side of a line that are attacking you.
[00:28:35] That's what World War II and Korea was very much like for the most part.
[00:28:40] Another person in a different uniform that you are going to fight and kill.
[00:28:45] And here we just have something totally different.
[00:28:47] People that are mixed in with the villages, there's no front line anywhere.
[00:28:51] They're dressing the same.
[00:28:53] Sometimes they have a gun.
[00:28:54] Sometimes they don't, it's an infinitely challenging, more challenging situation.
[00:29:01] Now here we go back to the book.
[00:29:03] According to Cali, the only lesson every GI learned was not to trust anybody.
[00:29:10] It was drummed into us, B-sharp on guard, as soon as you think these people won't kill
[00:29:14] you, zap.
[00:29:16] In combat, you haven't friends, you have enemies.
[00:29:19] Ever and ever again, at OCS we heard this and I told myself, I'll act as if I'm never
[00:29:25] secure.
[00:29:26] As if everyone in Vietnam would do me in, as if everyone is bad.
[00:29:35] Michael Bernhardt was also concerned.
[00:29:37] Charlie Company did not match up to the high standards of order and discipline.
[00:29:40] He had learned at the La Sal military academy.
[00:29:43] So this is one of the soldiers.
[00:29:44] He had gone to a military type high school where they had good discipline.
[00:29:49] They learned about the military.
[00:29:52] And then when he got in, he went to airborne school.
[00:29:54] So he was moral, the higher end soldier.
[00:29:58] Back to the book.
[00:29:59] Trained as a parachute as he was disappointed to have been transferred to a run of the mill
[00:30:02] infantry company.
[00:30:04] Bernhardt was unusual for an enlisted man.
[00:30:06] He was a military animal, a stickler for authority and was happiest when things were being
[00:30:11] done by the book.
[00:30:17] But it was not this system that fathered Bernhardt.
[00:30:21] He believed that good soldiers not only needed discipline, but liked it.
[00:30:27] It was the lax discipline and Charlie Company and the fact that officers did not always
[00:30:31] insist on their orders being carried out out that worried him.
[00:30:35] In an argument with Callie shortly after arriving in Hawaii, he found the young lieutenant
[00:30:40] Callow and lacking in leadership qualities.
[00:30:45] So right now we're already seeing some chinks in the armor of Lieutenant Callie.
[00:30:51] And if you remember what Hackworth said about me lie, he talked about Callie.
[00:30:58] And he said that Callie had been kicked out or failed.
[00:31:05] He'd failed off your candidate school three times.
[00:31:08] And they just wanted to hey, we need more of guys.
[00:31:11] We need to have better numbers getting through, go ahead and pass the guy.
[00:31:14] So you got a guy that lacks leadership.
[00:31:16] And it is, I mean it's interesting to talk about how bland this guy is.
[00:31:20] I mean, somebody that's that bland that they literally have nothing no characteristics.
[00:31:24] Obviously the guy lacks some leadership characteristics.
[00:31:27] Well, because he has no characteristics.
[00:31:30] And now you got the young soldiers looking at the guy and thinking he doesn't have, he doesn't
[00:31:34] have any leadership.
[00:31:37] And this is a part that I highlighted because I think it's an interesting perspective
[00:31:43] of what it was like to go to Vietnam.
[00:31:46] Back to the book, we flew over on a continental airlines plane.
[00:31:51] Fred Wittmeyer recalls, it was a weird situation, a civilian plane with a civilian
[00:31:56] student and crew.
[00:31:58] They were flying both ways.
[00:32:00] They were flying people out as well as in, so they got to see both ends.
[00:32:05] I remember getting off the plane and the student just stood there crying as we unloaded.
[00:32:10] They were more attuned to what we were getting into than we were.
[00:32:18] That's pretty surreal.
[00:32:22] Now they start talking about what it's like there and what they're doing.
[00:32:33] And there's a province there that they're starting to concentrate on a province in Vietnam
[00:32:41] and some of the problems that they have there.
[00:32:43] In a province deemed correctly to be overwhelmingly sympathetic to the Vietnam this meant
[00:32:47] eliminating the countryside.
[00:32:49] The villages were bombed, burned down, and polarized.
[00:32:53] Sometimes villagers would be warned advance that their homes were about to be wiped off
[00:32:57] the face of the earth.
[00:32:59] Sometimes not.
[00:33:01] It was common practice to shell or bomb any village from which the US soldiers had taken
[00:33:06] any fire even small arms without any warning at all.
[00:33:11] The destruction was almost unimaginable scale.
[00:33:15] So again, was this something that in the wars that I thought and that we would never do
[00:33:21] that.
[00:33:22] It wasn't just like, oh we took rifle fire from a village bomb the whole thing.
[00:33:25] That was not happening.
[00:33:29] This was the reality behind Westmoreland's prediction in 1965 that the war will bring
[00:33:34] about a moment of decision for the peasant farmer.
[00:33:38] He will have to choose if he stays alive.
[00:33:42] American officials frequently referred to this choice.
[00:33:45] The choice's yours, one leaflet, dropped on villages proclaimed.
[00:33:49] If you refuse to let Viet Kong use your villages and hamlets as their battlefield, your
[00:33:54] homes and lives will be spared.
[00:33:57] A million leaflets a day were being dropped on quining province, quying nigh province
[00:34:04] at this time.
[00:34:05] The whole exercise assumed that the largely illiterate peasants could actually read them.
[00:34:12] From 1965 to 1972, 50 billion leaflets were dropped over Viet Nama, 1500 each for every member
[00:34:21] of the population.
[00:34:24] So that's just, when you think about dropping these leaflets to tell people what to do
[00:34:30] and most of the popular or a lot of the population is illiterate.
[00:34:34] Hey get out of your village.
[00:34:35] Well there's a piece of paper flying from the sky and I don't know what it says.
[00:34:41] Back to the book, to stay and be killed or to go join thousands of other refugees in the
[00:34:45] squalor of refugee camps or the mushrooming shanty towns around the towns and cities.
[00:34:50] What kind of a choice was this?
[00:34:54] But for the Americans, the whole point of clearing an area of countryside of its people was
[00:35:00] so that anyone who remained must be Viet Kong.
[00:35:04] These areas became free fire zones.
[00:35:06] Anything that happened to someone who chose to remain in or return to a free fire zone
[00:35:11] was their own fault.
[00:35:13] They could expect the worst.
[00:35:15] The belief that people had been given a chance to get out had made their choice, made
[00:35:20] the strategy morally workable.
[00:35:22] In a free fire zone, the pursuit of a high body count could proceed unencumbered by the
[00:35:28] need to discriminate between combatants and civilians at all.
[00:35:35] No where was this breathtaking carelessness of human life greater than in Quang Nai?
[00:35:43] No one was actually saying kill civilians but no one strived to keep them alive because
[00:35:48] the killing of civilians came to be seen as unavoidable less and less time was spent on seeing
[00:35:53] how it could be avoided.
[00:35:55] To American spokesman, the death or injury of non-combatants was always accidental and
[00:36:01] inevitable tragedy of war and therefore somehow uncorrectable.
[00:36:14] It doesn't take a genius to figure this out.
[00:36:17] When the Americans are bombing your village and they're killing your son, your husband,
[00:36:23] your wife, whatever.
[00:36:24] I mean, who side are you going to be on?
[00:36:28] And we know that the VC were brutal.
[00:36:31] Look at the end of Petun Commander when the VC come in and murder the half the village
[00:36:36] or three quarters of the village and burn down their hots and blow up all their hooches.
[00:36:40] We know that the VC were capable and evil but when our strategy is hey, give them a quick
[00:36:51] warning, drop some leaflets tell them if they stay there, they're VC and if not, hey,
[00:36:56] we gave them a chance so if they're standing there, they must be VC.
[00:37:03] Charlie Company spent December guarding bridges and practicing in the deserted village
[00:37:07] of Duke foe, the army called it in-country orientation and Australian adviser was brought
[00:37:15] into instruct the company on how to distinguish between non-compatants, the at-combatants,
[00:37:19] regular suspects and sympathizers.
[00:37:22] He said it was very difficult, so did other instructors from the South Vietnamese army.
[00:37:29] They got the same story from former Viet Kong, the Australian emphasized that you should
[00:37:36] be extremely leery of children, Medina testified later, Medina is the company commander
[00:37:42] so the company has three petunes in it, but overall in charge of the company's guy named
[00:37:46] Medina.
[00:37:47] Now think about this, not only you're just distinguishing between good and bad, you've got
[00:37:53] non-combatants which are friendly civilians, Viet Kong regulars, suspects and sympathizers.
[00:38:00] Now you've got the Vietnamese soldiers who are from Vietnam obviously, they're saying how hard
[00:38:06] it is to distinguish Khusu and then the Viet Kong captured Viet Kong themselves are saying
[00:38:13] that it's very difficult to know who's who.
[00:38:16] So how is a kid from Iowa going to be able to tell the difference?
[00:38:27] You were exposed to something that went far beyond the world as we knew it, said Fred
[00:38:32] Windmere.
[00:38:33] We had just left Hawaii with all the totels, nightclubs and bars and we wound up in
[00:38:38] Vietnam where people went right out and shit in the rice paddy in the morning, dropped
[00:38:43] their drawers right along the trail at any time.
[00:38:45] It was hard to consider people in the modern day and age living like they did.
[00:38:51] I think it went against our value of what human life is.
[00:38:57] Valley was always frustrated and is attempts to keep the children away from his men when
[00:39:02] they were guarding bridges at Duckfo.
[00:39:06] All the men love them, gave the kids candies, cookies, chewing gum, everything he said later,
[00:39:12] not me, I hated them.
[00:39:15] I was afraid of the Vietnamese kids.
[00:39:19] So you know you got the Australian guys saying hey look, be leery of the kids.
[00:39:22] You got the kid from Iowa, the normal American grunt, he loves the kids, he's given
[00:39:27] them gum, he's given them food, playing with them, it's all good.
[00:39:31] Meanwhile, Kali again, you start seeing the indicators of what's about to take place.
[00:39:36] You got a guy that's saying I hated them.
[00:39:39] I hated them.
[00:39:42] It's hard to develop hatred for a kid, for a five year old.
[00:39:51] Now they become part of a unit that's called Task Force Barker, which is multiple companies
[00:40:02] of which Charlie company is one of them.
[00:40:04] And this Lieutenant Colonel, like the Italian commander, he is the commander of this
[00:40:10] task force and actually his name is Colonel Frank Barker.
[00:40:12] So they named the task force after him and they send them up to this province.
[00:40:19] Now, inside their back to the book, inside their fire bases, men of the task force enjoyed
[00:40:27] as much of the American world as could be flown in by helicopter.
[00:40:31] They received their mail, American newspapers, cold beers, stakes, ice cream, Coca-Cola,
[00:40:38] and playboy magazine.
[00:40:40] But all around them was the world of the Viet Kong.
[00:40:45] And I got another interesting thing from this book just to show the extent that they did
[00:40:52] this.
[00:40:54] There was 40 ice cream plants built in Vietnam to supply the troops with ice cream.
[00:41:03] And each another figure that I read was that each person in each soldier in Vietnam used
[00:41:11] 100 pounds to supplies a day crazy.
[00:41:20] Now the guys, they move into this new province, province, quang-ni, and they start to
[00:41:31] encounter some combat.
[00:41:34] And I'm very careful to say they're not encountering, they're not really encountering
[00:41:38] VC, they're not getting in a bunch of fire flights, but they are getting in some.
[00:41:43] And this is there, they're in their first fire flight, and here we go, back to the book,
[00:41:47] the men in their first fire flight were discovering things about each other and about themselves.
[00:41:53] Greg Olson recalled, we were pinned down in a trench taking a lot of fire.
[00:41:57] Sergeant Cowan was on one side.
[00:42:00] One side of me putting up his helmet to get some bullet holes in it.
[00:42:03] Almost like it was amusing.
[00:42:05] On the other side, there was this other guy just sobbing, he'd come on glued, crawling
[00:42:10] around like a dog, just lost it.
[00:42:14] The first puttune with Jew under cover of massive artillery bombardment, according to some
[00:42:19] of the men, Cowan was totally lost.
[00:42:23] He led them back towards the river, as they broke cover the snipers started up again.
[00:42:28] On Weber, Cowan's radio operator took a shot with shattered his radio set and tore his kidney out.
[00:42:36] He died a few moments later, Charlie company's first killed in action.
[00:42:41] His horrified companions lifted him onto the hovering Metavac helicopter.
[00:42:46] A GI and shock bluvered and howled, no one had known much about shock before.
[00:42:52] If we got hit much harder, we would all go into shock, Cowan told his court martial
[00:42:56] nearly three years later.
[00:42:58] It was terrifying, terrifying experience.
[00:43:03] In later years, Cowan admitted that he'd been careless.
[00:43:06] He'd led his men into an exposed position, so they'd had to fire fight and they're trying
[00:43:11] to break contact and Cowan leads him out into an open area and gets one of his guys killed.
[00:43:18] And then he asked to report back, he got to fire fight, okay, how to go, let's report
[00:43:23] back, what's the body count?
[00:43:26] Is that remember this is all about killing, is all about killing.
[00:43:31] And so he passes up the body count and here's how he comes up with his body count.
[00:43:36] As later, how he arrived at a body count, Cowan replied, you just make an estimate off
[00:43:42] the top of your head.
[00:43:44] There is no way to really figure out exact body count as long as it was high, that's all
[00:43:49] they wanted.
[00:43:50] I generally knew that if I lost a troop, I'd better come back with a body count of
[00:43:55] 10, say I shot at least 10 of the enemy, which was pretty hard when you're only fighting
[00:44:00] a one sniper.
[00:44:03] So you got these guys out in the field and they're reported, they're just making up the
[00:44:06] body count.
[00:44:07] Now think about what the fact this has on the war effort, because General Westmoreland's
[00:44:12] up there saying, hey, we're going to kill him until they can't take it anymore.
[00:44:15] Well, guess how many people they killed right there, zero, they didn't kill that sniper.
[00:44:20] And yet they're reporting that they killed 10.
[00:44:23] Well, you multiply that over the whole country and every unit that's out there that's making
[00:44:28] up these body count numbers.
[00:44:29] And guess what, eventually, Westmoreland thinks we're doing a good job in killing a lot
[00:44:33] of bad guys, but we're not killing any.
[00:44:37] And I can jam you up when you have that, even in a different type of scenario where you're
[00:44:42] getting a report on a certain level of progress.
[00:44:46] And therefore, a lot of times the decision, the next decisions to be made are based on that.
[00:44:50] 100% any situation that you're in, if you've got your troopers and your subordinate
[00:44:57] leadership with the mindset that they would rather lie to you than tell you the truth about
[00:45:02] what's happening, you're never going to be able to make good decisions, because you're
[00:45:05] making your decisions based on lies.
[00:45:06] Yep.
[00:45:07] Yeah.
[00:45:08] Back to the book, frustration and anger aid away at the company's as speed accord.
[00:45:17] The men stopped believing that Charlie CONG, meaning the vehicle was afraid of Charlie
[00:45:22] Company.
[00:45:23] Faith in Medina, the company commander, was still high, although some G.I.s felt he pushed
[00:45:27] the company too hard.
[00:45:30] Cally was another matter.
[00:45:32] A pinion on him was universally hostile, according to one G.I. and his patoon, Cally was
[00:45:38] a glory hungry person, the kind of person who would have sacrificed all of us for his own
[00:45:43] personal advancement.
[00:45:45] On Smeil, a squad leader in third platoon called him a nervous, excitable type who yelled
[00:45:51] a lot.
[00:45:53] I think it's important for you to know, Smeil told Army CID, that Cally was so disliked by members
[00:46:00] of the unit that they put a bounty on his head.
[00:46:03] None of the men had any respect for him as a military leader.
[00:46:07] Greg Olson thought he was incompetent.
[00:46:09] I remember instances that we were lost one time at night, everyone knew we were lost, but
[00:46:14] Cally wouldn't admit it.
[00:46:18] So there you go, you got a guy.
[00:46:20] We talked about this all the time and say, what do you do if you make a mistake?
[00:46:23] You own the mistake.
[00:46:25] If you need help, you say, hey, you know what?
[00:46:26] I'm not sure we're on the map right now.
[00:46:28] Let me get someone up here to do a map study.
[00:46:30] Help me out.
[00:46:31] Let's figure out where we are.
[00:46:32] But instead, he just lies.
[00:46:34] He doesn't admit it.
[00:46:35] He doesn't own it.
[00:46:37] And no one is going to have respect for him.
[00:46:41] Back to the book.
[00:46:42] I thought Cally acted like a small guy who had been pushed around a lot by bigger people
[00:46:47] before he joined the army.
[00:46:49] Now that he had authority, he didn't know how to use it.
[00:46:51] And he didn't listen to suggestions.
[00:46:55] I talk about this all the time.
[00:46:58] If you're in a leadership position, you need to listen to your people.
[00:47:01] Up and down the chain of command.
[00:47:02] That's one of the main things that he's getting called out on.
[00:47:05] Doesn't admit what he's wrong.
[00:47:06] And doesn't listen to suggestions.
[00:47:09] Many commented that there was something about him that rubbed people the wrong way.
[00:47:13] Medina, the company commander, gave his junior lieutenant a tough time and ridiculed him
[00:47:17] in front of his men.
[00:47:20] The captain called him, Lieutenant Shithead regularly.
[00:47:24] One G.I. remembered, that tended to minimize your opinion of him.
[00:47:28] Other recalled, others recalled that Cally's attempt to win favor with Medina were frequently
[00:47:33] rebuffed with a sarcastic, listen sweetheart.
[00:47:37] So now we have another situation where you have a subordinate leader that's not doing a good
[00:47:42] job.
[00:47:43] He's not being a good leader.
[00:47:45] People don't respect him.
[00:47:46] And what is his superior doing?
[00:47:48] Undermining him in front of his troops instead of counseling him and said, I helped
[00:47:51] him and said, pulling him aside and say, hey, it's okay to admit when you're wrong.
[00:47:54] Hey, you need to take suggestions from your guys.
[00:47:57] Instead he's calling him a shithead, lieutenant shithead, undermining him all the time.
[00:48:01] So now you get put in Cally, and you even worse position.
[00:48:06] Now, they continue to patrol.
[00:48:13] They're starting to take some casualties and they start to go down the spiral.
[00:48:20] Back to the book.
[00:48:21] Charlie company's drift toward brutality took very little time.
[00:48:25] It began with beating up suspects and villages and quickly became more serious.
[00:48:31] Burn heart state of luft from the process Fred Widdmeer did not.
[00:48:36] It explained that Geneva Convention Toss turning our training and in the beginning we did
[00:48:40] what we thought was right and just turned the prisoners over.
[00:48:44] But it was kind of hard after you'd been there a while and you started seeing, learning,
[00:48:48] finding out what real experience is all about.
[00:48:53] Here you are fighting an enemy who doesn't follow the Geneva Convention, but you have to
[00:48:57] abide by it.
[00:48:58] It's like being in a football team where you have to follow the rules to the letter and
[00:49:03] the other team can do whatever the hell they like.
[00:49:06] The voices of authority in the company, the platoon sergeants and officers acknowledge that
[00:49:11] this executing prisoners was a proper way to behave.
[00:49:17] Who would have grunts to disagree with it?
[00:49:19] We supported it.
[00:49:23] They've started to execute prisoners, which is obviously against the Geneva Convention,
[00:49:28] but the way they're looking at it, they're seeing that the sergeants and the platoon commanders
[00:49:32] are like okay with it.
[00:49:34] So the grunts are okay, I guess that's the way it's going to be.
[00:49:40] And we'd mere goes on to say, the first time I saw something really bad was the point
[00:49:45] at which we stopped taking prisoners.
[00:49:48] We'd been there about a month and a half or maybe two months.
[00:49:51] There was one guy Medina had shoot the prisoners.
[00:49:54] Instead of having everyone around and shoot them, we would walk them down towards the
[00:49:58] they would walk them down towards the beach or behind some sand dunes and shoot them.
[00:50:03] A couple of shots and they were done.
[00:50:06] As time went by, things were done.
[00:50:08] Ears cut off mutilation.
[00:50:11] One prisoner had his arms tied straight out on a stick.
[00:50:15] One woman was a woman and one was a man.
[00:50:19] There was no question that these two were via Kong.
[00:50:22] The woman was working as a nurse and we found them in a tunnel with all the medical supplies
[00:50:26] and we knew they were the enemy.
[00:50:29] At cigarettes were put inside the elastic of the guy's pants and we watched him dance
[00:50:34] around because they were burning his ass.
[00:50:38] I think it was a bit of making him talk and a bit of venting our frustrations, a bit
[00:50:42] of both.
[00:50:43] I don't remember what happened to them whether they were turned over or shot.
[00:50:49] The more it went on, the more you didn't trust anyone.
[00:50:52] You didn't believe anybody because you didn't know who is, who you didn't know who the
[00:50:56] enemy was.
[00:50:58] As we went on, more and more prisoners would be executed.
[00:51:04] I would say it was a regular occurrence.
[00:51:06] I did abuse someone, a prisoner, a pop-as-on.
[00:51:10] I found myself doing the same things that had been going on all along.
[00:51:14] I found myself caught up in it.
[00:51:16] We caught his beard off.
[00:51:17] That was an insult.
[00:51:19] A pop-as-on with a beard is considered as the wise man and to caught off their beard
[00:51:22] who's a real sign of disrespect to them.
[00:51:25] You found yourself punching them around, beating them up, trying to get them to talk.
[00:51:30] I never did head anyone with a rifle.
[00:51:33] I've taken a knife to them.
[00:51:35] I never tortured anyone to death.
[00:51:37] I think I probably saw people tortured to death.
[00:51:41] So you hear this guy using this verbiage, you find yourself punching them around.
[00:51:45] It's almost as if it's not him.
[00:51:46] He's detached.
[00:51:48] Right, we talked about being detached.
[00:51:50] Well, he's detached from doing something that he knows he shouldn't be doing.
[00:51:53] Yeah, it seems like he comes back and checks back in every once in a while.
[00:51:57] Like, dang, I've got to woke up and found myself doing this thing.
[00:52:01] Burnheart, and outsider is usual.
[00:52:04] Watch the downward spiral.
[00:52:06] It started with just plain prisoners.
[00:52:09] Prisoners you thought were the enemy.
[00:52:11] Then you'd go on to prisoners who weren't the enemy.
[00:52:14] And then the civilians because there was no difference between the enemy and civilians.
[00:52:19] It came to a point where a guy could kill anybody.
[00:52:24] During an interrogation in one very village, Harry Stanley was standing only 10 feet away
[00:52:29] while the Cali and another GI Herbert Carter interrogated an old farmer.
[00:52:35] We attended Cali asked some questions and then Carter hit the old man in the mouth twice
[00:52:39] with his fist.
[00:52:40] Then Carter pushed the old man into a well, but the old man spread his legs and arms
[00:52:45] and held on and didn't fall into the well.
[00:52:48] In Carter hit the old man in the stomach with his rifle stock.
[00:52:51] The old man fell, the old man's feet fell into the well, but he was holding on with his hands.
[00:52:56] Carter hit the man's fingers trying to make him fall into the well.
[00:53:00] Then Lieutenant Cali shot the man in the Xen 16.
[00:53:07] For some GI's instance, like these showed that the official attitude to brutality was
[00:53:12] permissive.
[00:53:13] The result was a moral vacuum, a moratorium on restraint and self-control.
[00:53:19] Common decency became optional, a matter of personal inclination.
[00:53:25] Even those who refused to be drawn in were left morally thrown off balance.
[00:53:30] Greg Olson was in the village when Cali and Carter threw the old man down the well.
[00:53:36] I was in the village.
[00:53:37] I remember seeing people butted in the head with rifles, but you start losing your
[00:53:41] sense of what's normal.
[00:53:43] You don't give up your morals but you become a lot more tolerant.
[00:53:47] We believe this behavior was pretty commonplace.
[00:53:50] I didn't think we were doing anything different from any other unit.
[00:53:53] You really do lose your sense, not of right and wrong, but your degree of white right
[00:53:59] and wrong.
[00:54:02] And Michael Bernhardt, who watched what was happening from the sidelines, was already viewed
[00:54:07] with some mistrust by Medina, Cali and others in the company.
[00:54:13] When I saw American soldiers committing acts that could be called atrocities if someone
[00:54:17] else had done them, I began to think that maybe I'd just been too naive all my life
[00:54:21] that this is the way things really were.
[00:54:24] Little by little, I began to see that this group of men was getting out of control.
[00:54:30] Discipline was beginning to wear off.
[00:54:31] Without military discipline, they were alone in the country with no point of reference.
[00:54:37] The things they had brought from their families and schools were far away in beginning
[00:54:41] to disappear.
[00:54:45] Fred Woodmer, Fred Woodmer II felt things going from bad to worse and felt himself drawn
[00:54:51] along with the retired.
[00:54:54] If it ever occurred to me that things were getting out of hand or that I was questioning
[00:54:57] what, I myself might be capable of doing, I suppressed it.
[00:55:01] It did creep up in my mind because you still have those values of what is right and what
[00:55:05] is wrong that you have been taught all your life.
[00:55:09] I think the frustration got to me, but I also think I began to enjoy it.
[00:55:14] That's what's scary because at the time you find yourself enjoying it.
[00:55:19] I guess you could term it the superiority we had over them.
[00:55:23] It's a strange feeling.
[00:55:24] In retrospect, you look back on it and wonder how you yourself could have done it.
[00:55:30] 20 years later, when you look back at things that happened, things that transpired, things
[00:55:34] you did, you say, why?
[00:55:36] Why did I do that?
[00:55:38] That is not me.
[00:55:40] Something happened to me.
[00:55:42] You reach a point over there where you snap.
[00:55:45] That's the easiest way to put it.
[00:55:46] You finally snap.
[00:55:49] Somebody flicks a switch and you are a completely different person.
[00:55:53] There's a culture of violence, of brutality with people all around you doing the same thing.
[00:56:04] Continuing down the spiral, Leonard Gonzalez, a member of Second Paltune saw rapes,
[00:56:13] committed every time the company went through a village.
[00:56:19] One squad got one girl, one lady.
[00:56:23] Then they told me, go in there and I said no, I won't.
[00:56:26] So what I did is I went inside and she looked real bad.
[00:56:31] The only thing I can do for the lady is like, I got the canteen and I wiped her.
[00:56:36] She was awful for spiring.
[00:56:37] I wiped her forehead.
[00:56:39] I tried to help her.
[00:56:40] She got scared of me.
[00:56:41] I was part of them.
[00:56:43] I tried to tell her I don't have nothing to do with it.
[00:56:45] I helped her to her feet.
[00:56:47] I took her to the well.
[00:56:48] I got some water from the well.
[00:56:51] Then another squad heard about 13 guys who did their thing with this woman.
[00:56:57] And we're going to try her out and I told them to leave her alone.
[00:57:01] And then at that time I just walked off.
[00:57:03] I said, forget it.
[00:57:05] I don't want to kill my own men.
[00:57:08] I tried to tell her, get out of here.
[00:57:10] Go.
[00:57:12] She was going to run.
[00:57:14] But after 13 guys got to her, it's hard to walk.
[00:57:28] They're losing it.
[00:57:31] There's no leadership.
[00:57:33] They're losing it.
[00:57:40] Now they get into a, they get in a mine field.
[00:57:47] And they take some casualties in a mine field.
[00:57:49] And here's Madena's account of what happened in this mine field.
[00:57:54] We started sweeping the area as best we could with mine detectors taking pieces of toy
[00:57:58] that paper and marking the minds that we found.
[00:58:02] We had one individual that we could not evacuate that was dead.
[00:58:05] I took the medic that was with me, the platoon medic from first platoon.
[00:58:09] But he and I moved through the mine field to where an individual was lying.
[00:58:13] He was split as if somebody had taken a cleaver and right up from his crotch all the way up
[00:58:17] to his chest cavity.
[00:58:19] I had never seen anything like it that looked so unreal in my entire life.
[00:58:23] The intestines, the liver and the stomach and the blood just looked like plastic.
[00:58:28] We took a poncho and we spread it out and started and the medic started to pick
[00:58:33] them up by the legs.
[00:58:35] I reached underneath his arms to place him under the poncho and we set him on top of
[00:58:39] another mine.
[00:58:41] The concussion blew me back.
[00:58:43] I fell backward as I got up the medic was starting to go to pieces.
[00:58:49] I looked at him as if he had stood behind the screen and somebody had taken a paintbrush
[00:58:55] with red paint and splattered it through the screen.
[00:58:58] He had blood all over him.
[00:59:00] I grabbed him as he started to pass me and I shook him and I said, my god don't go to pieces
[00:59:04] on me.
[00:59:05] You're the only medic I've got.
[00:59:07] I have these people that are hurt.
[00:59:09] I hit him.
[00:59:11] I slapped him.
[00:59:12] I knocked him to the ground and I helped him to get back up and I saw on his religious
[00:59:17] metal a piece of liver and I tried to get it off the individual before he seen it.
[00:59:24] The individual was very shook up.
[00:59:29] Everybody was shaken.
[00:59:30] Three men were dead.
[00:59:31] Another 12 suffered ghastly injuries.
[00:59:34] If you could forget their own fear or the screams of the wounded or the gruesome task of
[00:59:39] loading the Medevac helicopters.
[00:59:43] When you've been through a minefield and put the remains of your friends and body bags,
[00:59:47] nothing shocks you anymore.
[00:59:51] So that minefield caused some three dead and 12 severely wounded.
[01:00:00] We talked about IEDs a lot in here.
[01:00:02] We talked about him with Jodi, Jodi Medek who got blown up by an IED.
[01:00:08] There's no one to fight.
[01:00:10] The bomb goes off and that's it.
[01:00:14] Who did this?
[01:00:16] Who do you blame?
[01:00:18] Well let me answer that question for these guys.
[01:00:21] Most of all they blamed the Vietnamese.
[01:00:24] Not the Vietnam who they could not see or find but the Vietnamese and the villages who did
[01:00:29] not warn them of the minefields and of the booby traps.
[01:00:32] Same thing my school teacher told me.
[01:00:35] They're starting to apply the blame to these Vietnamese villagers.
[01:00:44] Lieutenant Callie noticed the change in the mood of the men.
[01:00:50] He had been on leave at the time of the incident.
[01:00:52] So he wasn't around when this happened.
[01:00:56] He had been on leave at the time of the incident and had returned the LZ uptight and
[01:01:00] time to meet the helicopters fearing the dead and injured.
[01:01:04] From now on the men in his platoon no longer gave candy to the Vietnamese children.
[01:01:10] They came across while on patrol and the villages.
[01:01:13] Instead Callie noticed with some saddest faction.
[01:01:17] They kicked everybody aside, even the nice sweet kids.
[01:01:21] He could hardly refrain from telling them, well I told you so.
[01:01:26] Now they are starting to, after that incident, they're starting to now assemble information
[01:01:40] and intelligence for this raid that they're planning in Mely.
[01:01:48] And I think it's really important to take a look at where this intelligence is coming from
[01:01:53] and how this, because it paints a very important part of the picture of what these guys
[01:01:57] are being told back to the book.
[01:02:00] In intelligence round up for March 1968, prepared respectively, summed up the state of knowledge
[01:02:06] was this.
[01:02:08] Although, Sontin district remained relatively quiet during this period, elements of the 48th
[01:02:14] and existing local force units probably roamed the district countryside.
[01:02:21] The hills north and northwest of Mely area were probable base camps for elements of the 48th
[01:02:30] battalion.
[01:02:31] And it probably received supplies from the peninsula.
[01:02:38] So the 48th is an enemy unit, an enemy battalion.
[01:02:45] And you can hear the word probable being used.
[01:02:48] Okay, they're probably in the area, the villagers probably support them.
[01:02:51] So there isn't a claim being made from higher from above the chain of command.
[01:02:58] But you're going to hear that change.
[01:03:00] So above the chain of command, there's higher intelligence sets making these claims that
[01:03:06] there's probable VC there that they're probably working this area that they're probably
[01:03:09] getting supported from the villages.
[01:03:10] Well, as this filters down, it turns from probable to like definite.
[01:03:19] There is a strange discrepancy between what the army thought it knew about the vehicle
[01:03:24] and what the task force thought it knew.
[01:03:28] Army intelligence made only tentative claims.
[01:03:31] By contrast, Ram's Dell and for that matter, Kutak were almost pontificals.
[01:03:37] So these are the two intelligence guys at the task force level.
[01:03:42] So does that make sense?
[01:03:43] So you've got the higher army above them is telling them, hey, there's probably this
[01:03:47] problem that.
[01:03:48] And these guys are basically starting to say, no, no, this is VC.
[01:03:51] This is what this is.
[01:03:52] What's happening?
[01:03:53] Factually.
[01:03:54] Is that kind of like the game of telephone one of those?
[01:03:58] Yeah, it is.
[01:03:59] And it's also you're going to find as I go into this that both these guys aren't experienced.
[01:04:05] So I'll get to it.
[01:04:07] It was a kind of perverse destiny that brought the two overweight and middle-aged American
[01:04:11] captains, Ram's Dell and Kutak together in TET Kwang Nye City.
[01:04:18] Both were new boys to the real world of intelligence assessment in a battle zone.
[01:04:23] Both were inexperienced to both desperately eager to establish a reputation.
[01:04:29] Ram's Dell had provided to intelligence and Kutak prior to me, lie, operation and the
[01:04:34] curious convergence of their views irresistibly suggests that it was indeed Ram's Dell who
[01:04:41] provided intelligence for the attack on me, lie itself.
[01:04:46] Suggestions at the 48th local force betimes up to 400 strong that everyone in the village
[01:04:51] was Viet Kwang or Viet Kwang sympathizer.
[01:04:54] And that at seven on Saturday morning all bonafide civilians would have left the village
[01:04:58] for the market.
[01:04:59] All these views were shared by Ram's Dell and Kutak and accepted uncritically by Task Force
[01:05:05] Barker.
[01:05:06] So think about that.
[01:05:07] You got these guys saying there's 400 up to 400 enemy in the area that the village is
[01:05:15] all Viet Kwang sympathizers and that on a Saturday, everyone that's our actual civilian
[01:05:23] will have left at seven o'clock in the morning for the market.
[01:05:25] Now you can't make that claim about any group of civilians in the world that everyone's
[01:05:29] going to do something at the same time.
[01:05:33] Impossible that you could make that claim.
[01:05:38] Back to the book, ask later about intelligence indicating that no civilians would be left
[01:05:42] in the village at the time of the attack.
[01:05:43] Ram's Dell replied that the civilians went to market early in the morning because of the
[01:05:47] heat.
[01:05:50] They testified and appears in a similar vein in the civilian market.
[01:05:54] In a civilian population area there were several markets large markets where all the people
[01:05:58] would gather each day because they had no refrigeration or anything like it.
[01:06:04] With hindsight it appears naive even simple minded.
[01:06:08] Yet in 1968 this nugget of anthropological insight along with the corollary that everyone
[01:06:14] who was not at the market was Viet Kwang was deemed unchallengeable by Ram's Dell.
[01:06:20] It was ordered impeccable by Kutak and passed on unamended to the bitter men of Charlie
[01:06:25] Company seeking revenge for their losses.
[01:06:29] This is just a horrible situation.
[01:06:31] It's a horrible situation.
[01:06:32] I had situations like that occur with me where it was early my first deployment to Iraq
[01:06:41] where we got almost like a movie.
[01:06:44] We would get maps of a city area and there would be a red X on the target building.
[01:06:50] You're bad guys in this building.
[01:06:52] And I remember one time we went out we hit the building with the red X on it and we
[01:06:57] didn't find anything or it wasn't only or the people that we got out of there turned
[01:07:02] out to be not the person we were looking for and as we did further analysis we realized
[01:07:07] that the building was the wrong building.
[01:07:10] And after that I got very critical about okay who put the red X on this building.
[01:07:16] Tell me who did that and why they did it.
[01:07:18] I want to know I'm not just going off of you put a red X on a building doesn't mean anything
[01:07:21] to me.
[01:07:22] I want to know who did that and I had another situation where we went and hit a building
[01:07:30] where there was suspected bad guy we had intelligence on the sky was a finance year
[01:07:34] and had money and was given it to the insurgents and so we went and captured them and
[01:07:39] searched his house and you know blew his door off so we we caused impact to his house.
[01:07:48] And then when we got him back we after we talked to him we figured out this guy was not
[01:07:52] bad.
[01:07:53] And as I pulled the string on where the intelligence came from that eventually led
[01:07:59] somebody to put a red X on his house and described the guy and who he was I found out
[01:08:03] that it was actually he the guy owned a business and he had fired one of his employees
[01:08:08] and when he fired one of his employees well his employee went told the Americans hey
[01:08:13] this guy's a bad guy this guy's funding you know insurgents got a little disgruntled
[01:08:19] so all you had to do is dig in and find a little bit more about the information and you
[01:08:23] figured out it was a disgruntled employee so guys out there in the field right now when
[01:08:27] you're always questioning your intelligence nothing against the intelligence folks
[01:08:30] they're going to do the best they can but they're not the ones that are going to get
[01:08:32] the blood on their hands.
[01:08:34] So question the intelligence find out what the sources are find out where the information
[01:08:38] came from ask who drew that red X ask who said there's not going to be any villagers
[01:08:43] in the in the no civilians in the village after seven o'clock in the morning ask those
[01:08:48] questions.
[01:08:53] Meanwhile the losses these guys are continue to take casualties so they took was it
[01:08:59] three killed and twelve wounded and now they got sergeant Cox killed by a booby
[01:09:04] trap they got a dice and lost both legs Hendrickson's blinded suffered growing injuries
[01:09:10] and lost an arm in a leg.
[01:09:12] So there's continuing to take casualties and on top of the casualties that they're taking
[01:09:18] you're starting to get an escalation of behavior of negative behavior and here's an example
[01:09:23] of that back to the book a village you're passing on a bicycle was beaten up but managed
[01:09:27] to escape a woman working in the fields was shot when somebody shouted that she was
[01:09:31] carrying a weapon when the squad came closer they discovered she was unarmed and still alive
[01:09:38] they shot her again and kicked her body to a pulp somebody stole her ring.
[01:09:45] They were now close to their base and angry villagers stormed the camp and protest against
[01:09:50] the murder.
[01:09:51] Medina managed to hush it up no one was charged with any offense.
[01:09:55] Medina said later that the woman had been discovered with a detonator still in her hand.
[01:10:01] Kelly commented that Medina wasn't about to lose men just because they kicked a Vietnamese
[01:10:06] kid or killed a damn innocent woman he had to keep a combat effective unit.
[01:10:12] So now you've got clear cover up going on by the chain of command.
[01:10:16] Hey she had a detonator she now a detonator and it's very visible to see this downward
[01:10:24] spiral from a letter from Greg Olson who like I said he was the faithful Mormon kid and
[01:10:36] he writes a letter to his dad back in the States dear dad how's everything with you?
[01:10:40] I'm still here on the bridge we leave Saturday one of our platoons went out on a routine
[01:10:45] patrol today and came across a hundred and fifty five millimeter artillery round that
[01:10:49] was booby trap.
[01:10:51] They killed one man, boove the legs off two others and injured two more and it all turned
[01:10:57] out a bad day made even worse on their way back to to Doddy which is their the name
[01:11:03] of their camp.
[01:11:04] They saw woman working in the fields.
[01:11:07] They shot and wounded her then they kicked her to death and empty their magazines in
[01:11:11] her head.
[01:11:12] They slugged every little kid they came across wine gods named as this half to happen.
[01:11:18] They're all seemingly normal guys some were friends of mine for a while.
[01:11:25] They were wild like animals.
[01:11:28] It was murder and I'm ashamed of myself for not trying to do anything about it.
[01:11:32] This isn't the first time dad I've seen it many times before I don't know why I'm telling
[01:11:36] you this I guess I just want to get it all off my chest.
[01:11:40] My faith in fellow man is all shot to hell.
[01:11:44] I just want my time to pass and I just want to come home.
[01:11:47] I really believe as you do dad there's a cause behind all this and if it is God's will
[01:11:52] for me to go I would rather do it here than home on a freeway.
[01:11:58] Saturday we're going to be dropped by air in an NVA stronghold.
[01:12:03] I'm hoping I'll be able to get out of here for a few days to go to a conference.
[01:12:08] Don't expect any letters for me for a while but please keep writing them.
[01:12:12] I love and miss you and mom so much your son Greg.
[01:12:21] Again highlighted in there the normality of the guys and how they're starting to slide
[01:12:27] the clear it's obvious to Greg Olson that what's happening is wrong.
[01:12:33] And unfortunately he's not stepping up and saying anything he's not bringing it to the
[01:12:37] intention of anyone he's letting it happen.
[01:12:42] Back to the book with these most recent losses Charlie company was down to 105 men.
[01:12:48] Since arriving in Vietnam three months before they had suffered 28 casualties including
[01:12:52] five killed three of them in action.
[01:12:55] All the casualties come from mines, booby traps and snipers.
[01:13:01] They had never seen or encountered the enemy in any strength.
[01:13:06] Their had been no heavy contact.
[01:13:08] They were battle scarred without being battle hardened.
[01:13:17] So you can imagine again it's what my what's what my high school teacher told me.
[01:13:23] They're they're viewing.
[01:13:24] They're taking these casualties and it's very similar to Iraq and Afghanistan where I think
[01:13:28] in Iraq it was 75% of the casualties are from IEDs.
[01:13:33] There's no one to shoot at after an IED blows up oftentimes is nothing to shoot at.
[01:13:40] Now with those casualties with that viewpoint they're starting to prepare as I said
[01:13:49] for this this assault on me lie.
[01:13:54] And back to the book although no written record of the briefing survives the witnesses
[01:13:59] all agree on the general thrust of coup tax contribution this is the intelligence officer.
[01:14:04] The 48th LF battalion was dispersed throughout the area.
[01:14:09] But the latest intelligence the assembled officers were told suggested that VC headquarters
[01:14:14] and two companies totaling over 200 fighting men were located in me lie.
[01:14:22] The civilian population were all active sympathizers with the VC.
[01:14:28] By seven in the morning most non-combatants would have left the village for the market.
[01:14:35] So just to make that clear what we're expecting they're expecting to go in to me lie
[01:14:40] and find over 200 fighting men and all active sympathizers with the VC.
[01:14:50] Now they start to ask some questions like okay what at the at the task force level back
[01:14:57] to the book what was to happen to the village itself task force officers left the meeting
[01:15:00] with the clear impression that Barker had ordered the destruction of all houses, dwellings
[01:15:04] and livestock in the me lie area although there is some doubt as to whether this was a
[01:15:10] director or something that been assumed.
[01:15:13] Kutak recalled Barker saying that the village was to be destroyed.
[01:15:17] He wanted the area cleaned out he wanted it neutralized and he wanted the buildings knocked
[01:15:21] down.
[01:15:22] He wanted the hooches burned he wanted the tunnels filled and he wanted the livestock
[01:15:26] and chickens run off killed or destroyed.
[01:15:30] He wanted to neutralize the area.
[01:15:32] From Adina also those were Barker's clear instructions.
[01:15:39] And what was to happen to the civilians?
[01:15:41] There is nothing to suggest that Barker explicitly ordered the murder of ordinary people
[01:15:46] of me lie.
[01:15:48] But the previous failures of the task force and the demand for more aggression the intelligence
[01:15:53] picture of a community entirely controlled by the Viet Kong, the bland assumption that civilians
[01:15:58] would be gone to the market.
[01:16:00] The totally unjustified belief that innocent people had been warned to get out of the area.
[01:16:05] In other words the entire scorched earth concept of the operation planned to neutralize
[01:16:10] the area.
[01:16:12] Drove irresistibly to the conclusion that here was a free fire zone in which even the people
[01:16:19] were to be eliminated.
[01:16:25] Now that's the company commanders getting the brief from the battalion commander from the task
[01:16:33] force commander.
[01:16:34] That's the impression that they get.
[01:16:36] Now we start to get into your Chinese telephone game because now how does that get translated
[01:16:41] down the chain of command?
[01:16:42] And even with the battalion commander talking to the company commanders, there's it's not
[01:16:47] super solid what the actual orders were.
[01:16:50] It's not it's not super solid.
[01:16:51] No one's in a hey they said kill a woman until it's kind of implied well maybe he said
[01:16:55] he wanted everyone destroyed what does destroyed mean.
[01:17:00] So now we get to where Medina is talking to his troops and his subordinate leadership
[01:17:05] the company commander.
[01:17:08] Medina grabbed a shovel from a quarter ton trailer and drew a map of me lie for in the
[01:17:13] dirt at his feet as he described the coming engagement.
[01:17:18] Tomorrow he told them was Charlie company's chance to get even.
[01:17:24] Medina relayed what he had learned at Barker's briefing earlier in the afternoon the
[01:17:28] Vietcong the 48 Vietcong Battalion were in me lie with a strength between 250 and 280.
[01:17:35] So actually he just increased that number because the report that he was given was 200.
[01:17:39] Now he's saying between 250 and 280.
[01:17:43] This meant that Charlie company would be outnumbered more than 21 but they were not to worry
[01:17:47] because helicopter gunships would be on the American side.
[01:17:50] He told them to expect a hell of a good fight.
[01:17:54] He told them that all innocent civilians would have gone to the market.
[01:18:00] He's just amplifying what he was told.
[01:18:04] But what was going to happen to the village?
[01:18:07] I told them we had permission.
[01:18:13] It was a VC stronghold to burn down the houses to kill all the livestock to cut any
[01:18:19] of the crops that might feed the VC to cave the wells and destroy the village.
[01:18:25] And what was going to happen to the innocent civilians?
[01:18:29] Somebody at the briefing asked him, do we kill women and children?
[01:18:33] It was an astounding question that speaks volumes about the temper of the men but the fact
[01:18:37] that such a question was indeed asked is not disputed.
[01:18:41] Where testimony is divided is what Medina replied.
[01:18:45] My reply to that question was no, you do not kill women and children.
[01:18:49] You must use common sense.
[01:18:51] If they have a weapon and are trying to engage you, then you can shoot back but you must
[01:18:54] use common sense.
[01:18:57] But many of the men got a different message.
[01:19:00] This is Sergeant Hodges, right, recollection of the briefing.
[01:19:04] This was a time for us to get even.
[01:19:07] A time for us to settle the score, a time for revenge.
[01:19:12] When we can get revenge for our fallen comrades, the order we were given was to kill and destroy
[01:19:18] everything that was in the village.
[01:19:20] It was to kill the pigs, drop them in the wells, pollute the water supply, kill cut down
[01:19:25] the banana trees, burn the village, burn the hooches as we went through it.
[01:19:29] It was clearly explained that there were to be no prisoners.
[01:19:34] That order was given, the order that was given was to kill everyone in the village.
[01:19:39] Someone asked if that meant the women and children and the order was everyone in the village.
[01:19:45] Because those people in that village, the women, the kids, the old men were VC.
[01:19:51] They were Vietcong themselves or they were sympathetic to the Vietcong.
[01:19:55] They were not sympathetic to the American.
[01:19:58] It was quite clear that no one was to be spared in that village.
[01:20:05] So pretty clear what Sergeant Hodges thought.
[01:20:09] So Medina says no, I didn't tell him, I told him he had to use their common sense.
[01:20:12] If the shootin' at you, then you kill him.
[01:20:14] Hodges didn't hear that.
[01:20:15] Back to the book, Sergeant Hodges was not alone and his interpretation of Medina's briefing.
[01:20:20] Many senior NCOs left the meeting convinced that the order was to kill everyone.
[01:20:26] That Sergeant Bacon, we were to kill all Vietcong and all Vietcong sympathizers in the village.
[01:20:31] Sergeant West, it was a search and destroy mission, we were to kill everything.
[01:20:37] Staff Sergeant Fagan, kill everyone.
[01:20:40] Sergeant Cowan, to kill everything that was in the village.
[01:20:43] Inlisted men too, glimpse, La Martina Gonzalez, Lloyd, Parish, Moss later testified that
[01:20:49] this is what they heard.
[01:20:51] Flynn even remembered the question, someone asked, are we supposed to kill women and
[01:20:55] children and Medina replied, kill everything that moves?
[01:21:00] Harry Stanley said, Captain Medina told us that the intelligence and established that
[01:21:05] me, lie for, was completely enemy controlled.
[01:21:09] He described the formations we were to use following day and told us to carry extra ammunition.
[01:21:15] He ordered us to kill everything in the village.
[01:21:18] The men in my squad talked about amongst ourselves that night because the order to kill
[01:21:21] everything in the village was so unusual.
[01:21:24] We all agreed that Captain Medina meant for us to kill every man, woman, and child in the
[01:21:29] village.
[01:21:33] But not everyone agreed that Medina had ordered everyone in the village to be killed.
[01:21:37] Greg Olson, who's forboating letter to his father, had been posted only two days before,
[01:21:41] has a completely different recollection of the briefing.
[01:21:45] They're clearly absolutely wasn't in order to go in and slaughter everybody in that village
[01:21:49] and anybody that says so is a liar.
[01:21:52] Medina said that any villagers were to be rounded up and airlifted to refugee camps.
[01:21:57] That was specifically addressed in the meeting.
[01:21:59] If I thought I was going to get on a helicopter that morning with clear orders that
[01:22:02] I was going to slaughter every living, breathing, human being in that village, I'm sure
[01:22:07] to God it would have been so appalling and unthinkable.
[01:22:11] I mean, I'm not that stupid.
[01:22:13] I know they couldn't have forced me to do something like that.
[01:22:18] Others too denied there was any explicit order.
[01:22:21] He was like Medina's benediction, Michael Bernhardt said.
[01:22:25] He didn't actually say to kill every man, woman, and child in me lie.
[01:22:30] He stopped just sort of saying that.
[01:22:32] He gave every other indication that that's what he expected.
[01:22:38] Whatever Medina actually said, there can be no doubt about the impression he made to get
[01:22:43] the most of the men.
[01:22:46] To hurt pride, he offered satisfaction.
[01:22:50] To grieving soldiers, he offered a chance to strike back.
[01:22:54] To bidder and resentful men, he offered an end to the frustration.
[01:23:00] Medina let slip the dogs of war.
[01:23:05] Me lie for was thrown in the path of their vindictiveness and fury.
[01:23:11] Charlie Company was going to get it revenge.
[01:23:15] The task force would get its body count.
[01:23:18] This time there would be no mistake.
[01:23:29] So that's where that's the attitude that these guys roll into the operation with.
[01:23:40] And it is not the right attitude to have going into the situation because if KC haven't
[01:23:51] figured this out, yeah, the village that they're going into, there's no battalion of
[01:23:55] the Ackong fighters.
[01:23:57] There's no fighters at all.
[01:24:02] And here they start their attack.
[01:24:06] March 16th, 1968, 715 in the morning.
[01:24:13] Out in the fields of farmer frantically raised his hands by way of both greeting and to show
[01:24:19] he had no weapon.
[01:24:21] He was immediately felled by a burst from a machine gun.
[01:24:27] Along with the gunships, almost everyone in first and second Patuans was firing their weapons
[01:24:32] and now third Patuans was joining in.
[01:24:35] The moment of Vietnamese was spotted, Vali's of fire were loose off and the enemy fell wounded
[01:24:41] or dying.
[01:24:43] It was apparent to burn heart as it was to virtually everyone gathered there on the ground
[01:24:48] that they were receiving no return fire at all.
[01:24:52] There was no incoming.
[01:25:00] The workhold came across a hut which had been raked with bullets.
[01:25:04] Inside Burkhold discovered three children, a woman with a flesh wound inside an old man
[01:25:10] squatting down, hardly able to move.
[01:25:13] He had been seriously wounded in both legs.
[01:25:16] From six feet, Burkhold aimed his 45 caliber pistol and pulled the trigger causing the
[01:25:22] top of the man's head to fly off.
[01:25:25] He was a sight that would forever be etched in Maple's memory.
[01:25:31] Burkhold claimed to have shot the old man as an active mercy.
[01:25:40] Harry Stanley saw that the fleeing villagers were offering no resistance.
[01:25:45] His friend Alan Boyce who lived in New Jersey only a couple of miles from Maple's came
[01:25:49] up behind him with a Vietnamese farmer aged between 40 and 50 years in custody.
[01:25:55] He wore black pajamas and his shirt hung open so that Stanley could see his chest.
[01:26:01] Boyce pushed the man forward to where Stanley was standing beside the trail, suddenly and
[01:26:05] for no reason Boyce stabbed the man with the bayonet attached to the end of his rifle.
[01:26:11] He felt the ground grasping for breath.
[01:26:14] Boyce killed him and then grabbed another man being detained, shot him in the neck.
[01:26:19] And threw him into a well, lobbying an M26 grenade after him.
[01:26:24] That's the way you got to do it.
[01:26:26] He told Simpson.
[01:26:31] Robert Lee, the platoon medic, joined in the frenzy but confined his efforts to slaughtering
[01:26:35] animals.
[01:26:36] He killed a cow that had been injured.
[01:26:38] Lee was from a farming community and didn't want to see the beast suffer.
[01:26:43] Up front, he in the platoon sergeant Isaiah Cowan could see women and children being slain.
[01:26:48] They were stunned by what was happening all around them.
[01:26:51] The further they went into the village, the more bodies they found.
[01:26:57] To conty and he's another guy, conty, the man appeared all psyched up when they landed.
[01:27:02] The shooting once a began, created almost a chain reaction.
[01:27:06] He joined in without killing anyone.
[01:27:08] Inside the village, his comrades appeared out of control.
[01:27:12] Families huddled together for safety and houses and yards and in bunkers only to be mown
[01:27:17] down with automatic weapon fire or blown apart by fragmentation grenades.
[01:27:22] Women and children were pushed into bunkers and grenades thrown after them.
[01:27:28] At one point wandering off on his own, conty found a woman aged about 20 with a four-year-old
[01:27:33] child.
[01:27:35] He forced her to perform oral sex on him while he held a gun at the child's head, threatening
[01:27:40] to kill it.
[01:27:45] Half a dozen people from both platoons then witnessed a stocky blonde-haired second platoon
[01:27:51] soldier from Kansas City called Gary Rochovitz become hysterical when troops from first
[01:27:56] platoon were walking a small group of villagers back for screening.
[01:28:00] Rochovitz aged 25 was older than most of the grunts in the company.
[01:28:04] Standing almost six feet tall and weighing close to 230 pounds, he made a surprise grab for
[01:28:09] Roy Woods M-16 and demanded the weapon as a trade for his M-79 but Wood wasn't having any.
[01:28:16] Don't turn them over to the company, Rochovitz peeled to those gathered there, killed them.
[01:28:21] Wood, who was physically by far as the smaller of the two men, held tightly onto his
[01:28:25] rifle.
[01:28:26] Rochovitz then snatched a hold of Bernardo Simpson's M-16, turned in shot of Vietnamese farmer
[01:28:32] in the head.
[01:28:34] Wood began feeling sick at the side of the man's brain spilling on the ground as he turned away.
[01:28:40] Rochovitz shot two more peasants in the head before handing the gun back to Simpson.
[01:28:47] In the northern position of the village second platoon had also run berserk.
[01:28:54] Employing the routine combat assault technique used by Kali, Stephen Brooksmen also approached
[01:28:59] line of breast and three squads.
[01:29:02] During as they moved they came to dwellings and yelled out lie-day and Vietnamese for come
[01:29:06] here.
[01:29:08] The villagers at the villagers sheltering inside, homemade shelters or bunkers.
[01:29:15] Fragmentation grenades were tossed inside.
[01:29:17] Homes were sprayed with automatic fire.
[01:29:20] Children aged six or seven came toward them with their hands out stretch saying chop chop.
[01:29:25] They asked for food and candy they had received from other American soldiers on the two
[01:29:29] previous visits to the village.
[01:29:32] The soldiers skythed them down.
[01:29:35] After one group of Vietnamese were killed in front of a hot, the first squad leader, Sergeant
[01:29:40] Kenneth Sheel began telling his men that he didn't like what they were doing but that they
[01:29:45] had to obey orders.
[01:29:48] The villagers had to huddled together for safety but the Americans poured fire into them,
[01:29:52] tearing their bodies apart.
[01:29:54] One man firing a machine gun at random, other using M16's on automatic.
[01:30:05] Brooks radio operator Dean Fields witnessed for not a sense in shoot a woman with a baby
[01:30:09] from a distance of about 25 meters.
[01:30:12] Her arm was shot almost completely off at the wrist.
[01:30:15] All that it held, all that held it on was a fragile piece of flesh.
[01:30:20] She ran into a hooch and someone yelled in order for her and the baby to be killed.
[01:30:27] Max Hudson, the weapon squad leader formed a machine gun team with Floyd Wright as soon
[01:30:31] as they passed the tree line, they were confronted less than 30 feet away by a middle-aged
[01:30:36] woman climbing out of a tunnel using both hands.
[01:30:39] She was unarmed but they opened fire and she fell back into the tunnel.
[01:30:43] Hudson and Wright took turns on the machine gun whenever they came across any Vietnamese
[01:30:47] they opened fire, killing them.
[01:30:50] Hudson could see people firing all around him.
[01:30:52] The whole scene was one of chaos and confusion with people moving, yelling and shouting.
[01:30:59] Some of the troops were afraid they would be shot by their own men.
[01:31:08] In the clearing near a small couch, a group of 15 feet in a maze had been gathered for women
[01:31:14] and their 30s, three in their 50s, three girls in their late teens and five children ages
[01:31:19] between three and 14.
[01:31:22] Standing around were seven or eight soldiers from different squads including Huto, Torres
[01:31:26] and Rochovats.
[01:31:28] Gonzalez heard someone yell that if anyone was behind the Vietnamese to take cover because
[01:31:32] they were going to open fire.
[01:31:34] A shot rang out on a bullet penetrated the head of a young child being carried by its mother,
[01:31:40] blowing out the back of its skull.
[01:31:43] Others began firing until the entire group was dead.
[01:31:48] Gonzalez could stand no more, he turned away and vomited.
[01:31:52] Few words were spoken until someone said, let's move out.
[01:31:58] A soldier's stooping over a tunnel yelled for the occupants to come out.
[01:32:02] Gonzalez moved closer and could hear people responding as if they were about to comply.
[01:32:06] Whereupon the soldier threw in a grenade and yelled fire in the hole, telling everyone to stand
[01:32:12] clear.
[01:32:15] Kelly had been called twice that morning on the radio by an anxious Medina.
[01:32:22] What is happening over there?
[01:32:23] Medina demanded to know, challenging the slow progress of the first platoon.
[01:32:29] He wanted Kelly to get his men back online and keep moving.
[01:32:33] This made the young platoon commander nervous throughout his time with the company he had
[01:32:38] frequently been made the butt of Medina's jokes.
[01:32:41] Medina knew Kelly couldn't command the respect of his men.
[01:32:44] Now, under pressure, Kelly replied that large groups of civilians had gathered and were
[01:32:49] slowing the platoon down.
[01:32:52] Never one to accept excuses, Medina told Kelly simply to get rid of them.
[01:32:57] So when Kelly came across, Miedlo and Kanti in the clearing and said, take care of them,
[01:33:02] his intention was clear.
[01:33:04] It was his way of getting Medina off his back.
[01:33:08] He thought nothing of the implications of Kelly's request when he simply replied, okay.
[01:33:14] Like many in the company, he regarded the man as a joke and resented cat the way Kelly tried
[01:33:19] to suck up to the men one minute by calling them by their first names and then shouted
[01:33:23] and bald at them the next.
[01:33:26] Kanti felt his platoon commander had absolutely no leadership ability.
[01:33:31] Among the squatting Vietnamese were 10 to 15 men with beards and 10 women, women, as well
[01:33:37] as a handful of very elderly gray-haired women who could hardly walk.
[01:33:41] The rest were children of all ages from babies up to early teens.
[01:33:48] Kelly, who was carrying a band-alir of ammunition on one shoulder, said, I thought I told you
[01:33:53] to take care of them.
[01:33:55] Miedlo responded, somewhat naively, we are.
[01:33:59] We're watching over them.
[01:34:02] No reposted, Kelly.
[01:34:04] I want them killed.
[01:34:05] He moved over to where Kanti was standing beside Miedlo.
[01:34:10] We'll get online and fire into them.
[01:34:14] Kanti and Miedlo look each other and backed off, neither of them wanting a part in what
[01:34:18] was about to happen.
[01:34:20] Kelly, losing his temper, back in them, toward him, come here.
[01:34:24] Come on, we'll line them up and we'll kill them.
[01:34:27] Kanti searching for an excuse pointed out that he was carrying a grenade launcher and he didn't
[01:34:31] want a way to ammunition.
[01:34:33] Perhaps it could keep guard over by the tree-line in case anyone tried to get away.
[01:34:36] He suggested.
[01:34:38] Kelly turned to Miedlo.
[01:34:41] Fire when I say, fire.
[01:34:45] Kanti stood behind them as Cally and Miedlo standing side by side blazed away.
[01:34:50] They stood only ten feet from their hapless victims, changing magazines from time to time.
[01:34:55] The Vietnamese screamed, yelled, and tried to get up.
[01:35:00] He was pure carnage as heads were shot off along with limbs, the fleshier body parts
[01:35:05] were ripped to shreds.
[01:35:08] Miedlo had taken 23 fully loaded magazines for his M16 in his pack when they had left
[01:35:13] thoughty.
[01:35:14] He fired in a spring motion.
[01:35:17] He noticed one man dressed in red, followed that as he fired the rifle on automatic until
[01:35:22] the magazine was exhausted.
[01:35:24] Then he reloaded.
[01:35:26] He switched to semi-automatic fire and loaded the third magazine.
[01:35:31] After a minute or so Miedlo couldn't continue.
[01:35:35] Tears flooded down his cheeks.
[01:35:39] He turned, stuck his rifle in Kanti's hand and said, you shoot them.
[01:35:43] Kanti pushed the weapon back.
[01:35:45] If they are going to be killed, I'm not going to do it.
[01:35:48] Let him do it.
[01:35:49] He said pointing a Cally by this time Kanti could see only a few children were left standing.
[01:35:56] Mothers had thrown themselves on top of the young ones in the last desperate bid to protect
[01:36:01] them from bullets raining down on them.
[01:36:04] The children were trying to stand up.
[01:36:07] Cally opened fire again, killing them one by one.
[01:36:12] Kanti swore at him.
[01:36:14] Finally, when it appeared to be all over, Cally calmly turned and said, okay, let's go.
[01:36:23] Only someone yelled out that more Vietnamese, five women and six children, some distance
[01:36:27] away were making a break for the tree line.
[01:36:31] Cally burst out, get them, get them, kill them.
[01:36:37] Miedlo's face was flushed.
[01:36:40] His eyes were still full of tears when he arrived with greysick at the ditch site and found
[01:36:46] Cally sitting down.
[01:36:48] We've got another job to do.
[01:36:50] He said, looking up them.
[01:36:53] About 10 members of the platoon were guarding 40 to 50 Vietnamese babies, crying and crawling
[01:36:58] around.
[01:36:59] James Dursey, a heavy set Irish Italian from Brooklyn, was looking at a man in white
[01:37:05] robes with a go-tbe beard whom he took to be a Buddhist monk praying over an elderly woman.
[01:37:11] She was seriously ill and had been carried through the village on a narrow wooden platform
[01:37:14] which the Vietnamese used as a bed.
[01:37:17] Cally was now one of his feet.
[01:37:19] Cally was standing up here on the scene and tried to question the monk who was crying and
[01:37:22] bowing as he tried to make himself understood.
[01:37:26] Cally could not understand him.
[01:37:28] Greasick, who had attended Vietnamese language classes in Hawaii, tried more questions and
[01:37:33] got nowhere.
[01:37:35] Cally was getting more and more impatient.
[01:37:38] Where had the Viet Cong gone?
[01:37:40] Where were the weapons?
[01:37:41] Where were the NVA?
[01:37:43] When the man shook his head, Cally struck him in the mouth with his rifle but.
[01:37:47] Just then a child aged about two years and parted from its mother managed to crawl up to
[01:37:52] the top of the ditch.
[01:37:54] Dursey watched horrified as Cally picked up the child, shoved it back down the slope and
[01:37:59] shot it before returning to question the monk.
[01:38:02] The villagers pleaded for the holy man's life.
[01:38:05] Stanley asked the bearded man the same questions in Vietnamese that Cally was asking an
[01:38:09] English and effort to defuse the situation.
[01:38:13] The monk's vainly replied that there were no North Vietnamese soldiers in the village.
[01:38:18] There were no weapons.
[01:38:21] Stanley translated these replies immediately Cally grabbed the monk, pulled him round, hurled
[01:38:27] him into the patty and opened fire with me those N16.
[01:38:31] As the elderly mamasan lying prostrate tried to get up, she too was killed.
[01:38:41] Her Vietnamese shepherded by soldiers were arriving on the scene and Cally indicated a
[01:38:46] me low in voice he wanted everyone killed.
[01:38:49] He began pushing peasants into the irrigation channel.
[01:38:52] Others joined in using their rifle butts to shove wailing Vietnamese down the sleep steep
[01:38:57] slope.
[01:38:59] Some jumped in by themselves, others sat down on the edge, moaning and crying, clearly aware
[01:39:06] that disaster was imminent.
[01:39:09] It was a pitiful sight.
[01:39:11] Until the time all the firing started, Herbert Carter had been kneeling beside Dersie, quietly
[01:39:17] playing with a couple of children.
[01:39:20] Dersie said incredulously, I think Cally wants them all killed.
[01:39:24] Carter said, oh no.
[01:39:28] He can send me to jail, but I'm not going to kill anybody said Dersie, beginning to move
[01:39:31] away and wondering what would happen to him for refusing to fire.
[01:39:35] Dersie was another one who liked to play with the children.
[01:39:39] Earlier in the day he'd been devastated after he opened fire and killed someone running
[01:39:42] from the village.
[01:39:43] It turned out to be a woman carrying a baby in Dersie who was horrified and ashamed by what
[01:39:47] he had done.
[01:39:49] Olson had seen he was really cut up about it.
[01:39:52] A woman standing next to Robert Maples showed him a bullet wound in her left arm.
[01:39:57] He felt helpless.
[01:39:58] There was nothing he could do for her.
[01:40:01] Cally shoved her in the ditch and told Maples, load your machine gun and shoot these people.
[01:40:07] Maples shook his head and replied, I'm not going to do that.
[01:40:10] Cally turned his M16 on Maples as if to shoot him then and there.
[01:40:14] Maples was surprised and relieved when some of the other soldiers interposed to protect him.
[01:40:19] Cally backed off.
[01:40:22] Seconds later, he and meed low began firing.
[01:40:26] A machine gun opened up and one of the squad leaders tried to usher the man into lines so
[01:40:31] they could all fire simultaneously.
[01:40:34] Mercy stood completely frozen, watching disbelievingly as the Vietnamese tried frantically
[01:40:39] to hide under one another, mothers protecting babies.
[01:40:45] Screaming at Dersie above the sounds of M16 on full automatic, meed low continued pouring
[01:40:50] shells into the ditch.
[01:40:53] Crying hysterically once more, he stopped for a second.
[01:40:56] Why are you firing?
[01:40:57] He pleaded with Dersie.
[01:40:59] Fire, why don't you fire?
[01:41:01] The onlookers saw remnants of shredded human beings, hundreds of pieces of flesh and bone
[01:41:07] flying up in the air as the shallower ofine was repeatedly sprayed with bullets.
[01:41:14] Magazine after magazine was reloaded during the mass execution.
[01:41:26] And as all this horrendous scene is unfolding, there is actually a photographer there,
[01:41:39] military photographer, himhaberlay, and he's taking pictures.
[01:41:50] And he was almost like he was just instinctively shooting, he kind of detached himself.
[01:41:59] And here's what he said.
[01:42:00] I knew it was something that shouldn't be happening, but yet I was part of it.
[01:42:05] I think I was in a kind of a days from seeing all these shootings and not seeing any return
[01:42:09] fire yet the killing kept going on.
[01:42:13] The Americans were rounding up the people and shooting them not taking any prisoners.
[01:42:17] I was completely different to my concept of what war is all about.
[01:42:21] I kept taking pictures.
[01:42:22] That was my job as a photographer to take pictures.
[01:42:24] A normal reaction I have with a camera just picking up and keep on shooting, trying to capture
[01:42:30] what is happening around me.
[01:42:33] I feel sometimes that the camera did take over during the operation.
[01:42:37] I put it up to my eye, took a shot, put it down, nothing was composed, nothing was
[01:42:41] pre-thought, just a normal reaction of a photographer.
[01:42:46] I was part of it.
[01:42:47] Everyone who is there was part of it and that includes the general and the colonel flying
[01:42:51] above and their helicopters, they're all part of it.
[01:42:56] We all were just a one big group.
[01:43:02] Now as all this is happening, you've got Medina who's the again the company commander.
[01:43:09] He's sort of coming up from the rear.
[01:43:13] And he's starting to assess what he's seeing.
[01:43:17] Back to the book, while Medina might not have seen mass executions taking place, the evidence
[01:43:21] of his own eyes told him what everyone else could see that some kind of massacre had occurred.
[01:43:28] In fact, it was worse than a massacre.
[01:43:31] Too many of Medina's men were taking sword pleasure in sadistic behavior.
[01:43:37] People became double veterans, GI slang for the dubious honor of raping a woman and then
[01:43:44] murdering her.
[01:43:47] Many women were raped and solemnized, mutilated and had their vaginas ripped open with knives
[01:43:53] or bayonets.
[01:43:56] One woman was killed when the muzzle of a rifle barrel was inserted into her vagina and
[01:44:00] the trigger was pulled.
[01:44:04] Others repeatedly stabbed their victims, cut off limbs, sometimes beheaded them.
[01:44:11] Some were scout, others had their tongues cut out or their throat slit or both.
[01:44:18] Tommy Lee Moss saw Vietnamese placed their hands together and bowed agreed Americans,
[01:44:23] only to be beaten with fists and tortured club with rifles and stabbed in the back with bayonets.
[01:44:30] Some faggin saw bodies which had been shot in the head at point blank range.
[01:44:34] He could tell because the penetration of an M16 round created a shockwave inside the skull
[01:44:39] forcing the brain completely out.
[01:44:43] Other victims were mutilated with the signature C company or the shape of an ace of spades
[01:44:48] carved into the chest.
[01:44:51] Faggin figured this had been done as a warning to the superstitious Vietnamese.
[01:44:54] Those widely believed that they regard the ace of spades as a sign of bad luck.
[01:45:01] Troops from all three platoons cleared out one and mindless acts of brutality.
[01:45:07] The second platoon were already amongst the most notorious rapists in Charlie Company,
[01:45:13] even the platoon commander joined in on occasions.
[01:45:19] The poshivets forced the women to undress with the intention of having sex with all of them.
[01:45:26] If they didn't strip, he said he was going to shoot them.
[01:45:28] He singled out one woman telling her to boom boom him.
[01:45:32] She became hysterical and the other women panicked yelling and screaming and begging for
[01:45:36] mercy, rushivets decided to let them have it.
[01:45:41] He fired several rounds and killed them all.
[01:45:45] And now we got hobbley again, he's the photographer and this is what he's witnessing.
[01:45:50] Just as soon as I turned away, I heard firing.
[01:45:52] I saw people drop.
[01:45:54] They started falling on top of each other, one on top of another.
[01:45:58] I just kept walking.
[01:45:59] I did not pay attention to who did it.
[01:46:01] By that time I knew what the score was, it wasn't atrocity.
[01:46:05] I felt I wanted to do something to stop this as though as we were going through the village,
[01:46:09] I asked some soldiers, why?
[01:46:12] They more or less shrugged their soldiers and kept on with the killing.
[01:46:16] It was like they were fixed on one thing, searching destroy, and that meant killing civilians.
[01:46:23] I noticed this one small boy had been shot in the foot.
[01:46:26] Part of the foot was torn off, he was walking towards a group of bodies looking for his mother.
[01:46:31] I put up my camera up to my eye.
[01:46:34] I was going to take a photograph.
[01:46:37] I didn't notice a GI down beside me with a Zem16 rifle pointed at the child.
[01:46:43] Then suddenly I heard the crack and through the viewfinder I saw this child flip over
[01:46:47] on top of the pile of bodies.
[01:46:51] The GI just stood up and walked away.
[01:46:55] No remorse, nothing.
[01:46:58] The other soldiers had a cold reaction.
[01:47:00] They were staring off into space like it was in every day thing.
[01:47:04] They felt they had to do it and they did it.
[01:47:08] That was their job.
[01:47:10] It was weird just a shrug of the shoulder, no emotional reaction.
[01:47:17] Now above this horror, you had helicopters that were flying around.
[01:47:26] Some of them were gunships, some of them were there to pick people up, drop people off,
[01:47:31] some of them were command and control helicopters where some senior leadership was flying
[01:47:36] around, trying to observe the battles that took place.
[01:47:40] We do end up with a real hero here.
[01:47:45] A hero, that's a helicopter pilot.
[01:47:53] His name is Hugh Klauer's Thompson Jr.
[01:48:00] He's flying around and I'll go to the book.
[01:48:04] Thompson marked several wounded people on the ground with green smoke, a signal that they
[01:48:08] needed help.
[01:48:10] Returning to the me lie area, about 9 a.m.
[01:48:15] After the first refueling Thompson, mealy noticed that people who were previously injured
[01:48:19] were now dead.
[01:48:21] There were groups of bodies as well as many dead water buffalo.
[01:48:24] Over the radio he warned the gunships to fire only when they could positively identify
[01:48:28] enemy target.
[01:48:30] They had good visibility as they hovered sometimes only four feet, five feet off the ground.
[01:48:36] Gunner Lawrence Colburn in the doorway didn't want to look at the corpses.
[01:48:42] Out in the patty field beside a dike, 200 meters south of the village they watched a small
[01:48:48] group of soldiers approaching injured woman of age 20.
[01:48:52] Thompson had marked her with smoke.
[01:48:54] They were flying close enough for Colburn to look at her face as she lay half in and
[01:48:57] half out of the dike.
[01:48:59] She made a fievel gesture with her hand and was obviously a need of help.
[01:49:04] Thompson put the aircraft into a standstill hover only a few feet off the ground.
[01:49:08] The high gunship told the ground forces on the radio, you have a wounded over where the
[01:49:12] bubble is hovering.
[01:49:15] Thompson and his crew watched as an infantry officer wearing captains bars on his helmet,
[01:49:20] came up to the woman, prodder with his foot, and then killed her.
[01:49:25] Who's in the helicopter could hardly believe what they were seeing.
[01:49:30] Minutes later, over on the eastern side of the village they saw dozens of bodies in the
[01:49:33] air, deigation ditch.
[01:49:36] Movements from the ditch convinced them there were people still alive.
[01:49:40] Not far away a group of infantry men taking a cigarette break sat around on the ground and
[01:49:44] relaxed, taking off their steel pots.
[01:49:48] It was obvious there was no firefight taking place.
[01:49:53] So now what happens is Thompson, he's starting to get, he's starting to be totally disturbed
[01:50:00] by what he's seen down there.
[01:50:01] So he lands the helicopter and gets out of the helicopter and he goes over and talks to a
[01:50:07] young infantry officer.
[01:50:09] A young infantry officer came up and Thompson questioned him about what was happening on
[01:50:13] the ground.
[01:50:14] The officer said that it was none of his business because he was in charge of the ground
[01:50:18] troops.
[01:50:19] Several members of Kelly's platoon observed Thompson's intervention.
[01:50:23] Kelly had gone to speak with the bubble helicopter pilot.
[01:50:26] Stanley overheard Kelly telling sledge forward sledge afterward that the pilot hadn't
[01:50:31] liked what he was taking place.
[01:50:34] He didn't like the way I'm running the show, but I'm the boss here.
[01:50:38] Olson, who wanted no part in the executions at the irrigation ditch, had moved 150 meters
[01:50:43] out to the patty field to set up a perimeter of defense.
[01:50:47] He saw the pilot angrily shaking his arms and just circulating.
[01:50:51] He frustrated Thompson lifted off again in circled area for a few minutes.
[01:50:56] Almost as soon as he took off, his worst fears were confirmed.
[01:51:01] Andraida reported the sergeant was now shooting the people in the ditch.
[01:51:05] Thompson began thinking about what the Nazis had done in the last war, marching people to
[01:51:09] a ditch and blowing them away.
[01:51:11] Furious with himself and everybody else he finally snapped.
[01:51:15] He flew over the northeast corner of the village and spotted a group of about 10 civilians
[01:51:20] including children running towards a homemade bomb shelter.
[01:51:24] Pursuing them were a group of from second-paltoon returning to the village from their murderous
[01:51:28] expedition.
[01:51:30] Based on all he had seen in the village that morning it was obvious to Thompson what
[01:51:33] would happen when the troops got to the fleeing civilians.
[01:51:37] He landed his aircraft between the villagers and the soldiers and radioed the gunships he needed
[01:51:42] help.
[01:51:43] Screaming to his crew that he had to get the people out of the bunker he issued an instruction
[01:51:47] that be, be wielded Colburn.
[01:51:50] If the Americans began shooting on the villagers Thompson said Colburn would turn his machine
[01:51:54] gun on the Americans, open up on him, blow him away Thompson urged him.
[01:51:59] Colburn turned his gun around to face the G.I.s though he was unsure whether he would be
[01:52:03] able to open fire on his own men.
[01:52:06] Concerned for their own safety Colburn wasn't sure it was a good idea to land in the middle
[01:52:10] of a combat zone.
[01:52:12] The pilot confronted the lieutenant in charge Stephen Brooks.
[01:52:17] He said he wanted to help get the peasants out of the bunker, Brooks told him the only
[01:52:21] way to do that was with hand grenades.
[01:52:23] Thompson shouted that he would personally get them out and told Lieutenant to stay put.
[01:52:28] With that he went across the bunker and genuinely coaxed the civilians to come out.
[01:52:33] Crew members in the gunships overhead heard Thompson announce over the radio that an old man
[01:52:39] was sitting in the path of the troops near the door of a small bomb shelter.
[01:52:43] Thompson's voice was choking with emotion.
[01:52:46] The swarm of senators, cursed and pleaded with the arrow crew to come down and help rescue
[01:52:51] civilians.
[01:52:52] One pilot initially queried at the request.
[01:52:55] Thompson threatened that if the infantry opened fire on the civilians his machine
[01:52:59] gunner would turn his guns on the Americans.
[01:53:03] Danny Millions a war officer on the low gunship realized the delicate nature of the drama
[01:53:08] unfolding below and knowing that Thompson couldn't talk directly with the ground troops
[01:53:13] radio the high gunship to tell the infantry to stop killing.
[01:53:17] Millions and Brian living in another pilot landed their ships and flew the Vietnamese
[01:53:22] two men, two women and five or six children four miles away to the safety of the road
[01:53:28] which ran west.
[01:53:32] I mean this you can't get any more drama than that.
[01:53:37] And eventually Thompson gets back to base and I'll go to the book.
[01:53:46] They arrived back at Doddy at about 11 a.m.
[01:53:49] Thompson got out of the aircraft and threw his helmet on the ground.
[01:53:53] He cold his section leader what had happened and when Millions and Livingston landed
[01:53:57] they confirmed it.
[01:53:59] A group of them sought out their company commander, major Fred Watky in the aviation sections
[01:54:05] operation van.
[01:54:07] They told him everything they had seen.
[01:54:09] Watky walked up the hill to the low ceiling 10 of the tactical operation center and passed
[01:54:13] the information on the barker.
[01:54:15] He in turn quickly got on the radio to his executive officer, major Charles Calhoun who
[01:54:20] was flying in a helicopter over the battle zone.
[01:54:23] Calhoun was instructed to find out what was happening and get it stopped.
[01:54:28] There had been allegations that civilians had been shot.
[01:54:31] The doctor wanted his insurance from a dean of that nothing of this kind was happening.
[01:54:37] The order went out to Charlie Company to cease fire and they did.
[01:54:49] And almost as quickly as it started it stopped.
[01:54:59] It shows you that this whole time when all this horror was taking place.
[01:55:12] Anybody could have stopped it.
[01:55:14] Had they stepped up and said something and spoke.
[01:55:21] Now it might have been hard for someone that's a junior and listed guy that's 18 years
[01:55:24] old that thinks he's carrying out the mission but any of those people in the leadership
[01:55:26] position.
[01:55:29] And even some of the folks at work leadership position if you're there and you start to
[01:55:34] say no this isn't going to be happening.
[01:55:37] I mean and you did or some guys on the ground that resisted but no one was able to actually
[01:55:42] stop it.
[01:55:44] And it's one of those bizarre things when I hear that all it took was that order to see
[01:55:50] fire and okay well stop shooting.
[01:55:54] It shows you the power of leadership and the responsibility of leadership.
[01:56:08] Now as this story goes forward the first thing that happens is a big cover up and they
[01:56:16] talk about this operation like it was just a great victory over the VC and in fact a message
[01:56:23] I'm going to the book here a message of congratulations for the pink feel operation.
[01:56:27] That's what the operation is called pink feel was received from general West Moreland
[01:56:31] himself in a post-grip that brigade commander described the me lie operation as having
[01:56:40] been an outstanding success.
[01:56:42] The praise worthy role of units in the eleventh infantry brigade directly reflects your
[01:56:47] expert guidance leadership and devotion to duty he wrote to Medina copying the memo to
[01:56:53] Barker.
[01:56:55] The quick response and professionalism displayed during this action has enhanced the brigade's
[01:57:00] image in the eyes of higher commands.
[01:57:05] So there you go.
[01:57:08] Within a few hours the army's PR machine was pumping out a colorful image of daring
[01:57:13] due by the American troops.
[01:57:17] The Mac V communique issued later the same day from Saigon gave brief details the operation
[01:57:23] announcing that American division forces had killed 128 enemy six miles northeast of
[01:57:30] Quining City, US troops surrounded reds, kill 128.
[01:57:37] There's another headline that went out that said TF Barker crushes enemy stronghold.
[01:57:43] That attitude continues now Barker, the battalion commander, ends up being killed before
[01:57:52] he's killed his he releases his assessment of the operation and this is what he starts
[01:57:59] as you see cover up written all over this.
[01:58:02] Here's Barker's official report.
[01:58:07] This operation was well planned, well executed and successful.
[01:58:10] Only casualties were light and the enemy suffered heavily.
[01:58:14] On this operation the civilian population supporting the VC in the area numbered approximately
[01:58:18] 200.
[01:58:20] This created a problem in population control and medical care of those civilians caught in
[01:58:24] the fire of opposing forces.
[01:58:26] However the infantry unit on the ground and helicopters were able to assist civilians and
[01:58:30] leaving the area and in caring for and or evacuating the wounded.
[01:58:35] This lies just lies another another piece.
[01:58:43] Barker was genuinely concerned that civilians be protected in future operations and there's
[01:58:48] no way he could have known the dreadful atrocity being committed by Charlie Company
[01:58:52] at the time it was happening but it's clear he quickly became part of the cover up.
[01:58:58] He knew civilians had died and a lot of them.
[01:59:03] Now so this starts to gain a little bit of traction people are starting to talk about
[01:59:08] there's rumors of even though these big nice headlines come out and the official report
[01:59:14] comes out but people start to know about it.
[01:59:17] And so they start sending Charlie Company and all kinds of crazy long term operations
[01:59:21] out in the field and they start to feel like well good to look.
[01:59:26] GIs felt they were being sent out in the hopes that they all might be killed.
[01:59:32] They tried to bury us out there when we're bitterly remembered.
[01:59:36] After me lie we went out in the field for three months straight.
[01:59:41] We never came back into the villages.
[01:59:42] Our trips to the base camps were few and far between.
[01:59:45] They had a problem and dealt with us by trying to hide out and hide out in the jungle hoping
[01:59:50] we'd all get killed but we didn't.
[01:59:59] So a guy, like I said people are talking about it there's rumors about it and there's
[02:00:05] a guy named Rightenauer who checks in to Charlie Company and he starts here in stories.
[02:00:14] He starts here in stories.
[02:00:15] He starts they start telling them they start talking and this is why you can't ever cover
[02:00:18] anything up.
[02:00:19] This is why cover up's never worked.
[02:00:21] Never trying to cover anything up because it's going to come out.
[02:00:24] It's going to come out.
[02:00:25] If you try and cover something up it's going to come out.
[02:00:27] That's the way it works.
[02:00:29] So this guy, right now, after he hears enough and he talks to all these different people
[02:00:36] that are more involved and they tell him what they did and what went down and he kind of
[02:00:41] gathers all that information.
[02:00:44] Here we go back to the book.
[02:00:47] Rightenauer, he writes a letter.
[02:00:48] He writes a letter that explains what he had learned, what he'd found out.
[02:00:53] Here we go right now, we're posted the letter on April 2nd, 1969 to you doll and 30 prominent
[02:01:00] men in Washington DC including President Nixon, the Secretary of Defense, Melvin Laird,
[02:01:07] the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Edward Kennedy, Barry Goldwater, Eugene McCarthy
[02:01:11] and William Fulbright.
[02:01:14] He sent the letters a registered mail thinking that staff opening them would be bound to
[02:01:17] take the comments to contents more seriously.
[02:01:20] And here's a little excerpt from the letter, gentlemen, it was in late April 1968 that
[02:01:27] I first heard of Pinkville and what allegedly happened there.
[02:01:32] I received that first report with some skepticism but in the following months I was
[02:01:37] to hear similar stories from such a wide variety of people that it became impossible for
[02:01:42] me to disbelieve that something rather dark and bloody did indeed occur sometime in March
[02:01:48] 1968 in a village called Pinkville in the Republic of Vietnam.
[02:01:59] So that's how the story breaks.
[02:02:01] They start to investigate it.
[02:02:04] Within the Pentagon, they start to investigate this great, this book is great, goes into
[02:02:08] a ton of detail on what that's like, how that takes place.
[02:02:12] The people that are running it and there's good, honest, solid army leadership that says,
[02:02:19] oh no, we're going to find out what happened and we're going to do something about it.
[02:02:24] So the cover up isn't throughout the chain of commanders, people that try and put a stop
[02:02:28] to it.
[02:02:29] Now the other thing that turns very interesting on this is obviously when it hits the public.
[02:02:38] And one of the most shocking impacts to the public took place on television.
[02:02:45] And if you remember at this time, and I don't know if this was like for you because you're
[02:02:49] a little bit younger than me, but when I was a kid, we had three TV channels.
[02:02:54] There was no 57 or 147 or 1000 TV channels.
[02:02:59] There was no internet.
[02:03:01] We didn't really, there wasn't really radio shows anymore.
[02:03:03] So if the family was going to do something at night at six o'clock at night or seven o'clock
[02:03:07] at night together after dinner, there was a good chance they were going to sit down and watch TV.
[02:03:12] And now you go back this 1969.
[02:03:14] So it's even more focused on television.
[02:03:18] And so what happens is this story breaks on TV with an interview and I'll go to the
[02:03:25] book with me, those confession.
[02:03:29] Television was for most Americans, quintessentially a medium of entertainment.
[02:03:34] The lead-lo's confession was truly an extraordinary departure from the vapid diet of soap
[02:03:39] operas comedy programs and quiz shows.
[02:03:43] News, however, was important to American audiences.
[02:03:46] Walter Kronkite was a national institution.
[02:03:49] Meadlo's interview was delivered virtually without warning to an audience of millions of
[02:03:54] parents and children waiting excitedly for news of Apollo 12's astronauts return from
[02:04:00] the moon and the splash down into the Pacific Ocean.
[02:04:04] That's what everyone thinks that's what they're going to say.
[02:04:05] Oh, let's get the kids to watch the news.
[02:04:07] And we'll find out about, yay, yay, America.
[02:04:11] Back to the book.
[02:04:12] Instead, they're living rooms appeared the gauchess figure of a young man from Indiana.
[02:04:18] Meadlo brought to the audience a raw truth about Vietnam.
[02:04:22] They would prefer not to have known.
[02:04:25] He chillingly described lining up first the first group of villagers and shooting them
[02:04:30] down, expanding four clips of ammunition in the killing.
[02:04:34] There were 17 bullets to a clip which meant Wallace deducted deduced 68 shots.
[02:04:42] At the ditch execution site, Meadlo said he was ordered to fire single shots to conserve
[02:04:47] ammunition.
[02:04:50] Wallace wanted to know why he did it.
[02:04:56] And here's the interview.
[02:04:57] Why did I do it?
[02:04:59] Because I felt like I was ordered to do it and it seemed like that at the time I
[02:05:04] felt like I was doing the right thing because I lost buddies.
[02:05:07] I lost a damn good buddy Bobby Wilson and it was on my conscience.
[02:05:12] So after I done it, I felt good.
[02:05:15] But later on that day, it was getting to me.
[02:05:20] You're married, right?
[02:05:23] Children, too.
[02:05:25] How old?
[02:05:27] The boy is two and a half and the little girl is a year and a half.
[02:05:31] Well, obviously the question comes to mind, the father of two little kids like that,
[02:05:36] how can you shoot babies?
[02:05:39] I didn't have the little girl.
[02:05:40] I just had the little boy at the time.
[02:05:43] How do you shoot babies?
[02:05:45] I don't know.
[02:05:46] It's just one of them things.
[02:05:49] How many people would you imagine were killed that day?
[02:05:52] I would say 370.
[02:05:56] What did these civilians, these particularly the women and children, the old men, what did
[02:06:00] they do?
[02:06:01] What did they say to you?
[02:06:03] They weren't begging or anything?
[02:06:05] No, no, or right.
[02:06:07] They were begging and saying no, no, and their mothers were hugging their children, but
[02:06:12] they kept on firing.
[02:06:15] Well, we kept on firing.
[02:06:17] They was waving their arms and begging.
[02:06:21] Did you ever dream about all this that went on in pinkville?
[02:06:25] Yes, I did.
[02:06:27] And I still dream about it.
[02:06:29] What kind of dreams?
[02:06:31] I see the women and children in my sleep.
[02:06:35] Some days, some nights, I can't sleep.
[02:06:40] I just lay there thinking about it.
[02:06:44] So that's not exactly the friendly news that you're expecting to see about the Apollo
[02:06:49] mission.
[02:06:53] Now this thing goes to trial.
[02:06:56] And again, you got to get into the book to see how all this breaks down.
[02:07:01] But a couple highlights.
[02:07:02] Here's Lieutenant Callie during the trial on how he testified on what he did.
[02:07:13] And this is a good insight into his mind, said, here we go.
[02:07:16] Lieutenant Callie.
[02:07:17] I was ordered to go in there and destroy the enemy.
[02:07:20] That was my job that day.
[02:07:22] That was my mission.
[02:07:23] I was given.
[02:07:24] I did not sit down and think in terms of men, women, and children.
[02:07:27] They were all classified the same.
[02:07:29] And that was the classification that we dealt with just as enemy soldiers.
[02:07:34] I felt then.
[02:07:35] And I still do that I acted as I was directed.
[02:07:38] And I carried out the orders that I was given.
[02:07:40] And I do not feel wrong in doing so.
[02:07:44] And we get very used to the media.
[02:07:51] I mean, we're in a media circus.
[02:07:54] Nowadays, because there's so much media, there's social media, there's cable media,
[02:07:58] there's internet media.
[02:07:59] I mean, we get there's a circus of media now.
[02:08:02] And you get a lot, I would say, you can get a lot more distracted.
[02:08:05] I mean, new stories here don't last that long.
[02:08:07] But this was a big new story.
[02:08:09] And it was really dividing the country in a way even more so than the country is already
[02:08:15] being divided by the Vietnam War.
[02:08:17] But, and I'll go to the book here, to many Americans, Callie was a hero.
[02:08:23] And they believed that with the guilty verdict he was found guilty, a great injustice
[02:08:27] had been perpetrated upon the army.
[02:08:29] And in Vietnam, they gave an example here in Vietnam that soldiers at K-Son had hastily
[02:08:36] raised a defiant sign that said, a troop first-cav, salutes William Callie.
[02:08:45] So you got people that are saying, hey, what, you know, Callie was Callie did the right
[02:08:50] thing out there.
[02:08:52] On top of that, this was a good example of what the attitude of some Americans were
[02:08:57] it was at a World War II veteran went into an army recruiting office in Mobile, Alabama
[02:09:06] to make an extraordinary request.
[02:09:08] He had flown bombing missions over Germany which had killed innocent civilians and wanted
[02:09:13] to be arrested for war crimes.
[02:09:16] Despite, and another good example that somebody sent a goat, a Billy goat, a living
[02:09:22] Billy goat, and sent it to the White House and it had a jacket on and the jacket said,
[02:09:27] scapegoat on it.
[02:09:29] And this is pretty cool.
[02:09:32] The response that the army and the government had to this, Callie is not a scapegoat, nor
[02:09:37] a poor lieutenant single-out to bear the entire burden of a difficult war.
[02:09:44] It's clear to high level army memorandum circling amongst senior staff at the White House.
[02:09:50] His act stand alone and infamy among known atrocities for the US forces in the war.
[02:09:57] If Callie is let go or let off with a slap on the wrist, the message to all soldiers must
[02:10:02] read anything goes.
[02:10:05] The implications for the army let alone the nation are incalculable but clearly intolerable.
[02:10:14] So, they did hold the line and recognize that this was not good.
[02:10:24] At the same time, you still got these people that were saying that, look, this is the war.
[02:10:32] And here's a quote from the book, Take By Way of Example of the following.
[02:10:37] The American soldier in an officially sanctioned wrath is a thing so ugly and dangerous that
[02:10:44] it would take a kipling to describe him.
[02:10:48] Not a description of Me lie, but the observation of James H. Blunt a young lieutenant later
[02:10:54] to come later to become a judge on the behavior of troops in the Philippine 60 years before
[02:10:59] Vietnam.
[02:11:02] Here's another comment about what that war was like.
[02:11:05] The war and the Philippines are men have been relentless, have killed to exterminate men,
[02:11:11] women and children, prisoners and captives, active insurgents and suspected people from
[02:11:16] lads of 10 up and idea prevailing that the Filipino was little better than a dog.
[02:11:24] And another comparison here from the book, in the Dakotas, General William to come to Sherman
[02:11:32] had written to General Yuless, you, this is as grand.
[02:11:35] We must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sue, even to the extermination, men, women
[02:11:43] and children.
[02:11:44] Nothing else will reach the root of the case.
[02:11:46] Let's talk about the Indian wars there.
[02:11:50] And then another one, just a description that sort of explains how horrible war is.
[02:12:00] And this one was from World War II.
[02:12:02] What kind of a war to civilian suppose we fought anyways, we shot prisoners and cold blood,
[02:12:07] wiped out hospitals, strafed light, lifeboats, killed or mistreated enemy civilians, finished
[02:12:13] off the enemy wounded, tossed the dying into a hole with the dead.
[02:12:17] And in the Pacific, boiled the flesh off enemy skulls to make table ornaments for sweet
[02:12:21] hearts or carved their bones into letter openers.
[02:12:26] I was written by an American war correspondent, Edward L. Jones.
[02:12:35] Now, where those ideas become so disturbing and again, war is hell, war is dark or is evil,
[02:12:50] horrible things happen.
[02:12:57] And again, when you have a lack of leadership, things get even worse.
[02:13:01] And it can happen even to these apparently normal guys.
[02:13:08] And here's Michael Bernhardt talking about what it was like and what he fought of people
[02:13:14] after he got home.
[02:13:16] I had seen people who looked like everybody else, normal people doing atrocious things.
[02:13:22] And I really wasn't sure how anyone would have acted in the same situation.
[02:13:27] I thought I knew human nature.
[02:13:29] I thought that people were basically good and that they couldn't do this.
[02:13:32] I thought most of the values people held were pretty solid.
[02:13:36] That when we defined things as good or bad, that they were good or bad.
[02:13:42] And that we would know when something was really bad.
[02:13:45] But I had seen that this was not the case.
[02:13:49] I wasn't sure I could trust anyone again.
[02:13:51] I wasn't sure I could ever get close to anyone or confide in anyone very closely because
[02:13:56] of what I'd seen over there.
[02:14:00] And going back to the leadership piece, and this is from the book, what steps were taken
[02:14:06] to halt the run of beatings, thefts, rapes, tortures, and murder, which prodded Charlie
[02:14:12] Company down the road to me lie.
[02:14:16] None.
[02:14:18] Who, among the chain of command that found on its bottom wrongly tenant William Cally and
[02:14:23] rose through Medina, Barker, Henderson, and Costa gave any kind of moral leader example
[02:14:29] that might have prevented the moral destruction of the company.
[02:14:33] No one.
[02:14:36] In place of clear leadership, there was paper leadership.
[02:14:42] The rules of engagement, numerous codes of conduct, and all other directives, all of which
[02:14:47] contained valoftiest intentions.
[02:14:53] There was nothing wrong with these regulations.
[02:14:55] In spirit, they were a recognizable expression of the American ideal at war, a blueprint
[02:15:00] for order in the midst of hell.
[02:15:04] They simply never became part of the soldiers' reality because they weren't never seriously
[02:15:11] enforced.
[02:15:12] And without infatric enforcement, they corresponded as much to the world of the common
[02:15:16] grunt as road maps of Mars.
[02:15:24] That total lack of leadership, that lack of moral courage.
[02:15:39] And as we close this out, it goes in the book here and says, once again, the darker side
[02:15:46] of war has gone underground.
[02:15:49] Eli is no longer a public burden or concern, the burden of guilt and the burden of responsibility
[02:15:56] have fallen onto the soldiers themselves.
[02:16:01] Shit, that men of Charlie Company used to tell each other, rolls downhill.
[02:16:10] And we'll close out with the words from Vernado Simpson, who is in his own little private
[02:16:21] hell with his memories of this as he sits shaking from side to side in his chair, alone
[02:16:27] in his house in Jackson, Mississippi.
[02:16:32] How can you forgive?
[02:16:35] I can't forgive myself for the things.
[02:16:39] Even though I know that it was something that I was told to do, but how can I forget
[02:16:42] that or forgive?
[02:16:45] It's easy for you to say, well, go ahead with your life.
[02:16:50] But how can you go ahead with your life when this is holding you back?
[02:16:55] I can't put my mind to anything.
[02:16:58] Yes, I'm ashamed, I'm sorry, I'm guilty, but I did it.
[02:17:05] You know what else can I tell you.
[02:17:11] It happened.
[02:17:16] It happened.
[02:17:22] And as we think about this book and you should go and get this book and you should read
[02:17:32] this book and you should experience this.
[02:17:35] Level of darkness in the world so that we can all remember to be vigilant against this
[02:17:47] power of darkness, which I suppose we have to admit that that darkness is in every man's
[02:18:00] soul lurking and waiting for a moment to strike out.
[02:18:14] And we need to counter that.
[02:18:35] And you can see in these situations where leaders lead men to do things that they
[02:18:42] knew were wrong.
[02:18:44] They knew they were wrong.
[02:18:48] Things that they didn't want to do, killing children as tears are streaming down their
[02:18:54] faces.
[02:18:55] And if you can lead men to do things that they know are wrong, imagine the power and the
[02:19:01] influence you have as a leader to lead people to do things that are right and that people
[02:19:07] know are right and that are good.
[02:19:14] And you are a leader.
[02:19:18] I am a leader.
[02:19:19] No matter what your station in life or your position or your rank you are a leader when you
[02:19:26] step up and lead you are a leader.
[02:19:32] And you can make a difference and you can have an impact and you can affect the outcomes
[02:19:39] of so many things in the world by stepping up and leading away from the evil and away from
[02:19:54] the darkness and toward the light.
[02:20:09] And I know that was a rough book and it is a rough podcast.
[02:20:20] And I was questioning whether to actually do this or not.
[02:20:28] And at certain points when I was reading this, this is my fourth time reading it.
[02:20:33] I think and even when I was reading it just now on the podcast for this recording I could
[02:20:43] hear a numbness in my voice. I could hear it as I'm talking about the killing and the
[02:20:50] gunning down and it's so much.
[02:20:57] And I know it's going to be brutal.
[02:20:59] I know people are going to be impacted by this and maybe not everyone's going to make
[02:21:03] it through this and I understand that.
[02:21:08] And we owe it to ourselves to know history and to know and understand evil and to understand
[02:21:19] how quickly it can come about and to see these indicators and to know that if you're in the
[02:21:26] leadership position and you start to see things going sideways, you've got to put a stop
[02:21:29] to them before they get out of hand before they turn into this.
[02:21:38] Maybe at some point we'll look for some topics that are a little bit more I guess light
[02:21:51] hard and light harded.
[02:21:53] But I'll tell you the my only issue with that is you want a topic that's light
[02:21:56] harded you can find them anywhere.
[02:21:59] You can go get them anywhere.
[02:22:00] There's a whole actually there's a whole section for a podcast that's called comedy.
[02:22:06] Right?
[02:22:07] It's called comedy that exists.
[02:22:09] There's no section that says the darkness I guess there is one it's called jockel podcast.
[02:22:13] You want to hear about the darkness.
[02:22:14] You want to hear about things that are going on in the world that aren't good.
[02:22:17] This is it.
[02:22:18] And where the people that are dealing with reality and you know I know this is not for
[02:22:25] everybody and that's okay.
[02:22:28] That's okay.
[02:22:29] You know we're talking about heavy topics here and the reason we're talking about the
[02:22:35] dark is because we want to be enlightened.
[02:22:37] We want to know about these things.
[02:22:45] I don't think we're going to have time for Q&A because I just talked about that book for
[02:22:49] a really long time.
[02:22:54] So what we'll do is do a Q&A for the next podcast.
[02:22:59] For this one we'll let it stand on its own.
[02:23:08] And I know it might be a rough podcast to think about wanting to hear more of them.
[02:23:13] But if you do want to hear more of these podcasts echo what can these folks do to support
[02:23:20] the podcasts.
[02:23:21] Well, as I always recommend, sure support the podcast, but you can also support yourself.
[02:23:29] With supplementation on it has the best supplements, the actual supplements that I take.
[02:23:38] Jocquitakes on it.com slash jockel.
[02:23:42] You can get 10% off.
[02:23:44] So support yourself physically and financially in that way.
[02:23:49] I would recommend what do you think.
[02:23:51] Well, what's the number one you think?
[02:23:55] I think it depends on who you are.
[02:24:02] I think if you're me, it's cruel.
[02:24:05] Yeah, and they're just doing anyway.
[02:24:06] So Alphabran, good for you, brain, makes you think quicker.
[02:24:09] Makes you like, you know, you just say Alphabran because I got how soft I'm ready
[02:24:12] for it.
[02:24:13] As Jocquit drinks Alphabran instant by the way.
[02:24:17] Makes you think, you know, like when you search for words, like in your, you know, when
[02:24:20] you're trying to think of a word, sometimes.
[02:24:23] Yes.
[02:24:24] Well, you feel like you leave the pathways to the words a little bit closer.
[02:24:28] Yeah.
[02:24:29] Yeah.
[02:24:30] If you want to get it, you actually can read all about it.
[02:24:31] It's called a neutral pick Alphabran.
[02:24:33] Yes.
[02:24:34] Good for you, brain.
[02:24:35] Anyway, cruel oil, good for you, joins us when Jocquitakes.
[02:24:38] That's why he's so functional.
[02:24:40] I would say, relax a bit at our professional.
[02:24:43] I like that word.
[02:24:46] And warrior bars.
[02:24:48] That's the new one right there, the warrior bars.
[02:24:50] That's not like some, you know, they've been having, well, actually,
[02:24:54] it's pretty neat too, but you know, you have protein powder.
[02:24:56] That's been around.
[02:24:57] But warrior bar, that's a new twist on things.
[02:25:00] Well, what's good about, what's good about, like you talk about protein
[02:25:02] powder?
[02:25:03] That's like a powder, right?
[02:25:04] Or you get a protein bar.
[02:25:05] That's a thing that's been manufactured.
[02:25:07] Right.
[02:25:08] Like a power.
[02:25:09] Yeah.
[02:25:10] The warrior bar is like food.
[02:25:11] Yeah.
[02:25:12] Yeah.
[02:25:13] So that makes it a little bit better in my mind.
[02:25:15] Yes.
[02:25:16] Because I want to make food.
[02:25:17] Yeah.
[02:25:18] So it's kind of like in the direction of a beef jerky situation, but even more.
[02:25:23] Anyway, look, look at it.
[02:25:24] The thing is, well, there's two, there's two major differences between beef jerky
[02:25:27] and warrior bar.
[02:25:28] And that is beef jerky dry.
[02:25:31] Warrior bar, not dry.
[02:25:32] Yeah.
[02:25:33] That's the list.
[02:25:34] And then a shrimp tech, good for like high intensity kind of prolong stuff.
[02:25:39] Gigiitsu, if you're into it wrestling, metcon, metcon, metcon, or.
[02:25:43] You're in a crossfit.
[02:25:44] There you go.
[02:25:45] A shrimp tech boom.
[02:25:46] Yeah.
[02:25:47] Improve your output, your performance.
[02:25:49] Utilize oxygen better.
[02:25:51] Anyway, it's really good.
[02:25:53] It's like really good.
[02:25:54] Also another way to support the podcast if you're in the mood to.
[02:25:57] Before you do your Amazon shopping, go to japkopadcast.com and click on the Amazon link.
[02:26:02] What is that cost you?
[02:26:04] That doesn't cost you anything except for literally, literally, three seconds.
[02:26:08] So you're in time.
[02:26:09] Three seconds and you support the podcast.
[02:26:11] Yep.
[02:26:12] I like that.
[02:26:13] And one like a click.
[02:26:14] Maybe like a one tenth of a calorie.
[02:26:15] Maybe you finger click.
[02:26:16] I like that.
[02:26:17] But yeah, super easy.
[02:26:18] The main thing is we're asking people to donate money there.
[02:26:21] No, no, no.
[02:26:22] We just Amazon's gonna donate the money.
[02:26:24] Yeah.
[02:26:25] They're gonna support the podcast.
[02:26:27] Like, collect it.
[02:26:28] Yeah, it's good.
[02:26:29] So boom, there you go.
[02:26:31] I guess the main thing is to remember to do it.
[02:26:35] You know, when you're trying to get that duct tape real quick, oh, I got to make that
[02:26:37] time so you can ship that same day.
[02:26:40] You know, then you got to just want it.
[02:26:42] Maybe take some alpha brain that'll help you remember.
[02:26:44] I like that.
[02:26:45] Anyway.
[02:26:46] You want some jocos stuff, like some cool shirts, jocosdoor.com.
[02:26:50] Now this, I'm seeing a new shirt.
[02:26:52] Is that correct here?
[02:26:53] Yes, we have a new shirt, the trooper shirt.
[02:26:56] That's, it's got a name.
[02:26:58] Are we naming shirts now?
[02:26:59] Because the guy is over there.
[02:27:01] We have to name it.
[02:27:02] So this is some people don't echo Charles.
[02:27:06] He is an artist, right?
[02:27:08] He's an artist.
[02:27:10] And so that's why he has to name the t-shirt.
[02:27:13] Yeah.
[02:27:14] You know, you just have to name it because that makes you feel like it's a piece.
[02:27:16] It's a piece of art.
[02:27:17] Because you just said the trooper shirt.
[02:27:22] As if that's the thing.
[02:27:24] But here's the thing, though, with this shirt and with all the shirts, it's not just,
[02:27:28] oh, I'm going to call it the trooper shirt because I think that sounds cool.
[02:27:31] It's like there's different lace, not just a shirt with a saying line.
[02:27:33] Like this blue equals.
[02:27:34] It's not just your saying.
[02:27:35] It's not just called the trooper t-shirt.
[02:27:37] It actually is the trooper shirt.
[02:27:39] Yeah.
[02:27:40] Like where you're coming.
[02:27:41] And you're wearing it right now.
[02:27:42] If you want to see the side of you too, you can check it out.
[02:27:45] But three colors, that's a unique one.
[02:27:47] Usually you have two colors.
[02:27:48] Normally I would protest something like that.
[02:27:50] No, but you can't protest it and this is why.
[02:27:52] So the people who signed up on the insider's group, the email list, I, people that
[02:28:00] are enlisted troopers.
[02:28:01] You know, of Jockel podcast.
[02:28:02] Thanks, guys.
[02:28:03] Yeah, it's all.
[02:28:04] Well, how do they do that?
[02:28:06] Well, on JockelStore.com, Ryan the front, you just put your email address.
[02:28:10] And I don't spam.
[02:28:11] That's not what it's for.
[02:28:12] This is what it's for.
[02:28:13] The things that it was for and the people who are on the list know this.
[02:28:17] Where hey, I got a new shirt design idea, you know, I don't know what colors really
[02:28:25] did.
[02:28:26] What are the best colors, right?
[02:28:27] I know what colors I like.
[02:28:28] Yeah, I'll do a black one.
[02:28:30] I'll do.
[02:28:31] But so what I did was I sent an email to everybody and said, what, here's the design.
[02:28:36] Here's what it kind of will look like.
[02:28:37] What color shirts are we doing?
[02:28:39] What color shirts do you guys like?
[02:28:40] So there's a, there was a vote that was input received.
[02:28:43] Yes, yeah, like a, yeah, and a consensus was these three colors.
[02:28:47] It's like a dark red.
[02:28:49] Oh, which actually turned out even better than I thought.
[02:28:52] And I was enthusiastic about the red and the OD green support OD green.
[02:28:58] That way if you have to, you never know when you might have to go tactical.
[02:29:02] It is tactical.
[02:29:03] I'm into doing purpose things.
[02:29:05] Things that can be good for normal situations or tactical situations.
[02:29:10] That's why like OD green t-shirts.
[02:29:12] Yeah, just in case you get a spring into getting after it.
[02:29:15] Spontaneous.
[02:29:16] And then of course we got the black, but that was the consensus overall.
[02:29:19] The green.
[02:29:20] There was a charcoal head of strong, strong, you know.
[02:29:24] But the, the, the green, the red and the black.
[02:29:27] But anyway, yeah, it's a cool one.
[02:29:29] Check it out if you want to look at the details of it.
[02:29:31] They're, yeah, they're good.
[02:29:33] Anyway, if you want to support the podcast that way, get a shirt.
[02:29:36] This trooper shirt isn't the only one.
[02:29:38] But man, I, I'm pretty, I'm pretty fired up about it.
[02:29:42] It looks good.
[02:29:43] I think.
[02:29:44] Anyway, there's other ones on there too that are cool.
[02:29:47] And coffee mugs and stickers.
[02:29:50] If you're down.
[02:29:51] I like that.
[02:29:52] That's the way.
[02:29:53] Those are the ways.
[02:29:54] And for the people who have been and do, thank to say thank you would be like, not even
[02:30:01] doing it halfway just this.
[02:30:03] Yeah, definitely thanks everyone for doing that.
[02:30:06] And you know, you know what's weird.
[02:30:08] You always talk about like how, oh, you go to see the, you got to see the dark to, to appreciate
[02:30:13] the light, right?
[02:30:15] I actually just because we just got done with that dark, dark darkness of a book in just
[02:30:22] having a conversation right now.
[02:30:23] I'm so happy.
[02:30:24] Right.
[02:30:25] Just to be like here and talking and we're, we're selling some cool t shirts and drinking
[02:30:31] some just to be just in this situation.
[02:30:35] And know that we have this goodness around us is, uh, is really good.
[02:30:40] So I think it is worth venturing into the dark so that you can appreciate the light.
[02:30:46] If you want to hear more of this kind of things, obviously you got the podcast.
[02:30:51] You can also pick up a book written by myself and my brother, Lave Babin.
[02:30:56] It's called Extreme Ownership.
[02:30:59] You can buy the book or you can buy the audio book, which is actually Lave and I reading
[02:31:02] it.
[02:31:03] You'll get some more information in there and that's everything I talk about is, is in
[02:31:09] that book.
[02:31:10] I mean, that's, that's, it's the basic principles of combat leadership that we put
[02:31:13] in there.
[02:31:14] Let me add one thing about, it's, it's extreme, that book, extreme ownership.
[02:31:20] It's good.
[02:31:21] It's like dang.
[02:31:22] This is, you fit a lot of the, everyone's different.
[02:31:23] But me, I felt like more than adult after like incorporating these, like the, but
[02:31:29] here's the thing that you do take away is the people around you will notice that you're
[02:31:34] a, like, better person to be around.
[02:31:37] And I thought I was like pretty nice anyway, but you'll feel people like gravitating
[02:31:42] towards you more because like any abrasion, and everyone has varying levels of abrasiveness
[02:31:47] in them.
[02:31:48] Even if it's just a teeny tiny little bit, everyone has some.
[02:31:51] But what that does, it, it, it makes you work with people in a way less abrasive way.
[02:31:59] So people want to be around you when things go now.
[02:32:03] I would say that's, that's a very good assessment.
[02:32:07] And I'll tell you that I always felt, especially when I was in the, when I was in the military,
[02:32:12] in the seal teams, when, when I was doing something, people wanted to come with me.
[02:32:17] I know.
[02:32:18] Yeah, it was all good.
[02:32:19] We all wanted to get after it together.
[02:32:20] Yeah.
[02:32:21] So that's probably an indicator of the principles in the book at work in my life.
[02:32:27] Yeah.
[02:32:28] And some people, I mean, I don't know, maybe us whatever, where, you know, you'll have
[02:32:33] a little, small little conflict or a little something, little friction with somebody.
[02:32:40] Confident.
[02:32:41] Maybe I'll work or even at home or whatever.
[02:32:44] I would say it's, it's pretty rare.
[02:32:46] Like, I'm not, like, if there was some friction that came up between me and anyone,
[02:32:50] even at my friend, my wife or something, he would stand out so much nowadays.
[02:32:54] Yeah.
[02:32:55] It's got become a better person.
[02:32:58] Yeah.
[02:32:59] You become a better person.
[02:33:00] Yeah, and that's at the end, but like I said, it's like, if you, if you follow it, if you
[02:33:06] are like, dang, I value this and I'm going to actually incorporate it.
[02:33:12] As time goes on, that's how it is where if you get friction or some adversarial situation,
[02:33:18] even if it's not yours, you're like, dang, I see that from a mile away, and it sticks out.
[02:33:24] So it's not, I mean, some people, it's part of their everyday thing.
[02:33:27] Yeah, no, no.
[02:33:28] It's road rage or I don't know anything.
[02:33:30] Yeah.
[02:33:31] But it's, yeah, it's good, man.
[02:33:32] It's good like that.
[02:33:33] Well, thanks.
[02:33:34] Appreciate it.
[02:33:35] Check it out.
[02:33:36] You can get it on Amazon after you click through the website.
[02:33:39] You know, closing it up, everybody, if you want to talk to us more beyond that, you can
[02:33:47] get us on the, in a web's, Echo's ad echo Charles.
[02:33:50] I am at Jocca Willink, that's on Twitter, the Facebookie, and even have a little bit of
[02:33:56] the Instagram going on.
[02:33:59] I actually, I actually answer most of the, well, I actually, every single thing that comes
[02:34:03] on Twitter, I will respond to.
[02:34:05] I'm going to see how long I can keep that up for.
[02:34:07] I don't know how long it's going to last.
[02:34:08] It's getting pretty hard core right now.
[02:34:12] But I'm definitely reading everything that's coming in and we appreciate all the feedback
[02:34:17] we get from you guys and you guys bring it a little light to our world as much appreciated.
[02:34:23] And thanks for bringing that light to us and most of all, thanks for going out there and
[02:34:33] getting after it.
[02:34:35] And so until next time, this is Echo and Jockel.