TIME MAGAZINE

November 1969. US Army investigation of the incident had begun in September 1968. Lieutenant William Calley was court-martialled for the murder of 109 Vietnamese civilians.

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

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

A detailed account came from Paul David Meadlo, twenty-two, a
member of Calley's platoon . . . Meadlo says his group ran through
My Lai, herding men, women, children and babies into the center
of the village - 'like a little island'.

'Lieutenant Calley came over and said, "You know what to do
with them, don'~ you?" And I said, "Yes." And he left and came
back about ten minutes later, and said, "How come you ain't killed
them yet?" And I told him that I didn't think he wanted us to kill
them, that he just wanted us to guard them. He said, "No, I want
them dead." So he started shooting them. And he told me to start
shooting. I poured about four clips [68 shots] into them. I might
have killed ten or fifteen of them.

'So we started to gather more people, and we had about seven or
eight, and we put them in the hootch [hut] and then we dropped a
hand grenade in there with them. And then they had about seventy
to seventy-five people all gathered up by a ravine, so we threw ours
in with them and Lieutenant Calley told me, "Meadlo, we got
another job to do." And so he walked over to the people, and he
started pushing them off and started shooting. We just pushed them
all off and just started using automatics on them.'

According to SPS lay Roberts, the rampaging Gls were not
interested solely in killing, although that seemed foremost in their minds. Roberts told Life, 'Just outside the village there was this big pile of bodies. This really tiny kid - he had only a shirt on, nothing else - he came over to the pile and held the hand of one of the dead. One of the Gls behind me dropped into a kneeling position thirty meters from this kid and killed him with a single shot.' Roberts also watched while troops accosted a group of women, including a teenage girl. The girl was about thirteen, wearing black pyjamas: 'A Gl grabbed the girl and with the help of others started stripping her,' Roberts related. 'Let's see what she's made of,' a soldier said. 'VC boom-boom,' another said, telling the thirteen-year-old girl that she was a whore for the Vietcong. 'I'm horny,' said a third. As they were stripping the girl, with bodies and burning huts all around them, the girl's mother tried to help her, scratching and clawing at the soldiers.

Continued Roberts: 'Another Vietnamese woman, afraid for her
own safety, tried to stop the woman from objecting. One soldier
kicked the mother, and another slapped her up a bit. Haeberle [the
photographer] jumped in to take a picture of the group of women.
The picture shows the thirteen-year-old girl hiding behind her
mother, trying to button the top of her pyjamas. When they noticed
Ron, they left off and turned away as if everything was normal.
Then a soldier asked, "Well, what'll we do with 'em?" "Kill 'em,"
another answered. I heard an M60 go off, a light machine-gun, and
when we turned all of them and the kids with them were dead.'

OPENING STATEMENT - Trial of Lt. WILLIAM CALLEY - Ft. Benning, Ga.