The Mylai Massacre - text page 2

On the day before their mission the men of Company C met for a briefing after supper. The company commander, Captain Ernest Medina, read the official prepared orders for the assault against Mylai and spoke for about 45 minutes, mostly about the procedures of movement. At least two other companies would also participate. They, like Company C, were elements of Task Force Barker, named for its commander, Lt. Colonel Frank Barker, who was to die in action three months later. But only Company C would actually enter the cluster of huts known as Mylai 4.

"Captain Medina told us that this village was heavily fortified," recalls one of his squad leaders, Sgt. Charles West. "He said it was considered extremely dangerous and he wanted us to be on our toes at all times. He told us there was supposed to be a part of the 98th NVA Regiment and the 48th VC Battalion there. From the intelligence that higher levels had received, he said, this village consisted only of North Vietnamese army, Vietcong, and VC families. He said the order was to destroy Mylai and everything in it."

Captain Medina was a stocky, crew-cut, hard-nosed disciplinarian whom his men called "Mad Dog Medina." Men respected him: to Charles West he was one of "the best officers I've known." Most of them had served under Medina since the company had formed the previous year in Hawaii as C Company, First Battalion, 20th Infantry, 11th Light Infantry Brigade.

"As far as I'm concerned, Charlie Company was the best company to ever serve in Vietnam," says West. "Charlie Company was a company, not just a hundred and some men they call a company. We operated together or not at all. We cared about each and every individual and each and every individual's problems. This is the way that we were taught by Captain Medina to feel toward each other. We were like brothers."

Mylai 4 was one of nine hamlets, each designated by a number, which were clustered near the village of Songmy, a name sometimes used also for the hamlets. The men of Company C called the area "Pinkville" because it was colored rose on their military maps and because these fertile coastal plains long had been known as Vietcong territory. Pinkville was only seven miles northeast of the provincial capital of Quangngai, where, during the Tet offensive only a month before, Vietcong and North Vietnamese troops had boldly occupied portions of the city. Soon Company C would use the name Pinkville not only for the entire area but for the single hamlet Mylai 4.

Company C had seen its first real combat in the previous weeks, all of it around Pinkville. A couple of weeks before, sniper fire from across the river had killed one man. His buddies believed the fire had come from Mylai 4. Two weeks before, enemy land mines had killed five men and wounded 22. Several days before, in a hamlet near Mylai 4, a booby trap made from an unexploded artillery shell had killed one of the Gls' favorite squad leaders, Sgt. George Cox.

"I was his assistant squad leader," recalls Charles West. "On the way back to camp I was crying. Everybody was deeply hurt, right up to Captain Medina. Guys were going around kicking sandbags and saying,'Those dirty dogs, those dirty bastards.' "

At the briefing, says West, "Captain Medina told us we might get a chance to revenge the deaths of our fellow GIs." Afterward the men held a memorial service for George Cox, but the ritual of mourning was more like a pep rally for the forthcoming action.

"Captain Medina didn't give an order to go in and kill women or children," says West. "Nobody told us about handling civilians, because at the time I don't think any of us were aware of the fact that we'd run into civilians. I think what we heard put fear into a lot of our hearts. We thought we'd run into heavy resistance. He was telling us that here was the enemy, the enemy that had been killing our partners. This was going to be our first real live battle, and we had made up our minds we were going to go in and with whatever means possible wipe them out."

Shortly after sunrise on March 16, 1968, a bright, clear, warm day, the helicopters began lifting approximately 80 men of Company C from the base camp at Landing Zone Dottie and delivering them 11 kilometers away in the paddies west of Mylai 4.

Army Photographer Sgt. Ron Haeberle and SP5 Jay Roberts, both of the 31st Public Information Detachment, came in on the second helicopter lift. Haeberle, who had been drafted out of college, had only a week left on his tour in Vietnam. Neither man had seen much action. They had volunteered for this operation because the word was out that it would be "a hot one." The squad the two were assigned to was getting its orders by walkie-talkie from Captain Medina. Haeberle was carrying three cameras--one for the Army, two of his own. (He turned in his black-and-white film to the Army. The Army took no action at that time but apparently intends to use the film as evidence in the court-martial proceedings.) Roberts, a college student who had volunteered for the draft, took pad and pencil. Their mission was to prepare news releases and report for the brigade newspaper.

"We landed about 9 or 9:30 in a field of elephant grass," says Varnado Simpson, then a 19-year-old assistant platoon leader from Jackson, Miss. Gunships had prepped the area with Miniguns and grenade launchers. It was clear and very warm and it got warmer. "Our landing zone was the outskirts of town, on the left flank. There were about 25 of us and we went directly into the village. There wasn't any enemy fire. We'd come up on a hootch, we'd search it to see if there was someone in it. If there was no one in it, we'd burn it down. We found people in some, and we took some back to the intelligence people for questioning. Some ran, we tried to tell them not to run. There were about 15. Some stopped. About five or six were killed."

Haeberle and Roberts moved through the rice fields toward a hill in back of the village area. Haeberle was with 10 or 15 GIs when he saw a cow and heard shots at the same time. The shooting was straight ahead. A GI shot a cow and then others kept pumping bullets into the cow until the cow finally fell.

"Off to the right," says Haeberle, "a woman's form, a head, appeared from some brush. All the other GIs started firing at her, aiming at her, firing at her over and over again. She had slumped over into one of those things that stick out of the rice paddies so that her head was a propped-up target. There was no attempt to question her or anything. They just kept shooting at her . You could see the bones flying in the air chip by chip. Jay and I, we just shook our heads."