"God," says Roberts, "those cows died hard. They had them in small pens. They'd shoot them--paff, paff, and the cow'd just go moo. Then paff,paff, paff, moo."

A GI was running down a trail, chasing a duck with a knife.

"I saw two military-age males running across the field about 500 meters away," says Charles West. "I yelled,'Dong lai, dong lai,' but neither of them stopped. At this distance we could have killed both of them, but we just fired in the air and then chased them about half a mile. Only one of them lived. The other one was killed by the interrogation unit. Some of the people told the interrogation unit they didn't understand what was being talked about. The men that didn't talk were killed by the Vietnamese that were doing the questioning, not by the Americans. There were, I guess, nine or 10 killed before one of them started talking. I was told that the guys were saying that there had been Vietcong and North Vietnamese troops there and that they had gone toward the ocean by underground tunnels."

Haeberle remembers a hideously small act of compassion. "A GI went up to a little boy who was badly mangled up, and put a blanket over him."

SP4 Larry Colburn was the gunner on a helicopter, flying reconnaissance over the Mylai area. "Outside the village," he recalls, "we saw a VC with a carbine and pack, but he got away. We came back near Mylai and noticed people dead and wounded along the road and all through the village. There was an irrigation ditch full of bodies. We noticed some people were still alive.We didn't know what had happened.

"Our pilot wanted to evacuate some of the wounded, but there was no room in our helicopter, so he called for gunships to help out. We spotted a child.We went down and our crew chief brought out a little boy about 2 years old. He seemed to be in shock.

"About 50 meters away there was a bunker with 10 or 15 people. We called for gunships to help evacuate them while we took the child to a hospital. There must have been 75 or 80 people in a ditch--some dead, some wounded. I had never seen so many people dead in one place before."

Later the helicopter returned and landed in a paddy near Lieutenant Calley's platoon. The pilot got out and motioned for Lieutenant Calley to come over. "The pilot seemed angry," remembers Charles Sledge, Calley's radio operator,''but we couldn't hear what he was saying. Then Lieutenant Calley came back and told us, 'This guy isn't very happy with the way we're running the operation, but I don't care. He's not in charge. "

Charles West's squad saw a little boy about 10 feet away. The boy was crying. He had been shot in the arm and leg--probably the same child Charles Gruver had described.

"Gee," a GI said, "what are we going to do with that kid up there?"

Without reply, says West, a radioman turned, aimed and fired his M16, shooting the little boy through the head. Neither West nor anyone else said anything. They kept going, pushing on, "clearing up," as West calls it.

"That day I was thinking military," says West. "I was thinking about the security of my own men. I said to myself this is a bad thing that all these people had to be killed. But if I was to say that at that time I actually felt a whole lot of sorrow for the people, then I would be lying."

An old papa-san was found hiding. His pants kept coming off. Two GIs dragged him out to be questioned. He was trying to keep his pants on. Captain Medina was doing the questioning. The old man didn't know anything. He rattled something off. Somebody asked Captain Medina what to do with the man, and Jay Roberts heard the captain say, "I don't care."

Captain Medina walked away. Roberts heard a shot and the old man was dead.

In the entire day at Mylai 4, says West, "I can't rightfully say that I got fired upon. I heard shots all the time, but I couldn't tell whether it was our men or an enemy firing upon us. I did hear some guys call on a radio and say they had received sniper fire. They told Captain Medina they were going to try to get in position to zap the sniper. But I heard all that on the radio."

"I remember this man and his two small children, one boy and one girl, kept walking toward us on this trail," says Haeberle. "They just kept walking toward us, you know, very nervously, very afraid, and you could hear the little girl saying,'No, no,' in the Vietnamese tongue. The girl was on the right and the boy was on the left. All of a sudden, the GIs just opened up and cut them down."

Before noon Haeberle and Roberts left by chopper to cover another company and have lunch. Later that day, at another company, Haeberle heard a captain listening to a radio report. The report said 125 Vietcong had been killed. The captain didn't know anything about the incident, but he laughed and said, "Yeah, probably all women and children!"

Later, back at base camp, West talked to Haeberle. "He said he thought there was a whole lot of wrong-doing," recalls West. "He had taken a whole lot of pictures of this. I stressed that I thought it was wrong that people should be walking around taking pictures of this. There were a whole lot of GIs going about taking pictures of dead bodies.

"Most of us felt that we were U.S. government property, which we were and still are. I tried to explain to the men at the time that you can't sit there and blame yourself--you were on orders, you were on a search-and-destroy mission. If anyone was to be blamed or court-martialed, it has to be someone higher than our echelon. Calley and the sergeant shouldn't be tried unless they try every man that was on that operation."

"They captured three weapons [rifles]," says Roberts, "40 rounds of mortar ammo, grenades, web gear.

"We thought about Mylai a lot after we got back to Duchpho. But neither one of us was very much of a banner carrier." When he wrote it up for the brigade newspaper, Roberts says, "I played it up like it was a big success."

"The village was heavily fortified with rice," says West.''They did find documents that there had been NVA and VC troops there. Also they found evidence that these people had been there not too long ago. I understand that they found ammunition and as far as tunnels, I wouldn't know because I checked into some tunnels and I ran into dead ends."

"Eventually we reached the beach," says John Kinch. "We captured four suspects, one kid, one 15 to 27, one 40 to 55 and a girl in her twenties. They were being beaten kind of hard and the kid named the older man as an NVA platoon leader. Medina drew his .38, took out five rounds and played Russian roulette with him. Then he grabbed him by the hair and threw him up against a tree. He fired two shots with a rifle, closer and closer to the guy's head, then aimed straight at him. The guy must have been very scared because he started rapping like hell. He turned out to be an NVA area commander. Then Medina had a picture of himself taken while he drank from a coconut with one hand and held a big sharp knife under the throat of the kid who was gagged and tied to a bamboo.

"When`we got back to LZ Dottie, Captain Medina gave the company a briefing. He said, 'They are running an investigation. As far as anyone knows, we ran into sniper fire and cut loose.' As far as I am concerned there was no sniper fire."

Charles West and his squad stayed in Mylai until about 5 that afternoon. They camped in the same area that night, before moving on to find Vietcong nearer the coast the next day. Some of the men talked about writing their congressmen to protest the action, but they never did. Some were quiet and grim, but not many. "A lot of people knew," Charles West says, "that a lot of people had been killed who didn't have to be killed, but the average GI felt that it was part of our mission. We all wondered where the enemy went. We were all concentrating on finding where they went.

At suppertime they set up bivouac in a little graveyard near Mylai. Children and old papa-sans were hovering nearby. When the GIs opened their C-rations, they shared their supper with these Vietnamese who had survived the massacre.