The Good Guys: My Lai Massacre, Vietnam
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Hello and welcome to Conflicted, the history podcast where we talk about the struggles that shaped us, the tough questions that they pose, and why we should care about any of it. I'm your host, Zach Cornwell. Now, before we get into today's episode, I just wanted to make a quick announcement. So I am very happy to say that as of today, the show is now a member of the Evergreen Podcasts Network.

They're great folks over there with a very impressive stable of compelling shows, and I'm thrilled to be able to continue the show with their awesome support. And now, without further ado, this is episode 12, The Good Guys. One of the most shocking revelations in modern American history began with a chance encounter at a tiny bar in Vietnam.

The year was 1968, and a 22-year-old American soldier named Ron Ridenhour was sipping on a cold beer at an airbase in Chu Lai. Ridenhour was not the classic portrait of a soldier. He was a thin, lanky guy with a bowl cut and mutton chops, but appearances aside, Ridenhour was a capable helicopter gunner, and he was grateful for the refreshing pint and the brief respite from his usual duties.

As Ridenhour is sipping on his beer, he suddenly notices an old acquaintance across the bar, a private named Charles Groover. Ridenhour called him Butch. Ridenhour and Butch had trained together back in Hawaii before they'd been deployed to Vietnam, and the two men were surprised and happy to see each other. So Butch brings his beer over to Ridenhour's table, and they start chatting. After a couple minutes of small talk, Butch sets his beer down.

and he says to Ridenhour, quote, Did you hear what we did at Pinkville? Pinkville was a code name, referring to a cluster of villages in South Vietnam called My Lai. The U.S. Army called it Pinkville because on the tactical maps, the area had such a high population density that all the red dots made the area appear pink. The name didn't mean much to Ridenhour. He shrugged and told Butch he hadn't heard of it.

Well, Butch leans in and says in a hushed voice over the noise of the bar, quote, We just went in there and killed everybody. All the civilians in the village. End quote. Ron Ridenhour stopped sipping his beer and looked at Butch. He said, quote, Killed everybody? What do you mean? Butch answered, quote,

We just shot them. Lined them up and shot them down. Three, four, five hundred people. I don't even know how many. Initially, Reidenhower was speechless. America's ground war in Vietnam had begun in earnest in 1965, and in those three years, it had become clear that this was unlike any other war the United States had ever fought. It was dirtier, more brutal, and plagued by political strife and moral ambiguity.

But this immediately struck Ridenhour as beyond the pale. Ridenhour was one of many soldiers who did not want to be in Vietnam. He didn't like the war, he didn't believe in what they were doing, he just wanted to do his time and go home. After months in country, he had seen his fill of death and violence as a gunner, skimming over the paddies in a helicopter. But what Butch had just said rattled him deeply.

Ridenhour couldn't help himself, and suddenly the questions just came pouring out. What happened? Who did what? When was this? Who was killed? How many people? And Butch held nothing back. Butch told Ridenhour a tale of senseless, systematic butchery. He told of drainage ditches filled with hundreds of dead women, children, and old people.

He told of American GIs, machine gunning babies, throwing old men into wells and tossing grenades in after them. He told of a particularly bloodthirsty lieutenant named Calley, who'd personally murdered over a hundred people with his own hands. But the thing that troubled Ridenhower the most was that his friend Butch seemed to be bragging about it, like it was some kind of victory.

Reidenhower had to hold his tongue in silence as Butch talked about raping a young girl in the village. Years later, Reidenhower noted with disgust that Butch, quote, almost boasted about it, end quote. Reidenhower bit his tongue, finished his beer, and the two men parted. But the conversation had lit a burning anger in the 22-year-old corporal.

Something he could not ignore. He thought to himself later, quote, these no good sons of bitches. Look at what they've gotten me into. Look at what they've gotten us all into, end quote. Ridenhour knew that if this was true, he had an obligation to bring it to light. And just having the knowledge of it made him culpable by association.

Butch Groover could have confessed the truth about Pinkville to any number of U.S. servicemen, but according to historian Howard Jones, by boasting about it to Ridenhour, he'd, quote, confessed to the wrong person, end quote.

Over the next several weeks, Ron Ridenhour began asking around about what had happened at Pinkville. He started reaching out to other old buddies and acquaintances in the army in an attempt to confirm what Butch had told him. Initially, he hoped that Butch had just been drunk and exaggerating. But as Ron Ridenhour talked to more and more people, a terrible picture began to slowly come into focus. Something horrific had happened earlier.

earlier that spring in a tiny hamlet in South Vietnam. Something that threatened to shake a century of assumptions about American exceptionalism to its very bedrock. The next person Ridenhour spoke to was a man named Mike Terry. Mike was a devout Mormon, and Ridenhour knew that if something bad had really happened, Mike would tell him the truth. When Ridenhour finally spoke to him, Mike Terry confirmed Butch's story.

With palpable regret, he explained his own role in the mysterious massacre. Mike told Ridenhauer that he had personally finished off dead and dying civilians in a ditch by peppering them with machine gun fire. Ridenhauer looked his friend dead in the eye and whispered, quote, Mike, Mike, didn't you know that that was wrong? Mike responded, quote, I don't know, man. I guess it was a Nazi kind of thing.

Ridenhower talked to several more men from the company that had gone into Pinkville, and one by one they confirmed that a litany of shocking atrocities had been committed by American soldiers at Pinkville. One man told him that he'd seen a wounded four-year-old boy who, quote, "...just stood there with big eyes, staring around like he didn't understand," before a soldier finished him off with a bullet from his M16.

Ridenhour only had a tiny fragment of the entire picture, but he felt compelled to bring what he did know about Pinkville to light. As he said years later, quote, I felt that I had to take some action. I had to do something. I couldn't just rest with knowledge for the rest of my life. I couldn't live with myself if I did, end quote.

As journalist Nick Turse put it, Ron Ridenhauer was, quote, the type of man many want to be, but few actually are, end quote. On March 29th, 1969, after he returned to the States, Ridenhauer wrote a five-page letter detailing everything he had learned, and he sent it over to 30 high-ranking members of Congress and the U.S. military. After detailing everything he had learned, Ridenhauer finished his letter, quote,

Exactly what did, in fact, occur in the village of Pinkville in March 1968, I do not know for certain, but I am convinced that it was something very black indeed. I remain irrevocably persuaded that if you and I do truly believe in the principles of justice and the equality of every man, however humble before the law, that form the very backbone

that this country is founded on, then we must press forward a widespread and public investigation of this matter with all of our combined efforts. I think that it was Winston Churchill who once said, "A country without a conscience is a country without a soul, and a country without a soul is a country that cannot survive." The consequences of Ridenhowers letter were explosive.

What began as a quiet internal investigation by the U.S. Army quickly snowballed into a national scandal. Through a series of newspaper articles, highly publicized court-martials, and dogged investigative journalism, the American public soon learned the truth that Ron Bridenhauer had pursued. And that truth was this.

On March 16, 1968, more than 100 American soldiers had entered the village of My Lai, codename Pinkville, and over the course of four hours systematically murdered 567 unarmed old people, women, children, and infants. They tore them apart with automatic machine gun fire. They blew them up with grenades. They caved their heads in with rifle butts.

There were no less than 20 corroborated reports of rape and two confirmed gang rapes. Their orders had been to, quote, kill everything that moves. The American public was not prepared for this kind of revelation. The idea that soldiers of the United States military could engage in such flagrant cruelty and blatant homicide was inconceivable.

Many people completely refused to believe it. To them, this was the military that had stormed the beaches of Normandy, liberated concentration camps, and defeated Nazi Germany just 20 years earlier. The sacred national myth, the story that we had been telling ourselves over and over again about the unimpeachable moral conduct of US troops, had suddenly evaporated with the morning fog over Vietnam.

The scandal plunged a red-hot spike of doubt into the national psyche. How could this have happened? How could we have done this? After all, we were the good guys. The white hats. The protagonists of the 20th century.

In the aftermath of the My Lai media frenzy, the American heartland woefully shook their heads at these few bad apples. This handful of renegade GIs who had besmirched the sterling reputation of the American military. As a government official wrote in 1971, "...the United States Army has never condoned wanton killing or disregard for human life." It was what everyone wanted to hear.

what everyone needed to hear, a story we all desperately had to believe was true.

But there was a darker, deeper truth festering beneath it. The My Lai Massacre, as it came to be known, was not a one-off event. Its scale was unprecedented, but as a veteran named Charles McDuff wrote in 1971, "...the atrocities that were committed in My Lai are eclipsed by similar American actions throughout Vietnam."

As Ron Ridenhour bitterly observed years after sending his letter, the butchery of Vietnamese civilians by American troops was, quote, not an aberration. It was an operation, end quote. To paraphrase journalist Nick Turse, the only aberration about My Lai was the fact that it had been investigated at all.

This massacre was just a single note and a long, heartbreaking melody of misery. The awful truth was that the roots of the My Lai Massacre and countless others like it stretched far beyond the soldiers on the ground. The tendrils of dysfunction and hubris and systematic disregard for Vietnamese civilian life reached all the way back across the Pacific Ocean to the highest halls of the Pentagon.

The decisions made and policies enacted far away in Washington almost ensured that a My Lai would happen at some point. It was inevitable. Today we are going to be talking about that big, bad boondoggle of American history, the Vietnam War. In the 45 years since it ended, the United States has been soul-searching in an attempt to grapple with what happened and what it meant.

We've used every permutation of media and art and pop culture and information as a means of collective therapy to process that national trauma. Movies, books, documentaries, paintings, comedies, tragedies, protests. But we never managed to fully absorb it or its visceral lessons into our cultural memory. It is a huge blind spot for us.

When I was in high school, our history textbooks conveniently ended right before Vietnam. We didn't learn about it at all. American history seemed to just end with the triumph of the Civil Rights Movement. For those not old enough to remember it, Vietnam is either a punchline or a slur. But the understanding stops there.

Undoubtedly, Vietnam is a titanic subject, absolutely massive. But in this episode, we're going to narrow the aperture and look at the war within the war. The battle for the soul of the American military. Between the soldiers who brutalized the people of Vietnam and the men who tried to stop them.

Between the good men like Ron Reidenhower and the butchers at MeLie. Between the Goliath of apathy, inertia, and cynical bureaucracy and the handful of Davids who dared to speak up or just simply say, no, I'm not doing that.

Before I let you go today, I'm going to tell you the full story of what happened at My Lai. Minute by minute, bullet by bullet. In the words of the men who saw it with their own eyes and killed with their own hands. In the words of the survivors who had their entire world taken from them on a humid spring morning in 1968. But obviously, we're going to need a little background.

As Marine veteran Bill Earhart reflected on his experience in the war, quote,

I needed to have an understanding of the political, historical realities that brought us to Vietnam before I could make sense of what I was seeing. I began to acquire the other cards in the deck during the three years or so after I got back from Vietnam, but while I was there, nothing made sense because I kept trying to, you know, play this game with 27 cards instead of 52, and it kept not coming out right, and I didn't know why. All I knew was that it was nuts."

So, let's go get our full deck of cards. Then we can try and understand what was so different about Vietnam and what exactly happened to all the good guys.

I'm Ken Harbaugh, host of Burn the Boats from Evergreen Podcasts. I interview political leaders and influencers, folks like award-winning journalist Soledad O'Brien and conservative columnist Bill Kristol about the choices they confront when failure is not an option. I won't agree with everyone I talk to, but I respect anyone who believes in something enough to risk everything for it. Because history belongs to those willing to burn the boats. Episodes are out every other week, wherever you get your podcasts.

700 years before the United States decided to flex its military muscle in the tiny coastal country of Vietnam, another world power was resolving to exert its own influence in Southeast Asia. The Mongol Empire, which stretched from the mountains of Korea to the foothills of Eastern Europe, had set its sights on the fertile subtropical kingdoms that made up what we now call Vietnam.

Kublai Khan, ruler of the Mongol Empire and grandson to the famous Genghis Khan, had decided he wanted to add Vietnam to his vast domain. Another piece of territory to gobble up and squeeze for taxes, tribute, and resources. So in the year 1258, the Mongol army rode south. At the time, this was the largest, deadliest, most well-equipped military force on the planet.

In the 100 years since Genghis Khan had rode out from the frigid grasslands north of China, no fighting force in the known world had been able to stand up to the killing power of Mongol cavalry.

One by one, kingdoms, caliphates, and empires had all been crushed, and now it was Vietnam's turn. The Mongols were extremely confident as they rode into the jungles and the wetlands of Vietnam. And why shouldn't they be? They were basically the all-time undefeated champs of the Eastern Hemisphere. But almost immediately, they receive a very rude awakening.

Their shaggy horses, accustomed to the cool northern climates, begin to struggle in the sweltering heat. The Mongol heavy iron armor turns their bodies into sweat boxes, and the climate gives rise to diseases like malaria and dysentery. And as bad as all that was, that was just the weather forecast.

To the Mongols' surprise, the Vietnamese were very formidable fighters. They excelled in guerrilla warfare, small, lightning-quick ambushes that drained and withered the Mongol army, which was accustomed to much larger-scale, decisive engagements. The key to the Mongol war machine had always been speed and maneuverability, but in the dense jungles and the swampy wetlands of Vietnam, that counted for almost nothing.

The most powerful military in the world had gotten itself into something they were totally unprepared for. In their arrogance, they believed that conquering Vietnam would be a breeze. After all, how could primitive Stone Age peasants resist the most powerful empire in the world? It was a lesson that the Vietnamese would have to teach outsiders over and over and over again over the course of their history.

Suffice to say, if anyone in the U.S. military could have talked to Kublai Khan, he would have said, dude, don't even bother. After heavy losses and a long, frustrating jungle war, the Mongols did eventually manage to reach a deal with the Vietnamese kingdoms, who agreed to pay tribute to the great Khans. But as empires tend to do, the Mongol Empire collapsed, and the people of Vietnam were once again left to their own intrigues and devices.

Following the Mongol incursions, the kingdoms of Vietnam remained largely unmolested and isolated for the next several centuries. Because of the region's proximity to China, it soaked up a lot of cultural and religious characteristics of their big brother to the north. Things like Buddhism, Confucian patriarchy, and an emperor-based monarchy. But the Vietnamese also retained an identity and a language that was distinctly their own.

They called their country, and I'm going to butcher this, I'm so sorry, Dat Nguoc, which means earth and water. They developed the most advanced system for rice cultivation in all of Southeast Asia, and that simple pastoral lifestyle was the norm for the majority of Vietnamese for almost their entire history. Most people in Vietnam lived in the same small village on the same tiny patch of farmland that their ancestors had.

Many of us in the West don't know the name of our great-great-grandfather off the top of our head. Well, the Vietnamese could tell you the name of their ninth great-grandfather. For them, the past and the present were just two sides of the same revolving coin, turning itself over in an endless, perfect cycle. Birth, growth, death, rebirth, on and on.

But it was only a matter of time before they came face to face with the future. In the early 1800s, a Vietnamese scholar received reports of something sitting in the water offshore, belching smoke and covered in hard, shiny armor. He started thumbing through his bookshelf for an answer and he eventually concluded that it had to be a dragon.

Vietnam was as old as time itself. Everything had an origin. Everything had an explanation. And he left it at that. Well, the Dragon was actually a French steamship. And before long, the Vietnamese found themselves absorbed into the colonial French empire. Just as the other great Western powers had done across East Asia, the French set up shop, stuck a flag in the ground, and started plundering the region for all it was worth.

And as for the Vietnamese who protested, to quote the great Eddie Izzard, no flag, no country. The French quickly realized what a truly gorgeous possession they had just acquired. To quote one visitor, the scenery was absolutely intoxicating, noting the quote,

paddy fields in which water buffalo grazed, almost every one with a white egret perched on its back, picking at insects, of vegetation so bright and green that it hurt the eyes, of waits at ferries beside broad rivers the color of Café Crème, of gaudy pagodas and wooden homes on stilts, surrounded by dogs and ducks of the steaming atmosphere, the ripe smells and water everywhere giving a sense of fecundity,

of nature spawning, ripening, and in heat." Even more beautiful and bedazzling were the Vietnamese people themselves. They spoke in a monosyllabic language that relied on subtle tonal inflections to convey a variety of meanings. A single-syllable word could have up to six different definitions based on the way in which it was spoken. One Westerner who became entranced and infatuated with the language said that the Vietnamese, quote,

End quote. That's obviously a very patronizing oversimplification, but you can tell his heart was in the right place. However, the French Empire was not in Vietnam to learn the language or see the sights. They were there for the same reason all European empires were in Asia.

for money, specifically money in the form of rubber trees, which when punctured, bled sap that they referred to as "white gold." Before long, the Vietnamese countryside was filled with plantations that grew rubber trees, sugar cane, coffee, and other crops to satiate the inexhaustible appetites of Europe's bourgeois elite. And naturally, it was the Vietnamese people who paid the price.

For 70 years, the French enforced a brutal regime that caused immense human suffering. And in the year 1920, a young man from Vietnam traveled to Europe and pled his case before the French Socialist Congress, saying, quote, "...it is impossible for me in just a few minutes to rehearse to you all the atrocities committed in Indochina. There are more prisons than schools."

This man's name was Nguyen Sinh Khung. And again, I probably totally butchered that, but these Vietnamese names are very difficult, so cut me some slack.

But he would become known to history by a different moniker: Ho Chi Minh. Ho Chi Minh was, in many ways, a fish out of water. The majority of his countrymen were extremely traditional, laser-focused on the past, and content to exist in the same pastoral cycles that their ancestors had. Well, Ho Chi Minh was completely different. Prior to the French arrival, Vietnam had been their entire world.

But now that snow globe had been smashed to pieces, and Ho Chi Minh had a ravenous curiosity about what lay across the oceans that had ferried these oppressors to his home country. So in 1911, after getting into a little trouble with the law, Ho Chi Minh skipped town and secured a job as a galley boy on a French ship.

He spent the next several years being basically the Vietnamese version of the most interesting man in the world. He traveled to and lived in New York City, Boston, London, Moscow, Hong Kong, and Paris. He worked as a sailor, a pastry chef, and a line manager for General Motors. He had an ear for languages and could soon fluently speak English, French, Chinese, and Russian.

But the more he saw and the more he experienced, the more he realized just how unfairly the Vietnamese were being treated back in his home country. And before long, Ho Chi Minh began plotting and planning to make his country independent once again. As Ho himself summed up, quote, I always thought I would become a scholar or a writer, but I've become a professional revolutionary, end quote.

One man who met Ho Chi Minh described him as, quote, taught and quivering, with only one thought in his head, his country, end quote. Meanwhile, back in Vietnam, things had gone from bad to worse. When World War II broke out, the Empire of Japan rolled over most of East Asia, plucking Europe's prized colonial possessions like peaches off a tree.

The French could not hold on to Vietnam, and soon it was under Japanese control. Initially, the Japanese were a source of inspiration for the Vietnamese. You know, the idea of an East Asian power humiliating Europeans was, as the Vietnamese said, oai, or awe-inspiring. But the Japanese, instead of being liberators, turned out to be just as cruel to the people of Vietnam as the French were.

just another empire looking to squeeze the territory for its natural resources. Colonialism, as it turned out, comes in every shade. In the midst of all this war and chaos, Ho Chi Minh returned to his country. He hadn't seen it in over 30 years. And now a full-fledged revolutionary leader, he took control of the local guerrilla movement and began fighting to disentangle Vietnam from the grasping fingers of Japan.

When two very big bombs put an end to Japanese ambitions and the Second World War in August 1945, Ho Chi Minh and his compatriots took advantage of the power vacuum and seized control of the northern part of Vietnam. For the Vietnamese, this was a triumph, an amazing day, as Ho said to roaring crowds in Hanoi, quote,

End quote.

One Vietnamese man who was just a little boy at the time remembered, quote, Our teachers were so happy. They told us we must go out and celebrate independence. They said that when we were old men, we must remember this as a day of celebration, end quote. But there was just one teeny tiny little problem. With the Japanese ousted, the French wanted their colony back.

In their eyes, Vietnam was not an independent nation. It was a possession gone rogue. And it needed to be brought back under heel. So before the ink is even dry on the peace treaties from World War II, a hot war erupts between the French army and the Vietnamese revolutionaries. Now, this is one of those moments from history that, at first glance, feels small.

A squabble that appears insignificant in the grand scheme of things, but this little territorial scrap in Southeast Asia would become a pivotal axle upon which the entire 20th century turned. But before you steal yourself for any exhaustive lesson in Cold War politics, don't worry. We're not going to open up that particular Pandora's box. If we go down that road, we'll be lost in the weeds for hours, so scratch that.

The basic facts, just so we're all on the same page, are that in the aftermath of World War II, the world becomes bifurcated into two competing political ideologies. Democratic capitalism, spearheaded by the United States, and authoritarian communism, spearheaded by our dear friends in the Soviet Union. With the destructive capability of nuclear weapons now on the playing board, all-out war between the two superpowers is not an option.

not if we still want to have a planet to live on.

But here's the problem. World War II upset the political status quo of underdeveloped nations all over the world, and now all these little countries are trying to decide what kind of government they want to have. Democracy, authoritarianism, capitalism, communism, some mixture of the two. And the U.S. and Soviet Union are trying to influence which way those countries swing. As President Harry S. Truman said to Congress in 1947, quote,

End quote.

It's hard for people of my generation, people who didn't live through the Cold War, to fully appreciate the all-encompassing paranoia that Americans had about communism. It was extremely intense, and after China converts to communism in 1949, the U.S. government becomes unglued with anxiety.

As one British politician observed at the time, quote, There is now in the United States an emotional feeling about communist China and to a lesser extent Russia, which borders on hysteria. End quote. China, it was believed, would infect all the smaller countries around it, adding to the global hegemony of communism's team captain, Soviet Russia.

The nightmare scenario was that communism would spread into Southeast Asia, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and then work its way into the Philippines, Australia, India, Africa, and before you know it, there are Russians crossing the border into El Paso. On its face, it sounds a little bit irrational, but that was literally what U.S. policymakers were afraid of.

This was what they called the domino theory. Once the dominoes started toppling, it would be very hard to stop that chain reaction. The Americans resented any criticism whatsoever. As one of JFK's advisors, Dean Rusk, said to a British journalist, quote, End quote.

Back in Vietnam, our old pal Ho Chi Minh is looking for a sponsor to help him take back his country from the French. He needs weapons, artillery, supplies, and resources. Resources that his very poor country doesn't have. Without someone backing him up, he's going to lose this thing. So Ho Chi Minh, a card-carrying communist, turns to China and the Soviet Union for help.

They say, absolutely, we got your back, and they just pour tons of money and arms and advisors into North Vietnam. And the French, well, the French want their Vietnamese piggy bank back, so they turn to their ally, the Americans. Intent on containing the spread of communism, the United States energetically provides financial and military support.

As an army officer named Sam Wilson beautifully encapsulated, quote, End quote.

Well, the hard choice was made in favor of the French. And by 1953, U.S. taxpayers were footing 80% of the bill for the French war effort in Vietnam. And just like that, a third world nation the size of Florida has been turned into an ideological and literal battleground. But despite all the American money and weapons and expertise at their disposal, the French eventually lose this war.

If you want to take a second to pause the episode and make a joke to yourself about French military prowess, I'm not going to judge you. Suffice to say, this was not the outcome America was hoping for. A French-controlled Vietnam meant a democratic, capitalist Vietnam. But rather than take its toys and go home, America throws its support behind a puppet government in South Vietnam to keep Ho Chi Minh and his forces from taking over the entire country.

So, Vietnam settles into a political stalemate. The communist stronghold of Hanoi in the north

and the U.S.-backed regime operating from Saigon in the south. Initially, the U.S. only sends advisors to equip and train the South Vietnamese army, but they quickly realize that that's not going to cut it. The southern regime is inept, corrupt, and utterly incapable of mounting an effective military campaign against Ho Chi Minh in Hanoi. According to one historian, they were not an army, just, quote, "...a collection of individuals who happened to be carrying weapons."

End quote. So to keep South Vietnam from collapsing, the U.S. has to keep escalating its military presence in the country throughout the presidencies of both John F. Kennedy and his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson. As H.R. McMaster noted, quote, Vietnam was not forced on the U.S. by a tidal wave of Cold War ideology. It slunk in on cat's feet. End quote.

And eventually, in 1965, thousands upon thousands of American boots hit the ground in Vietnam. And they did so with a towering sense of optimism and can-do attitude.

They were going to stop the forces of communism in their tracks and preserve a free, democratic government for the people of South Vietnam. That confidence was tragically misguided. As historian Frances Fitzgerald wrote in her book Fire in the Lake, quote, "...Americans ignore history, for to them everything has always seemed new under the sun."

The national myth is that of creativity and progress, of a steady climbing upward into power and prosperity, both for the individual and for the country as a whole. Americans see history as a straight line, and themselves standing at the cutting edge of it, as representatives for all mankind. They believe in the future as if it were a religion. They believe that there is nothing they cannot accomplish, that solutions wait somewhere for all problems,

End quote. A Marine, a young guy named Phil Caputo, remembered the expectations he had before he left for Vietnam. Quote, End quote. It was an attitude many in the United States shared. According to legendary journalist Neil Sheehan, quote,

We thought we were the exceptions to history. We were Americans. History didn't apply to us. We could never fight a bad war. We could never represent the wrong cause. We were Americans. Well, in Vietnam, we learned we were not an exception to history.

According to a young infantryman named Tim O'Brien, the Vietnam War was boring. Quote, even in the deep bush where you could die any number of ways, the war was nakedly and aggressively boring. But it was a strange boredom.

It was boredom with a twist, the kind of boredom that caused stomach disorders. You'd be sitting at the top of a high hill, the flat paddies stretching out below, and the day would be calm and hot and utterly vacant, and you'd feel the boredom dripping inside you like a leaky faucet. Except it wasn't water. It was a sort of acid.

And with each little droplet, you'd feel the stuff eating away at important organs, and you'd try to relax. You'd uncurl your fists and let your thoughts go. Well, you'd think, this isn't so bad. And right then, you'd hear gunfire behind you, and your nuts would fly up into your throat, and you'd be squealing pig squeals. That kind of boredom.

End quote. When hundreds of thousands of American soldiers arrived in Vietnam, they were the best, most well-equipped army in the history of the world. And that's not hyperbole, that's an objective fact. No fighting force in any millennia could bring the same level of destructive capability to bear. And with that force came an intoxicating sense of power. As war correspondent Neil Sheehan remembered, quote, "...for the first six months I was not at all afraid."

I thought it was thrilling. Skiing over rice paddies in a helicopter. I was a child of the Cold War. We all felt the same way. Americans could do no wrong. We went there to stop these evil communists trying to take over the world and we had very little grip on reality. We felt this country deserved our support.

End quote. A U.S. intelligence officer named Harry Williams was even more optimistic. Quote, End quote.

And Lieutenant Phil Caputo reflected on his own naivete years later, quote, There was nothing we could not do, because we were Americans, and for the same reason, whatever we did was right. Communists were the new barbarians who menaced the far-flung interests of the new Rome, end quote. But all that gung-ho enthusiasm quickly curdled with the realization that this was an army built for the wrong war.

The U.S. Army could never invade North Vietnam directly. They could bomb it, they could blockade it, but they couldn't march troops into Hanoi and definitively crush Ho Chi Minh's power base. Why? Well, doing that might have drawn China, or worse, the Soviet Union, into the war. And that was something no one in Moscow or Washington wanted.

But what the U.S. Army could do was protect South Vietnam from the incursions of communist guerrilla fighters who traveled down from the north and waged an insurgency campaign in the jungles and the river deltas of the south in an effort to collapse the southern government.

American intelligence officers dubbed these Vietnamese communists the Viet Cong, which was then transposed into the military-speak Victor Charlie, which eventually became abbreviated to VC or Charlie. You've probably heard that before in movies, right? Charlie? Well, that's where that comes from.

Well, the United States thought it could go toe-to-toe with Charlie in direct large-scale engagements, just like it had against the Germans or the Japanese back in World War II. But the Viet Cong were not idiots. Going head-to-head with the American military machine would be suicide for a ragtag army of illiterate, poorly equipped guerrillas. So instead they decide to wage a shadow war, only engaging when they were absolutely positive they could win.

And the Americans found themselves presented with a very difficult question. You know, what do you do when an army won't come out and fight you? Well, you go out and you find him. And this evolved into a strategy called search and destroy. And as you can imagine, it was a lot easier said than done. The worst enemy the U.S. military faced in Vietnam was Vietnam itself.

Just like Kublai Khan's army discovered centuries before, the Americans quickly realized what a thoroughly agonizing experience jungle warfare could be.

As a captain named Chuck Rindenlau wrote in a letter to his wife, quote, No single piece of earth is less suited to waging conventional warfare, oozing water into which one sinks to the knees, trees and underbrush so thickly entwined that it is impossible to force a man's body through in many places, giant trees whose upper bowel structure keeps the ground in perpetual half-light, end quote. And the terrain was made even more punishing by the oppressive climate.

The heat, especially for men from the northern and midwestern states, was almost unbearable. The temperatures in Vietnam could get up to 120 degrees with 85% humidity. It rained incessantly, and everything was just wet all the time. Tim O'Brien painted an extremely vivid picture, quote, At night you'd find a high spot and you'd doze off, but

But then later, you'd wake up because you'd be buried in all that slime. You'd just sink in, and you'd feel it ooze up over your body and sort of suck you down. And the whole time, there was that constant rain. I mean, it never stopped. Not ever. End quote. Diseases like dysentery, malaria, and ringworm lurked within swarms of mosquitoes, ticks, and lice.

Poisonous snake bites were just a wrong step away. All of this was utterly inescapable. There's one super creepy story about a GI who wakes up in the middle of the night screaming because a giant leech had attached itself to his tongue while he was asleep.

And another kind of funny apocryphal tale describes a man who began collecting all of his head lice in a little baggie, and then he mailed it back to the draft board in Ohio who'd compelled him into service as kind of like a spiteful gift. I guess that's one way to do it. But what made all of this physical misery even more infuriating and soul-crushing is that the enemy were nowhere to be found.

The VC were everywhere and nowhere all at once. As a Marine veteran named Phil Earhart described, quote, I only saw four armed enemy soldiers in the first eight months I was in Vietnam. There was no one to fight back at. And you begin to think, these people are the enemy. They're all the enemy. End quote.

Another veteran said, quote, all through the whole entire time that I spent out in the field, I could literally count the amount of men or boys that we saw. You go into a village and there was never a man in the village. Never. End quote.

Lieutenant Phil Caputo vented his frustration as well, saying, quote, There was no pattern to our patrols and operations. Without a front, flanks, or rear, we fought a formless war against a formless enemy who evaporated like the morning jungle mists, only to materialize in some unexpected place. Most of the time, nothing happened. But when something did, it happened instantaneously and without warning. End quote.

For the Viet Cong, this was all part of the plan. As one internal communique advised, quote,

End quote. The Viet Cong and their political masters in Hanoi were possessed by a single-minded determination to make America's time in their country so demoralizing and costly that their fighting spirit would break. And one North Vietnamese politician told the New York Times, quote, End quote.

One source of the intense aforementioned psychological tension was booby traps. They ranged from the ingeniously modern, like repurposed mortar rounds, to the brutally simple, like spikes, pits, and tripwire.

As historian Max Hastings wrote, quote, "...mines were often planted in clusters, so that the first crippled a man and the next repped the corpsman who sought to tend to him. Grunts engaged in macabre debates about which limb they would soonest lose. Most claimed a preference for keeping knees and what was above them. In one two-month period, a single marine company lost 57 legs to mines and booby traps."

As an officer bleakly observed, that amounted to almost a leg a day. End quote. Anti-infantry mines, like the famous Bouncing Betty, were a big problem. These mines were initially invented by the Nazis in World War II, of course, and they were specifically designed to shred infantry at close range. Basically, what these things would do is once you tripped the wire, the explosive charge would spring up into the air about waist high and then detonate.

The shrapnel could cut men in half, take off limbs, rip off jaw bones. It was horrific. Well, one day, a man from the U.S. 9th Cavalry stepped on a bouncing Betty, but he managed to stop putting down pressure on it fractions of a second before it could explode.

The problem was he couldn't take his foot off the mine or else it would explode. So an engineer named Harold Bryan had to spend a full hour carefully trying to remove the prongs of the tripping mechanism which were embedded like fish hooks into the guy's boots. Eventually, the men from his platoon just tie a rope around his waist and yank him as hard as they can and as fast as they can away from the mine.

The guy got very, very lucky. Only the heel of his boot was damaged. When the U.S. infantry did engage the VC, they had to deal with the fact that their primary weapon, the M16 rifle, often didn't even work. As one Marine said, quote, the M16 was a piece of shit, end quote.

Soldiers hated this rifle. It required incessant cleaning, which in a rainy, muddy, humid climate like Vietnam was next to impossible. I mean, the M16 would often fail in the middle of ambushes and firefights. A Marine from Idaho wrote the following in a letter back to his parents, quote, Our M16s aren't worth much. If there's dust in them, they will jam. Half of us don't even have enough cleaning rods to unjam them.

Naturally, having to use a rifle that doesn't work 25% of the time is going to lead to some deaths. As one Marine said about a particularly nasty ambush, End quote.

The Viet Cong, who normally stripped dead Americans of every scrap of equipment they could find, often just left the M16s behind. They were considered to be worthless, too unreliable even for guerrillas. When the M16 did work, it was absolutely devastating. But you couldn't count on it when your life depended on it. It was just one more thing for the soldiers to worry about. And of course you'd think that the manufacturer, Colt, would haul ass to address the issue, right? Wrong.

They just shrugged and said, well, the Marines weren't cleaning them properly. To be an American soldier in Vietnam was to be submerged in a climate of constant fear and anxiety. But the human brain is a weird thing, and there's an element of seduction, a thrill to all that danger. As Tim O'Brien put it, quote, Vietnam had the effect of a powerful drug, that mix of unnamed terror and unnamed pleasure

End quote.

Tim O'Brien is the kind of writer who makes other writers jealous. He has so vibrantly distilled his experiences in Vietnam into his books that I'm going to be indulging in more than a few snippets of his writing. For example, the one I'm about to read you is probably my favorite passage of his writing, and in it he describes the bizarre duality of being in a war zone. Quote,

But in truth, war is also beauty. For all its horror, you can't help but gape at the awful majesty of combat. You stare out at tracer rounds, unwinding through the dark like brilliant red ribbons.

You crouch in ambush as a cool, impassive moon rises over the nighttime paddies. You admire the fluid symmetries of troops on the move, the harmonies of sound and shape and proportion, the great sheets of metal fire streaming down from a gunship, the illumination rounds, the white phosphorus, the purpley-orange glow of napalm, the rocket's red glare. It's not pretty, exactly. It's astonishing.

End quote.

Now, there may have been a surreal beauty to the landscape of Vietnam, but before long, the war turned very, very ugly. The VC were ghosts, impossible to find, endlessly ambushing, killing, and laying buoy traps for American GIs. They often found themselves fighting in the same places over and over again. A sergeant named Jim Stevens recalled, quote, sometimes you'd hit an LZ you dropped on two weeks before, and your old trash would still be there, end quote.

And all of that frustration, hopelessness, anger, and aggression only had one place to go. The Vietnamese people themselves. The civilians. And this is the point in the story where you can really start to see the idealistic core of the American military start to warp and rot and change in real time.

Now, before we go any further, I want to preemptively warn you that a lot of the primary sources and quotes you'll hear moving forward contain more than a few racial slurs against East Asian people. I wrestled a lot with whether I wanted to include them at all, but at a certain point it became obvious that to omit the language of that oppression and cruelty would be a huge disservice not only to the narrative, but to the people who suffered because of those racist platitudes.

Not to belabor the point, but it's always been very, very important to me as we navigate cultures from all over the world on this show to approach them with the utmost objectivity and respect. So please understand, the stuff you're about to hear is included purposefully, not carelessly.

In journalist Nick Turse's masterful expose on American atrocities in Vietnam, a book titled Kill Anything That Moves, he spends a lot of time describing the kind of ecosystem the vast majority of American soldiers were trained in, although programmed might be a more accurate word. A veteran named Wayne Smith confided to him, quote, "...the drill instructors never ever called the Vietnamese Vietnamese."

They would call them dinks, gooks, slopes, slants, rice eaters, everything that would take away their humanity. That they were less than human was clearly the message. End quote.

Another vet, Hayward Kirkland, said this, quote, As soon as you hit boot camp, they tried to change your entire personality. Right away, they told us not to call them Vietnamese. Call everybody gooks, dinks. They told us when you go over in Vietnam, you're going to be face-to-face with Charlie, the Viet Cong. They were like animals or something other than human. They wouldn't allow you to talk about them as if they were people.

They told us they're not to be treated with any type of mercy. And that's what was engraved into you, that killer instinct." Another vet named Milord said, "...I didn't become a robot, but you can get so close to being one, it's frightening. For 11 months, I was trained to kill. For eight weeks during basic training, I screamed, kill, kill. So when I got to Vietnam, I was ready to kill."

As journalist Nick Turse recounted, the country of Vietnam itself was referred to as, quote, the outhouse of Asia, the garbage dump of civilization, the asshole of the world, end quote. Another soldier remembered that basic training taught him, quote, the enemy is anything with slant eyes who lives in a village. It doesn't make any difference if it's a woman or a child, end quote.

As Marine veteran John Musgrave said with a heartbreaking sense of retrospection, the training was designed to, quote, end quote.

You may have noticed his mention of children there. Well, that brings us to another big issue. The average age of the soldiers serving in Vietnam. In World War II, the average age of an American soldier was about 26. So, that's a pretty good age, right? You're in the physical prime of your life. You got some life experience, some perspective. But more importantly, your brain has actually finished developing. Well, the human brain isn't fully developed until you're about 25.

The last piece to finish cooking is something called the frontal cortex. That's the part of the brain that controls things like risk-taking, sensation-seeking, and impulsive violence. Now, I'm not a biologist or a brain surgeon, clearly, but that seems like a good thing to have under control in a war zone. Well, the average age of American soldiers in Vietnam was 19. Most NCOs, non-commissioned officers, were only a few years older, 22.

Now let's just stop and think about that for a second. Do you remember what you were like when you were 19? I remember what I was like. And I wouldn't trust the average 19-year-old with a fully automatic weapon or a helicopter or the ability to call down an airstrike, much less with the task of weighing complex geopolitical issues or ethical dilemmas. And again, 19 is the average. Many more were even younger, 17, 18.

In fact, the youngest person to die in Vietnam serving in the U.S. Army was named Dan Bullock. And Dan wrote back to his family in Brooklyn, New York, the following, quote, I think I joined the Marines at the wrong time. Pray for me because I won't be coming home. End quote. Dan had lied about his age to join the Marine Corps and just three weeks after arriving in Vietnam, he was blown apart by a Viet Cong satchel charge.

Private Dan Bullock was 14 years old when he died.

Now, hopefully you can begin to see and understand that the ground war in Vietnam was inevitably careening in a direction destined for tragedy and atrocity. But as badly indoctrinated as the average soldier might have been, a good commander could theoretically restrain those impulses and contain bad conduct. But the dysfunction went much deeper and higher than any bigoted boot camp instructor.

Official army policy, the methodology for which the war was going to be fought, virtually guaranteed that war crimes would start taking place. And that policy went all the way to the highest corridors of the U.S. government. The Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, was a numbers guy. In 1965, he was 49 years old.

McNamara had initially served under President John F. Kennedy in the early 60s, and he'd been selected for the post because of his brilliant analytical mind and his powerful aptitude for numbers and statistics. It was McNamara who had conceived of the blockade that eventually averted the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.

Earlier in life, Robert McNamara had risen to fame by putting his arithmetic bona fides to use in the private sector, lifting the Ford Motor Company back to prominence after years of flagging sales. Well, in the mid to late 60s, McNamara found himself serving under JFK's successor, Lyndon B. Johnson.

McNamara and LBJ could not have been more different. They were polar opposites in terms of attitude and style. McNamara was a straight arrow, with a demeanor as rigid as his perfectly parted, slicked-back hair.

LBJ, on the other hand, as pretty much everybody knows, was a big, bombastic Texas Democrat, a hard-cussing, back-slapping, baby-kissing politician who had served as JFK's vice president before being thrust into the big job after Kennedy's assassination in 1963.

Together, the two men inherited the problem of Vietnam from previous administrations. But Robert McNamara had a very specific idea of how to solve the Vietnam problem. He believed that he could use the same algorithmic, statistics-based approach that had worked so well in the private sector and apply it to government work. Everything would be quantified.

Number of troops, number of bombs, number of rations, time in the field, time on the march, age of combatants, age of enemy combatants, and on and on and on. McNamara was a fervent believer in the power of quantitative analysis. He believed if he had enough information, enough metrics, the Vietnam War would become an equation that simply had to be cracked, solve for X, and win the war.

Well, after much number crunching, politicking, and internal debate, the Johnson administration, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and McNamara decided that if they could reach what they called a crossover point in Vietnam, then the war could be won. The crossover point was defined as the point in time when the U.S. military was killing more Viet Cong soldiers than could be replaced. It was basically an attrition strategy.

Keep fighting on a long enough timeline and eventually the communists would run out of either manpower or willpower. But how do you ascertain when that crossover point is reached? The only way to know for sure is to know how many enemies you're killing in each engagement. Measure the kill rate against the estimated strength of the enemy and you've got a theoretical timeline for success.

It was from this seemingly innocuous conclusion that the root of so much misery and atrocity inflicted upon Vietnam was born. To solve his equation, McNamara wanted body counts.

literal, numerical breakdowns of how many VC were killed in each engagement, how many weapons were captured, and how many villages pacified. From the pristine halls of the Pentagon, it just seemed like good record-keeping. But in the jungles and paddies of Vietnam, it became a direct incentivization for rampant, unrestricted murder.

Let me explain. So for American troops in Vietnam, the pressure to rack up kills becomes extremely intense. One commander remembered, quote, your success was measured by your body count. It came down through the channels, end quote. As one historian noted, quote,

Producing a high body count was crucial for promotion in the officer corps. Many high-level officers established production quotas for their units and systems of debit and credit to calculate exactly how efficiently subordinate units and middle management personnel performed, end quote.

A combat medic named Gary Nordstrom said that there was constant pressure to, quote, get the body count, get the body count, get the body count. It was prevalent everywhere. I think it was the mindset of the officer corps from the top down, end quote.

Another veteran remembered, quote, they would set up competitions. The company that came in with the biggest body count would be given in-country R&R or an extra case of beer. Now, if you're telling a 19-year-old kid it's okay to waste people and he will be rewarded for it, what do you think that does to his psyche? End quote. Now, on its face, asking an army to be more effective at killing the enemy is not a bad thing. You want them to rack up body counts.

But what if you can't find the enemy? What if you can't tell who the enemy is? And what if you're not killing the right people? But you need that body count, right? Your entire career depends upon filling a quota. And you have to find the bodies one way or another. And there was an all-consuming desperation to meet those expectations. As one Marine remembered, quote, If we came across four different body parts, we called in four kills. End quote.

Phil Caputo summarized the issue in his memoir, A Rumor of War, quote, Our mission was not to win terrain or seize positions, but simply to kill. To kill communists, and to kill as many of them as possible. Stack them like cordwood. Victory was a high body count. Defeat, a low kill ratio. War, a matter of arithmetic.

End quote.

The biggest day-to-day problem for American soldiers in Vietnam was that it was almost impossible to distinguish Viet Cong guerrillas from normal Vietnamese citizens. There was no VC uniform. They didn't wear insignias or markers of rank. They essentially just wore street clothes. Most Vietnamese peasants wore loose-fitting pants and tunics that were dyed black so that they would show less dirt and could be worn for longer periods of time before being washed.

Well, the GIs started calling these black pajamas. And after they found enough VC armed with AK-47s and grenades clothed in these kinds of garments, the black pajamas became synonymous with communist guerrillas. As Captain Edward Blake admitted, quote, You never know who was the enemy and who was a friend. Some of them were Viet Cong, but they all looked alike. End quote.

As a Marine vet named Bill Earhart confessed, quote, over a relatively short period of time, you begin to treat all of the Vietnamese as though they are the enemy. If you can't tell, shoot first and ask questions later. End quote.

a U.S. advisor named Captain Chuck Ridenlau out of Saigon wrote home to his family, quote, Imagine a football game in which one of the teams is conventionally uniform, observes the NFL rules of play, but the opposing team, however, wears no uniform and, in fact, has been deliberately clothed to resemble the spectators. This team plays by no rules, refuses to recognize the boundary markers, the ref's whistle, and when hard-pressed at their own goal,

The team's quarterback will hide the ball under his shirt and calmly run into the spectator boxes and defy you to find him. The inclination of the unenlightened is to holler, shoot him up, burn him out, smash the villages harboring the Viet Cong. That is what the VC hope we will do, and it is very difficult to refrain." So, Vietnamese civilians start getting killed en masse.

These search and destroy platoons were absolutely terrified, every hour of every day, and they got extremely jumpy. And the firepower that they had at their disposal was godlike. If a unit received even the slightest bit of resistance from a village or hamlet, they could call in airstrikes, napalm, and artillery that would kill everything and everyone within a quarter mile. A Marine named Reginald Edwards recalled, quote,

Now, I don't want to create the impression that there were no efforts to reduce civilian casualties and collateral damage. The Americans knew that the Viet Cong were living and operating among the civilian population. 80% of the population of South Vietnam lived in rural areas and were spread across tens of thousands of villages and towns and hamlets. And the VC exploited those people for resources and

intimidated them into cooperation, plied them with propaganda, and leached off their harvest to continue the war.

And let's make no mistake, the Viet Cong were very bad. And I am not trying to mitigate the terror that they waged on their own population in any way, shape, or form, just to get that out of the way. Well, before the Americans sent search and destroy platoons, airstrikes, or artillery barrages into a specific area, they'd try to let all the civilians know that they were coming and warned them to get out. Helicopters would swarm over target areas, dropping thousands of paper leaflets, telling the civilians that violence was coming and they needed to run for the hills.

So many leaflets were dropped, in fact, that one villager said it, quote, "...turned the forest white." End quote. Well, the problem was a vast majority of Vietnamese civilians were illiterate. They couldn't make sense of these warnings, so obviously they stayed put. American helicopters also delivered spoken warnings via loudspeakers, but they were often dismissed or went unheard or were spoken in such poor, broken Vietnamese that they were essentially meaningless.

And then there was the tactical disadvantage of all these humanitarian safeguards, because it gave actual Viet Cong a clear, unequivocal warning that Americans were advancing towards them. So these VC units could just pack up and retreat, set booby traps, or prepare ambushes. And you start to get a sense for this awful Catch-22, where in protecting civilians, you're actually helping the enemy.

The result was that American soldiers often walked into areas that were saturated with hostile booby traps, but completely devoid of actual Viet Cong to fight. The only people that were left in the area were the civilians, which again were extremely hard to distinguish from V.C. And it didn't help that the basic rules of engagement for American soldiers were very broad.

When huge, lumbering American soldiers would come marching through rice paddies or helicopter gunships would scream over villages, many of the civilians, naturally terrified by this awesome display of force, would run. Well, that was a mistake. By running, you were signaling that you had something to hide. And American soldiers would often just open up on these people and gun them down. As one vet observed, quote, "...the line between walking and running could be very thin."

Now, you'd think that would be against the rules, right? Just opening up on fleeing civilians? Well, no, because entwined in all of these tactical considerations was another important policy that would take the American military down the path towards daily, normalized atrocity.

American troops could declare certain areas something called free-fire zones, and that meant that anyone in the parameters of that area was an enemy. Full stop. It didn't matter if it was a 70-year-old woman or a 6-year-old boy, American GIs had permission to shoot and kill anything with a pulse in that radius. When entering a free-fire zone, a very common order from officers was to, quote, kill anything that moves, end quote.

One American soldier recalled, quote, if you saw or heard or thought you saw or heard movement in the house next door, you didn't stop to knock, you just tossed in a grenade, end quote. Veteran and writer Phil Caputo remembered a commander saying, quote, if they give you any problems, kill them. Don't sweat it. All the higher-ups want is bodies, end quote.

Now, to make sure they were filling their killing quotas, excuse me, body counts, American GIs would often count dead civilians as Viet Cong. A common phrase was, quote, if it's dead and Vietnamese, it's VC, end quote. The result of all this was the cultivation of a military attitude absolutely indifferent to Vietnamese life.

When an old woman was accidentally shot, an innocent family blown apart by a grenade, or a little boy drenched in napalm, a very particular acronym was used to shrug it off. The GIs would say MGR, which stood for Mere Gook Rule, meaning don't worry about it, they're just Vietnamese.

And what began as careless collateral damage evolved into widespread, indiscriminate murder, abuse, torture, and rape fueled by Pentagon policy, sharpened by military training, and accelerated by a flawed tactical approach. It was nothing short of systemic. As Nick Turst describes the mere gook rule, or MGR, quote,

held that all Vietnamese, northern and southern, adults and children, armed enemy and innocent civilian, were little more than animals who could be killed or abused at will. The MGR enabled soldiers to abuse children for amusement. It allowed officers sitting in judgment at courts martial to let off murderers with little or no punishment.

And it paved the way for commanders to willfully ignore rampant abuses by their troops while racking up kills to win favor at the Pentagon. End quote. Nolan Jones of Alpha Company said, quote, I saw guys just shoot people for nothing. They'd see an old person walking down the trail and shoot. They abused the people, shot people, they burned their villages up, threw their food away, shot up their animals. And I mean, this happened regularly. This didn't happen just one or two times.

Specialist Leslie Lantos corroborated this kind of sport killing, Lieutenant Philip Manuel recalled an occasion where he heard a pilot of a helicopter gunship say over the radio channel, Okay, I'm going to roll in and kill some folks.

End quote. A helicopter co-pilot testified to a court martial jury about a particular mission. Quote, We flew over a large rice paddy and there were some people working in the rice paddy, maybe a dozen or 15 individuals, and we passed a couple of times low over their heads and they didn't take any action. They were obviously nervous, but they didn't try and hide or anything. So then we hovered a few feet off the ground among them with the two helicopters and we turned on the police sirens. End quote.

And when they heard the police sirens, they started to disperse. And we opened up on them and just shot them all down. End quote. And this kind of willful contempt for Vietnamese life wasn't isolated to the front line either. Rear areas weren't safe for South Vietnamese people either.

In April 1969, a 12-year-old boy was picking through a garbage pile on a U.S. military base looking for scraps of food. A soldier from the 82nd Airborne Division promptly put a bullet through his chest. On another occasion, an American medic found two dead Vietnamese children on the side of the road.

He discovered the cause of their deaths shortly after. Quote, I found out that they'd been hit by an American military truck and that there was this kind of game going on, which supposedly guys were driving through town gambling over who could hit a kid. They had some disgusting name for it, something like Gook Hockey or something. And I think they were driving deuce and a halfs, big ass trucks. And the NCO who ordered me to clean the bodies could have cared less. End quote.

A CIA case officer named Bruce Lawler was absolutely furious at the American conduct in Vietnam, saying, quote, How in the hell can you put people like that into a war? How can you inject these types of guys into a situation that requires a tremendous amount of sophistication? You can't. What happens is they start shooting at anything that moves because they don't know. They're scared. I mean, they're out there getting shot at, and Christ, there's somebody with eyes that are different from mine, and boom, it's gone.

End quote.

Now, you might have noticed that I'm including a lot of direct quotes in this episode, even more than usual. Well, because we're talking about an extremely sensitive topic from an extremely divisive war, I'm not going to dive into this stuff without bringing the receipts. And believe me, this is only a fraction of first-hand accounts we have. Most of it is a matter of public record. As the war ground on and American casualties compounded, the mood of both politicians and people at home began to sour.

It's no secret that Vietnam is considered to be mostly a fruitless conflict, but American leadership, from JFK to LBJ to Nixon, were so concerned with saving face, not tarnishing the reputation of the American military, that they kept us over there long after they realized it was an unwinnable war. To illustrate this point, I want to share a, frankly, astonishing phone conversation between LBJ and his national security advisor, George McBundy.

where LBJ expresses some extremely transparent doubts about Vietnam. You can actually go and listen to the tape. It's out there. And you can almost feel LBJ's voice dripping with exhaustion and guilt and frustration. Quote, I just stayed awake last night thinking about this thing, and the more I think about it, I don't know what in the hell. It looks to me like we're getting into another Korea. It just worries the hell out of me.

I don't see what we can ever hope to get out of there. And once we're committed, I don't think it's worth fighting for. And I don't think we can get out. It's just the biggest damn mess. And I just thought about ordering these kids in there. And what in the hell am I ordering them out there for? What in the hell is Vietnam worth to me? What is it worth to this country? Of course, you start running from communists and they may chase you right into your own kitchen.

End quote. Even Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, architect of the body count policy, expressed disillusionment in a memo to the president. Quote, End quote.

Back in Vietnam, the violence and the cruelty were escalating. The consequence-free carnage waged on the civilian population was so prevalent that the 1st Cavalry Division, a helicopter unit, had a cute little rhyme for it. Quote, "'We shoot the sick, the young, the lame. We do our best to kill and maim. Because the kills count all the same, napalm sticks to kids.'"

Oxcart rolling down the road. Peasants with a heavy load. They're all VC when the bombs explode. Napalm sticks to kids. End quote.

At this point, it's very important to clarify that the American military was not a monolith of cruelty and butchery. Far from it. For every GI that shot, killed, tortured, or raped innocent civilians, there was a man who would not participate, would not fire, or reported what they saw to their higher-ups. But those men were often ignored, marginalized, discredited, or outright threatened by colleagues and superiors.

There's one story about a GI who saw fellow soldiers from his platoon sexually assaulting a young village girl. The GI was a big man, easily the biggest in his platoon, and he used his intimidating physical presence to put a stop to the gang rape, saying, quote, you leave that girl alone, end quote. Well, later that night, two or three of the guys woke the good Samaritan up while he was sleeping and said, quote, look, man, you leave us alone or we're going to kill you.

One man who paid a price for standing up for his beliefs was a private named Sven Eriksson. He was a young guy from Minnesota, and in 1966, he was fighting with the army in Vietnam. And the longer he was in Vietnam, he started to notice changes in the other soldiers around him, saying, quote,

From one day to the next, you could see for yourself changes coming over guys on our side. Decent fellas who wouldn't dream of calling an oriental a gook or a slopehead back home, but they were halfway around the world now, in a strange country where they couldn't tell who was their friend and who wasn't. Day after day, out on patrol, we'd come to a narrow dirt path leading through some shabby village,

and the elders would welcome us and the children came running with smiles on their faces waiting for the candy we'd give them but at the other end of the path just as we were leaving the village behind the enemy would open up on us and there was bitterness among us that the villagers hadn't given us any warning

Thinking like that, well, as I said, it can change some guys. End quote. Erickson had even noticed a change in himself. Quote, End quote.

In November of 1966, Erickson was assigned to a six-man team, whose job was to embark on a reconnaissance mission and scout for Viet Cong activity. They were going to be going in the jungle for about five days, at which point they'd circle back and report their findings to base. The sergeant who would be commanding the patrol, a man named Meserve, gathered his men before they set out.

And he was all business at first. The sergeant had a sterling reputation as a capable fighter and an exceptional leader of men. And Erickson felt confident being under this guy's command. But at the end of the briefing, Sergeant Meserve makes an announcement. According to Erickson, quote, After we were briefed by Meserve, he said that we would take a girl with us on patrol, or that we would try to take a girl with us to have some fun.

He said it would be good for the morale of the squad. Erickson thought the sergeant was joking, at first, and then Meserve made his plan abundantly clear.

They would leave about an hour early on their patrol, kidnap the first young, attractive Vietnamese woman they found in a village, and keep her with the squad over the course of the week to rape as they pleased. At the end of the five days, they'd kill her. Erickson went to sleep that night, certain that this was a joke or some kind of empty bravado. The squad left at 4.30 the next morning, and at about 6 a.m., they entered the tiny village of Cat Tuong. It was still dark.

And Erickson watched with astonishment as the other men in the squad searched house to house for a girl they could abduct. Eventually, they found one. A pretty young teenager named Phan Thi Mau was hauled out of her family's house and Sergeant Meserve had her hands tied with rope. Mau's mother cried and cried, but she knew that she was powerless against these five men with automatic weapons.

She tried to give her daughter a scarf before the squad left, but one of the guys just shoved it in the girl's mouth as a gag, and then they headed into the jungle. At about 10.30 in the morning, they found an abandoned hut in the wilderness, and the men started cleaning it up to convert it into a kind of command post. And the girl, Mao, began helping them tidy up without being asked. Erickson noted sadly years later, quote,

She had no idea the kind of place she was helping to prepare. It was impossible for me to have any part in what I knew was about to take place. End quote. At some point during the course of the day, Sergeant Meserve corners Erickson, and he asks him point blank whether he was going to join in the fun. The young private looked him dead in the eye and said no, he would not. This really pissed Sergeant Meserve off.

He got in Erickson's face, called him, quote, chicken shit and a queer, end quote. And when Erickson stood firm against the verbal assault, Meserve took a darker tack. He said that if Erickson didn't participate in the rape, he might end up a friendly casualty. That meant that the five other men might kill Erickson out in the jungle and make it look like an accident. But still, Erickson said no.

Sergeant Meserve, defeated, shrugged it off and went into the hut to assault the girl Mao. One by one, every single man in the squad did the same, except for Erickson. He heard it all happening, but he stood watch on the perimeter. Erickson admitted years later that he gave serious thought to killing his fellow soldiers. But then, quote,

End quote.

Eventually, after the other men had finished assaulting Mao, the sergeant and the rest of the squad left the hut for a perimeter check, and Erickson was left behind to guard the command post as a form of punishment. He was alone with Mao, and once the other men were gone, he rushed inside to check on her. "When Mao saw me come into the hut, she thought I was there to rape her. She began to weep and backed away, cringing. She looked weary and ill, and she seemed to be getting more so by the minute.

I had a feeling she had been injured in some way, not that I could tell. She had her black pajamas on. I gave her crackers and beef stew and water. It was the first food she'd had since she'd been taken away from her hamlet, and it had still been dark then, and here it was in the middle of the afternoon. She ate, standing, and it was whimper, then eat. Whimper, then eat. She kept looking at me as though she was trying to guess what my game could be.

When she finished eating, she mumbled something in Vietnamese. Maybe it was thank you. I wouldn't know. And I told her in English, I can't understand you. I wanted to tell her other things. I wanted to say, I apologize to you for what's happened, but don't ever accept my apology or anyone else's for that. Please don't ask me to explain why they did it. I'll never know. You're hurt, I can see, but how are you? I mean, if I let you go, do you think you can make it home?

I wish Mao and I could have talked. She might have helped me to know what to do. Instead of my having to figure it out alone, it was her life that was at stake. End quote. I wish I could say that Mao did get back to her village, that she managed to escape, but she didn't. The next day, Sergeant Meserve and the other men unceremoniously shot her, then knifed her three times as she was crawling away. Erickson couldn't do a thing.

If he did, he would have been killed along with her. All he could do was make sure that the men who'd committed the gang rape and the murder rotted in prison for the rest of their lives. If he didn't, quote, "...no one would ever know what had become of her. Who else would tell but myself? All the others in the patrol had raped or killed her. I knew I wouldn't rest until something was done about Mal's murder. It was the least I could do. I had failed her in so many ways."

When Erickson finally did get in front of a commanding officer to report the crime, he did not get the reaction he had been hoping for. Initially, the commander asked him, quote, Erickson replied that of course he did. That's why he was telling him.

According to Erickson, the commander then warned him that if he proceeded with his whistleblower complaint, "...the men would get off with hardly any or no sentence at all, and then myself and my family would really have something to worry about." But Erickson was undeterred, and after weeks of searching for someone to take his story seriously, his accusations were elevated to the Army's Criminal Investigation Division.

To confirm his story, Erickson needed to lead the investigators to Mao's body. The young soldier did exactly that, and they found the girl's body right where the patrol had left her after shooting and knifing her. Sergeant Meserve and the other men who'd raped and murdered Mao were taken into custody, and not long after that, a court-martial for all four men was set into motion.

The defense attorney tried to destroy Erickson's credibility at every turn. They accused him of cowardice, perjury, even hinted that he himself had participated in the rape and was trying to save his own skin. But Erickson just calmly and coolly told them what he'd seen and heard. One of the prosecutors asked one of the accused men why he'd gone into the hut, why he'd participated in the rape when Erickson would not. And here is that exchange, quote,

Better to go into the hooch, sir, and keep contentment in the squad, and keep a better, well, how do I explain it? Keep the thing running smooth. It makes for an easier mission and no problems. Then the prosecutor asked the following question, quote, You don't believe the military gives a choice between rules, orders, and conscience? The man answered, The army expects you to do it the army way, and that's follow orders, end quote.

In the end, Sergeant Meserve and the three other men that had raped and murdered Fon T. Mao were all convicted and sentenced to military prison. As for Erickson, he went home to Minnesota and tried to forget everything he'd seen. Erickson reflected on his service years after the war, quote, We all figured we might be dead in the next minute, so what difference did it make what we did?

End quote.

In a conversation with the New Yorker's Daniel Long, Sven Eriksson told the interview that one day after the war, he'd been riding a public bus to work in Minneapolis. And at some point he dozed off. Suddenly, a bump or a jolt in the road caused him to wake up, and he found himself staring into the face of a young Southeast Asian woman sitting in the seat across from him.

In that moment, for a half second, he thought he was back in the central highlands of Vietnam and the young girl Mao was alive. Somehow. Once the days of sleep wore off and the clarity settled in, he realized that she was just a stranger. Erickson got off the bus and he went to work. As Erickson's wife remembered about the day her husband returned from Vietnam, quote, "...the girl was very much with us when Sven came home that day."

And maybe she always will be. Welcome back, everybody. So as we move into the final stretch of this episode, after lots of background, it's time to finally discover what happened at the infamous My Lai Massacre. On March 16th, 1968, at about 7 in the morning, 22 American helicopters were preparing to take off from a landing zone in South Vietnam.

The helicopters were packed to the gills, 1,300 horsepower of screaming metal bristling with rockets, heavy machine guns, and infantrymen. Among them, crouching in one of the choppers, was a young lieutenant named William Calley. Calley was a 25-year-old soldier who'd been in Vietnam the better part of a year. He was a small guy, about 5'3", 130 pounds. He had reddish hair, and people called him "Rusty."

Cali had not gone into the army by choice. After receiving a draft notice in his hometown of Miami, he'd skip town and went west, working a series of odd jobs to avoid military service. Eventually, the government tracked him down and gave him a choice. Enlist or go to jail. And he chose the army.

After getting over the initial jitters, Callie thought the army could be a new home for him. A fresh start. A place where he could become a new man. A big bad warrior spreading democracy around the world for Uncle Sam. Well, the reality was much different.

End quote. One of his own men remembered, quote, End quote.

Another man described him as, quote, a little kid trying to play war, end quote. Cali must have often remembered, with bitterness, one of his very first days in Vietnam. He'd heard rustling in the trees and, thinking that it was a Viet Cong patrol, lit up the area with bright flares. Well, all he managed to do was expose his own position and endanger his men. His commanding officer was furious, and they had the following conversation, quote,

You are without a doubt the most stupid second lieutenant on the face of the earth. End quote. Cali replied, quote, Yes, sir. I know, sir. I'm stupid, sir. What should I do? End quote. Well, Vietnam did not get any easier for Cali or the men serving with him in Charlie Company of the Americal Division. They had been sent into Quang Nai province in the south to track down and destroy an infamous Viet Cong battalion called the 48th.

And as of yet, Calley and the rest of his company had been unable to locate them. All they had encountered were the endless booby traps, ambushes, and nightmarish jungle conditions that plagued Vietnam. Calley in particular had started getting really resentful of the locals, specifically the kids.

He was absolutely convinced that they were deliberately luring American GIs into ambushes and traps. And there was some truth to his suspicions. Some Vietnamese children had been trained by the Viet Cong guerrillas to throw grenades into restaurants or put explosives into U.S. Army fuel tanks. Calley admitted years later, quote, End quote.

He continued, quote, I had no love for these people now. I did have a few weeks earlier, but it had been slowly driven out, end quote. In their search for the 48th VC Battalion, Calley and the rest of Charlie Company had endured daily demoralizing losses. All the landmines, tripwires, and booby traps took a heavy toll, and they racked up about 28 casualties and five deaths. The company's captain remembered with a shudder that one man had, quote,

been split, as if somebody had taken a cleaver right up from his crotch all the way up to his chest cavity." But one night in particular haunted the men of Charlie Company. They had been out in the wilderness searching for the VC, and one of their patrols hadn't come back yet. The men made camp, set up a perimeter, and waited for their comrades to return. Well, in the middle of the night, they start to hear screaming coming from somewhere out in the hills.

It was completely pitch black, super scary, no visibility, and all they hear is just this screaming. A young soldier from Texas described it as, quote, the vomit cry, like death. But it didn't stop, not after one time. It kept going. It got weaker and weaker, but it held out. And it made you want to shit right there in your tracks. End quote.

When the sun eventually comes up, the company goes to investigate. According to historian Howard Jones, they find, "...the body of a tortured American soldier, a bloody hulk hanging from a pole. The Viet Cong had peeled off most of his skin and then doused his wounds in salt water, while forcing him to drink fresh water to remain alive and scream even more."

In the moment, Calley said, quote, What in the hell is happening? Inhuman, crude, and oh my God, end quote. This incident really messes with Charlie Company's heads. In all this time, they'd never found this massive VC battalion that was taunting them with mines and booby traps and skinning their soldiers alive. But in the spring, word comes down from intelligence officers. They'd found the 48th. Finally.

Through a collection of reconnaissance, spies, and intel gathering, they pinned down the 48th Viet Cong Battalion to a tiny little cluster of villages called My Lai, codename Pinkville. This was where the VC in the area had been operating from, and now Charlie Company and the Americal Division had an opportunity to strike and take them out of commission once and for all.

So, at 7:00 a.m., on August 16, 1968, Lieutenant Calley and the rest of his company were ready to take their revenge. The plan was simple. They knew that the civilian population would be leaving that morning to go to the market, and once they were gone, the American strike force could descend on My Lai via helicopters and neutralize the Viet Cong guerrillas. The mood among the guys was strange.

It was a mix of anxiety, anger, and adrenaline as the choppers took off and zipped across the bright green landscape. An advisor in another outfit described the physical sensation of being in one of these choppers, quote,

Sitting on the hard floor of the chopper, we are overwhelmed by noise. The engine throbs behind us. The gearbox winds as it transfers power to the main and tail rotors. The rotors whop away and the wind whistles past our ears. We are in the pilot's hands, deflated.

End quote. Before they left, the men of Charlie Company had a mission briefing. And what was said in that briefing is a matter of huge debate.

It would be disputed in courts martial, newspaper articles, and memoirs for decades to come. But a majority of the men who were there agree that their commanders made it very clear that they were to, quote, kill everything that moves. The captain, a man named Medina, said, quote, our job is to go in rapidly and neutralize everything, to kill everything, end quote. One of the soldiers asked if that meant, quote, women and children too,

Captain Medina responded, quote, I mean everything. When we go into My Lai, it's open season. When we leave, nothing will be living, end quote. The captain's words were no doubt echoing in Lieutenant Calley's head as he sat in one of the choppers roaring towards their drop zone on the outskirts of My Lai.

This was his opportunity to prove himself as a good commander, as a leader of men who could take charge and get the job done. And best of all, they had carte blanche to avenge all of their fellow soldiers who'd lost lives and limbs at the hands of an unseen enemy. But that didn't mean they weren't scared. According to Army intelligence, they would be facing upwards of 250 crack guerrilla troops at My Lai.

fortified in a spider web of underground bunkers and fortifications. Charlie Company would be outnumbered two to one. For most of the men, this would be their first actual engagement with the Viet Cong. As one sergeant remembered, quote, "I was really scared," end quote. These choppers moved fast, and after only eight minutes, they were touching down and offloading their troops. Lieutenant Calley leapt off the chopper and hit the ground.

Dozens of men followed him, fanning out in precisely coordinated lines of attack. At this point, they were only about 100 yards from the village proper, a football field away from the enemy and death. Callie remembered how he felt in that exact moment. Quote,

The fear. I was saturated with it. I felt it. I kept running, but it took extra effort to. The fear. Nearly everybody had it, and everyone had to destroy it. Me lie. The source of it. End quote. As the men got closer and closer, they started noticing something weird. Something unsettling. They weren't taking any enemy fire. There was no shooting coming from the village. One GI observed, quote,

I didn't feel the familiar crack of the bullet or whining beside me." Charlie Company moved closer to the village, closer and closer through the paddies, across the dirt roads, until they were in the midst of the village itself. Still, no enemy fire. All they found were old people, kids, grandmothers, pregnant women. As it turned out, the village had not left for the market.

It was just 500 people having breakfast in their huts and their homes. Suddenly the awful fear of what the GIs had been told to expect slammed into the reality of their situation. The 48th VC Battalion was not here. This was not an enemy fortress. The intelligence had been wrong.

But the adrenaline is pumping, coursing. These guys have loaded rifles, months of pent-up rage, and nowhere to direct it. One of the Americans says, quote, "What in the hell is this? They're not supposed to be here," end quote. The villagers start backing away, looking around with wide, scared eyes, and then a few of them start to make a break for it, to run. The GIs yell, "Dung Lai, Dung Lai," which means "stop" in Vietnamese.

After all, this was a free-fire zone. Then an American soldier says, quote, They must be VC, end quote. One American GI locks eyes with an old man, a thin, skinny farmer. His arms are at his side. The GI raises his rifle and puts a bullet through the man's torso. Then the killing starts. A radio operator who was there that day said, quote,

"Once the first civilian was killed, it was too late. Period. Whoever killed the first civilian, that was the end of the situation. It went out of control." The civilians start throwing up their hands and yelling the only English words that they knew: "No VC! No VC!" It's very tempting to imagine a short, intense period of killing, but the My Lai massacre was episodic.

It lasted hours. The massacre that was beginning to unfold was basically a mosaic of dozens of individual stories of butchery. A soldier named Alan Boyce stabbed an old man in the back with a knife, then shot him while he writhed on the ground. After that, Boyce took another old man and shoved him down a well.

Then he tossed a grenade in a few seconds later, and it exploded, sending water and blood shooting up into the air, and he turned to some soldiers nearby and grinned, quote, that's the way you gotta do it, end quote. On the other side of the village, 20 women and children sat praying at a Buddhist idol in the midst of all the chaos. The incense and smoke swirled around them as U.S. soldiers opened up and tore them all apart with automatic fire.

Private Dennis Conte pulled a young mother aside, aimed a gun at her four-year-old son's head, and forced the woman to perform oral sex on him. Private James Berktold stormed into a hut, pushed aside a young mother and her children, pulled out a .45 pistol, and put a bullet in their grandfather's skull. The old man had been wounded in the shooting, and Berktold later claimed it was, quote, a mercy killing, end quote.

At this point, the U.S. soldiers start gathering up the Vietnamese that they don't outright murder into small groups and clusters, basically prisoners. And around this time, Lieutenant Calley got a signal on his radio from the captain of the company, and this was their conversation. Quote, Captain Medina said, Where are you? Calley says, I'm on the eastern ridge and I'm checking the bunkers out. Captain Medina says, Well, dammit, I didn't tell you to check them out. Get your men in position. Calley says,

I've got a lot of Vietnamese here. Captain Medina says, Get rid of them. Get your men in position now. Cali says, Roger.

Lieutenant Calley put down his radio and walked over to a 21-year-old rifleman named Paul Meadlow, who'd gathered up about 50 men, women, and children, and infants, and was standing guard over them. Calley was concerned that they were losing their momentum and that they might run across the 48th VC Battalion at any moment, and they had to keep moving. And they had to get that body count.

As Paul Meadlow later told the world on 60 Minutes, Callie asked him, quote, You know what to do with them, don't you? End quote. Meadlow replied, yes, he did. And as Callie stormed off, Meadlow believed that he was supposed to keep guarding these young and elderly prisoners. But about 15 minutes later, Callie returned. And the lieutenant angrily asked the young soldier, quote, How come you ain't killed him yet?

End quote. Meadlow replied, quote, I didn't think you wanted us to kill them, just that you wanted us to guard them. End quote. Calley replied, quote, No, I want them dead. End quote. Initially, some of the guys weren't sure what to do, but Calley organizes them into a line and they start shooting their M16s into the crowd of innocent people. It took about a full minute to kill them all.

During this, some of the men stop firing and they become so overwhelmed by what they're doing. The 21-year-old rifleman, Paul Meadlow, after shooting by his own estimation 15 innocent civilians, including babies, breaks down into sobs and he throws his rifle at a fellow soldier saying, quote, you shoot them, end quote. In this group of 50 people, there were kids and infants who hadn't been hit

and were just sitting there crying or dazed looking up at their dead parents. At this point, Lieutenant William Calley raised his M16. According to historian Howard Jones, he, quote, coldly and methodically picked off the children one by one, ignoring other soldiers' shouts until both their voices and the cries of the children had gone silent. Calley asserted with a final air of finality, okay, let's go, end quote.

Callie later told a journalist, quote, End quote.

The killing keeps going and going, and at this point it's about 9 o'clock in the morning. Callie and his soldiers drive a group of women and kids into a drainage ditch, and they open fire. One of the women who managed to survive, Sa Thi Quy, said that, quote, we were chased into the ditch like ducks, end quote. At one point, a small boy, only about four years old, tried to crawl out of the ditch,

and Kali just hurled him back in and shot him. A young woman named Pham Thi Tuan played dead under the rest of the body in the ditch and actually managed to survive. She remembered, quote, their dead bodies weighed down on me, end quote. While she was playing dead, a pool of blood began to form by her head as it dripped down from the corpses above her, and she had to turn her head to the side to avoid drowning in the liquid.

At this point, some of the men start refusing to participate in the killings, which was a huge gamble. Officers in the field were well within their legal rights to shoot soldiers for disobeying direct orders. One man named Gressick told Calley he wouldn't do it, saying, quote, If you want to court-martial me, you do that, end quote. Another man named Robert Maples refused to shoot. So to make a point, Calley got in his face and said, quote,

There were several men who objected to the killing that day or refused to participate, but none of them actively put a stop to the massacre, except for one.

Now I realize I've thrown a lot of individual names out during this episode, and the reason I do that is to emphasize the point that these guys doing these things, or not doing them, were real flesh and blood people. Men with lives, hopes, fears, dreams, and families, and they were real, not extras in a war movie. And in some ways that makes it all the more horrifying.

But there's one last name I'm going to mention. And if you remember any single name from today's episode, remember this one. In my humble opinion, he's one of the few real heroes of the entire Vietnam War. His name was Hugh Thompson Jr. Hugh Thompson was a 25-year-old guy from Georgia with a thick country drawl and a mop of dark hair. And that morning, Thompson was commanding an observation helicopter circling above My Lai.

He and his crew's job was to report enemy troop movements and serve as the eyes and ears of the attack. But before long, Thompson and his crew realized something's wrong. The American soldiers on the ground weren't reporting taking any fire, but yet Thompson kept hearing gunshots. Lots of them. And he kept seeing bodies pile up in the outskirts of the village.

So they fly in for a closer look. And as Thompson and his crew hover about 10 feet above the ground, they see an old woman, quote, flailing around, waving back and forth with gushing chest wounds, end quote. So Thompson pops a smoke canister and throws it down to mark her location for the medic so they could help her. He radios to the ground troops and asks them to assist her. And a voice answers, quote, I'll help her, end quote.

Thompson and his crew watch a captain walk up, nudge the dying woman with his foot, and walk away. Then the soldier turned and shot her multiple times with his rifle. In the moment, Thompson and his crew were shocked, just absolutely floored. One of them yells, quote, son of a bitch, end quote. Thompson says, quote, she's history, and I'm just sitting here, oh my god, he just killed her.

Thompson was enraged. According to his crew, he was, quote, just beside himself. So in that moment, Thompson turns to his crew and says, quote, This isn't right. These are civilians. There's people killing civilians down there, and we gotta do something about this. Are you with me? His crew looks at him and says, Yeah.

As the My Lai Massacre continued to unfold on the morning of March 16, 1968, Hugh Thompson Jr. and his crew landed their observation helicopter, looking for a way to stop the killings.

They landed near the long drainage ditch, which at this point Thompson estimated must have been filled with as many as 150 dead Vietnamese women, children, and old people, and with more being added by the minute. Thompson stepped off the chopper and stormed over to the first American soldier he could find. He gestured towards the ditch full of dead civilians and angrily asked the GIs to start giving aid to the wounded. One of the soldiers said that, quote,

The only way to help them was to put them out of their misery. Thompson yelled, quote, quit joking around, help them out, end quote. Then another soldier walks up to the helicopter. It was Lieutenant Calley. By this point in the morning, Calley had personally killed almost 100 civilians. Calley outranked the helicopter pilot, but Thompson pointed his index finger at Calley anyway and said, quote, there's a lot of wounded here, end quote.

Callie barely even registered it. He said, quote, yeah. Thompson replied, quote, so what are you going to do about it? Nothing, Callie said. Relay it to the higher-ups. The two men go round and round for about a minute, and Thompson quickly realizes that he's not getting anywhere with this guy. So he returns to his helicopter and takes off. No sooner were they in the air than Thompson and his crew see Callie and his men start shooting people and shoving them into the ditch again.

The helicopter crew makes another pass over the area and then something catches their eye on the ground. They see about nine Vietnamese civilians, alive, sprinting towards a shelter. Marching after them and closing fast were 10 American soldiers, armed with M16s and hand grenades. As historian Howard Jones noted, Thompson realized that he had about 30 seconds to try and save these people's lives. He remembered years later, quote, "'I felt like I was in a cage,'

Innocent people were getting harmed. This was not combat. This was not war. I had tried talking. I had tried asking. I had tried screaming. None of that was working." So Thompson turns to his crew and says, "Those people are going to die. We're not going to let that happen." One man replied, "If we're going to do something, we better do it right now." Thompson lands his helicopter between the Vietnamese civilians and the pursuing American soldiers.

Before getting out of the chopper, he tells his crew, quote, they're coming this way. I'm going to go over there myself and get these people out. If they fire on these people or fire on me while I'm doing that, shoot them, end quote. Thompson had just gambled with his life, his future, his career, and maybe even his freedom to save these civilians.

He commanded his two door gunners to level their machine guns at the approaching American troops and to open fire on them if they made any move to hurt the civilians. The pursuing American soldiers stopped right in front of the chopper, and they immediately had to appreciate the men leveling big M60 machine guns at them, weapons that could easily cut any of them in half. One of the soldiers said later that in the moment he looked at Thompson's crew and thought to himself, quote, "'Oh my God, what are they gonna do?'

End quote. No one moves. The two groups look at each other. Americans standing off against other Americans. In the meantime, Hugh Thompson realizes he's got to move fast. He can't get all these people to safety. There's barely any room in his own small observation helicopter. And Thompson counted two women, five children, and two old men. He tries to calm them down, to make them unafraid, even though they had every reason to be.

And out of options, Thompson gets on the radio, and he calls another chopper pilot nearby, a friend he knew personally, someone he could trust. And he says, quote, Danny, I need a favor. I got about nine or ten people here, and I can't haul them out. Y'all land and get them out of here. End quote. The other pilot replied, quote, Where do you want me to take them? Thompson said, Away from this place. End quote.

As they waited for the other, larger helicopter to arrive, Thompson stood between the nine Vietnamese civilians and the ten American soldiers who had been pursuing with the intent to kill them. Thompson stood there the whole time, and a member of his crew remembered, quote, he was shielding people with his body. He just wanted to get those people out of there, end quote. Eventually, the second helo arrives, lands, loads up the civilians, and takes off. They were safe.

Hundreds of people had been butchered in My Lai that morning, but Hugh Thompson Jr. and his men had managed to save nine lives. And they'd been prepared to shoot and kill their fellow American soldiers to do it. In a war as ugly and brutal and dehumanizing as Vietnam, in a military that glorified cyclical destruction, systemic abuse, and casual racism, there were still good men like Hugh Thompson Jr. who stood up and said,

Fuck that. The My Lai Massacre happened in the spring of 1968, but the American public didn't hear about it until 18 months later. Hugh Thompson filed countless complaints and testified to the war crimes he saw with his own eyes. The army ignored him, marginalized him, and actively tried to discredit him. They buried My Lai. Only by chance did Ron Ridenhour, the young whistleblower from the beginning of our story, find out about it.

It took dozens of people, soldiers, journalists, witnesses, and activists to bring this thing to light. Without their moral outrage and rejection of self-preservation, the army would have kept this incident in a file cabinet in the bowels of the Pentagon. Even President Richard Nixon tried to help the military cover up the massive expose, saying, quote, it's those dirty, rotten Jews from New York who are behind it, end quote.

Eventually, the army is forced, through public exposure and political pressure, to prosecute the war criminals who killed about 500 innocent people at My Lai. Upwards of 100 American soldiers took part in the murders. Only 14 were charged and court-martialed, and all of them were acquitted, all except for one man. Lieutenant William Calley was convicted to life imprisonment by a military court in March 1971.

Well, hey, at least we got one, right? No, come on. You know that's not how these stories end. An appeals court reduced Calley's sentence to 20 years, then 10 years, then a few months of house arrest. Shortly later, he came up for parole, and by 1974, Lieutenant William Calley was a free man. Even after all of this, he continued to assert his self-described innocence, saying, quote,

Now, if you're like me, when you hear the story of the My Lai Massacre, the most vivid emotion that starts to bubble up to the surface is anger. Righteous, indignant anger at the men who did this. Well, if you feel that way, you're not alone.

Hugh Thompson Jr., the helicopter pilot who stopped the massacre and saved a handful of lives, never let go of the anger he felt towards Callie and the other butchers of My Lai. When he was an old man, Hugh Thompson was interviewed about My Lai. Even decades later, the man had tears in his eyes, hot, angry tears combined with a shaking, baritone Georgia drawl, and an interview asked him, quote, Can you ever forgive the people who did that?

Thompson replied, quote, No. No, I can't. I don't think I'm man enough to. Because I know, I know the pain and suffering that they inflicted for no reason. No reason whatsoever. There was no threat, you know. There was no enemy. Now, they might have all grown up to be enemy, but that's not what a soldier does in any country. It's just not. End quote. As Thompson told a different interviewer, quote,

We were supposed to be the guys in the white hats, end quote. If you go to the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D.C., you can read the names of the 58,000 American soldiers who died during the conflict. Measured end-to-end, it's about 246 feet long, about 235 names per foot.

Now, if you were to create a similar wall displaying the names of all the Vietnamese people who died, both civilian and military, it would stretch for almost two miles. Anywhere from two to three million names. I don't really have any kind of wise philosophical conclusion to today's episode. In some ways, that's kind of meta because the Vietnam War ended in an equally unsatisfying fashion. It just kind of stopped.

The last Americans fled Saigon in 1975, and the Viet Cong took over the country. The good guys, heavy quotes around that, had lost. The conflict exposed the massive moral liabilities of America's armed forces. It was a breeding ground for incompetence, cruelty, and murder. Flawed policies, institutional racism, and astonishing arrogance virtually guaranteed that a melee or something like it would inevitably occur.

And there are hundreds of smaller, unknown Milais languishing in manila folders in the basements of the Pentagon. According to Nick Terse, there are, quote, more than 300 allegations of massacres, murders, rapes, torture, assaults, mutilations, and other atrocities that were substantiated by Army investigators, end quote. And those are just the ones that were reported and recorded.

But Vietnam was also a place where countless good men, like Hugh Thompson Jr., Ron Ridenhour, and Sven Erikson, fought to curtail and expose that conduct, to take stands against our fellow soldiers in defense of basic human dignity, even when they knew their only wages for such an endeavor would be threats, intimidation, and loneliness. Now, we all want to believe.

need to believe that if we ourselves were put in these situations, we'd act like the good guys. We'd stop the killings, report the murders, stand up to our colleagues, and damn the consequences. But war and life is a lot more complicated than that, and if I'm being honest, I hope that I would have the courage to do what Thompson or Erickson or Ridenhour did. But it's hard to ever know for sure, and that's a scary thought.

But it also reinforces just how brave and exceptional these people were. I want to bring today's episode to a close with one last passage from Tim O'Brien, the soldier-turned-author who has been able to so beautifully distill his experiences of the conflict. In his book, The Things They Carried, O'Brien said the following, quote,

A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things that men have always done. If a story seems moral, don't believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste,

then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. And in the end, of course, a true war story is never about war. It's about sunlight. It's about the special way that dawn spreads out on a river when you know you must cross the river and march into the mountains and do things that you are afraid to do. It's about love and memory. It's about sorrow. It's about sisters who never write back and people who...

who never listen. This has been Conflicted. Thanks for listening. Conflicted is a proud member of the Evergreen Podcast Network. Be sure to follow us on Twitter and Instagram for updates, news about upcoming shows, and semi-daily musings about history. If you enjoyed today's show, please subscribe, rate, and review wherever you get your podcasts. And as always, thank you so much for your time, and have a great day.

My name is Cindy Burnett, and each week I interview at least two traditionally published authors on my podcast, Thoughts From a Page. We talk spoiler-free about their books, so you can listen whether you have read the book or not. And then we delve into things that you most likely won't hear about anywhere else. The importance of the cover design, why they included various aspects of the story, personal details about both the books and the authors' lives, and so much more. You can find the podcast on every major platform, and

and learn more about it on my website, thoughtsfromapage.com. Thanks so much for checking it out.