I was promoted in 1965 to the AP Washington bureau and did enough good reporting to be assigned as the bureau’s correspondent in the Pentagon. I wrote stories raising questions about the integrity of the men at the top.
by Seymour Hersh
I found out about the death of William Calley from his obituary this week on the front page of Washington Post. It was followed by another in the New York Times. Calley passed away months ago in what must have been planned obscurity. I was glad to see the newspapers remind Americans about the Vietnam War and Calley’s role in the US Army’s infamous massacre in March of 1968 of more than 500 men, women, and children in a rural village known as My Lai.
I spent months chasing rumors that led me to Calley’s lawyer and then to an interview with Calley as he was preparing to face a court martial for his role in the horror. He was initially accused by Army lawyers of responsibility for the premeditated deaths of 109 “Oriental” human beings. He was convicted, after trial, of the death of twenty-two. He was the perfect fall guy: an officer who had no business being a leader of men and was presented to the American public as an Army convenience, the rotten apple who spoiled his fellow soldiers. No other member of Calley’s company was convicted of murder or rape, although that was the order of the day at My Lai.
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| U.S. Army photographer Ronald Haeberle captured this image of a group of villagers rounded up during the assault on My Lai. [Image source: WikiMedia Commons] |
I found my way to Calley after getting a tip in the fall of 1969 about murders in Vietnam that were panicking the US Army, whose chief of staff at the time was General William Westmoreland. He had been commander of all forces in Vietnam when the massacre took place, and My Lai was a stink that he needed to go away.
There was an unseen tug of war going on at the time inside the Army and among the Joint Chiefs of Staff, about the disarray and breakdown of discipline that had become rife throughout the war zone. General Andy A. Lipscomb, who was in charge of the Army’s 11th brigade, the parent unit of the soldiers who committed the massacre, which was initially reported as an American combat victory, told a later Army inquiry that “the general feeling over there was that anything that was shot was a VC. I’m speaking bluntly here, but I think that generally was the accepted modis operandi over there.” Lipscomb, a 1938 graduate of West Point, retired from the Army a few days before the massacre took place. I tried to find him, but I never did. He died in 2000.
I was the right guy to get a tip about war crimes in Vietnam. I’d been in the reporting business for eight years by then, starting as a cynical police reporter in Chicago, where I learned there was a difference, in terms of punishment, between police crime and other crimes. Then came the Army and next a newspaper job with United Press in South Dakota, followed by an offer from the Associated Press to come back to Chicago, my hometown. I had been fascinated by the war in Vietnam since my Army days, and I had read enough about the region’s history to wonder why President Lyndon Johnson was pouring troops in where they were not wanted.
I was promoted in 1965 to the AP Washington bureau and did enough good reporting to be assigned as the bureau’s correspondent in the Pentagon. I wrote stories raising questions about the integrity of the men at the top. They were making decisions that raised doubts in the minds of the young officers there who had done combat tours in the war. Inevitably, my stories about their bosses led me to become friendly with them, and they gave me a seminar on what we agreed was the “shitshow” the war had become. I came to believe that the generals were lying about the chances of success, and so were the high-profile civilian stars at the top of the Pentagon, especially Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara, the man President Kennedy chose to run the war. I started getting information from senior generals and admirals who didn’t like official lying about the extent of US bombing of population centers in North Vietnam.
I got in trouble with McNamara for my reporting, and by late 1966 I was pulled off the beat. I resigned. There were no hard feelings because I had learned a great deal at the AP about how to think and write quickly—necessities for an important beat like the Pentagon—and I had gotten to know some generals and admirals who would help me for many years. The anti-war movement was growing in America, and former GIs were speaking out about atrocities they witnessed and, in some cases, participated in.
In late 1967 I was asked to join the anti-war presidential campaign of Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota, a brilliant if often remote Democrat who was not afraid to run against President Johnson. His hatred of the war, but not of the American soldiers fighting in it, matched my view. Politics was not for me, to say the least, and I lasted only through his primary shock to Johnson in New Hampshire and his win in Wisconsin. But I stayed friendly with the senator through his campaign and for decades afterwards. I always believed in his cause.
I’m telling you all this because it will explain why late in the afternoon on October 22, 1969, I jumped to full attention when a young Washington lawyer I didn’t know called me at my office and told me about a terrible massacre in Vietnam that was being covered up by the Pentagon. We had a friend in common, he explained, who told him I was a reporter who might pursue the tip. The immediate problem was that he had no more to say because he couldn’t jeopardize the person, obviously in the government somewhere, who passed him the information.
It was the slimmest of tips. But the information made sense given what I had learned in my time at the Pentagon. I still had Defense Department press credentials to get me in the building for a book I was then researching, and so I began at the beginning. The alleged massacre had taken place eighteen months earlier.
There are terrific resources at the Pentagon, and I started by going through all the murder cases that originated in each service. Nothing remotely matched the tip I had, although the number of alleged rapes that were dropped because the alleged victim was said to be an enemy nurse was more than a little distressing. I tried going through the daily newspapers for the fall of 1968, but that was clearly a nonstarter.
One of the most important things I learned in the Army and as a correspondent in the Pentagon was that there was no need to kiss ass with senior officers. Say what you have to say. Amid my hunting for a magical court case or a Hail Mary newspaper clip, I was walking down a Pentagon corridor to grab a sandwich when I saw a bright and unassuming colonel I knew from my AP days. I’d heard he’d made general after being wounded in Vietnam.
And now he was back in the Pentagon. He was limping forward a few yards in front of me. So I strolled up, gave him a little punch in the arm, and told him I’d heard he’d shot himself in the knee to make general. Sounds silly, but making fun is part of Army culture. He told me he’d heard I’d been fired. TouchĂ©.
So I asked him what his new assignment was. He said he was working for General Westmoreland. The general had been running the Vietnam War at the time of My Lai, and he had to know about the events there. And so I told the officer that I’d heard there was a terrible massacre in Vietnam the year before. What he did next was a magic moment for a journalist. He wheeled around and in obvious disgust slammed his hand on his bad knee and said something like: “That asshole Calley didn’t kill anyone higher than this. There’s nothing there, Sy.”
Bingo.
But did I say, “You’re right”? Probably. Did I have every intention of dashing around now that I had a name—though I initially spelled it “Kally”? Yes. Back to the library, but not in the Pentagon—I knew I was onto something big, maybe very big—and it was time to head to the public library. I did find a three-paragraph clip in the New York Times from September 8—six weeks earlier—about a Lieutenant William Calley who was being held at Fort Benning for the alleged murder of an “unspecified” number of civilians in Vietnam. A call to the public information office at Fort Benning led an officer there to speculate that Calley had shot up a bar in Saigon. No hint of anxiety about the question. Did I have the right guy? I looked in vain for the name of a lawyer.
I had a cup of coffee with a man with whom I’d worked when I was at the AP, a senior aide to Rep. L. Mendel Rivers of South Carolina, chair of the House Armed Services Committee. His boss was a leading hawk on the war, and if there was such a massacre, he would have been informed of it. He told me he knew there was “a mess” that had been briefed to the chairman of the committee. Some guy had gone crazy, he said. It was being handled. No reason to worry.
You bet, I thought. Calley had to have a lawyer, but I couldn’t find him. So I went back to my original source and told him he was right: something big had gone down. But I needed him to go to his sources and get the name of Calley’s lawyer. He tried, but all he could get was a last name: Latimer. I went to the local phone book and started calling up lawyers with the last name Latimer. I got lucky. One of them told me about a former military judge named George Latimer who had retired and was now practicing law, with a specialty in defending GIs, in Salt Lake City. He had served on the US Court of Appeal for the Armed Forces in Washington.
I finally reached the right Latimer in early October and told him I knew about the Calley case and couldn’t understand why one second lieutenant would be the key suspect in what I was told was a mass killing. I borrowed some money and flew west the next day. I got to Salt Lake City at night and went to Latimer’s office bright and early the next morning. I’d learned that he was an elder in the Mormon church. He was a kindly man but very cautious. He didn’t like the fact that a reporter knew about the case, and he assumed, so I thought, that someone in the Nixon administration leaked the story. There was a firefight, Latimer told me, with crossfire between Calley’s platoon and a hardcore Viet Cong battalion. I then blurted out to the judge—was it a bluff or just an instinct I had?—that for reasons having to do with the high level of worry about the case, I had come to believe that as many as 150 civilians had been murdered. All under orders.
With this, Latimer went to a file cabinet, pulled out the Army charge sheet against Calley, and began to read from it. He laid the document down flat on his desk, and put his glasses on. I could see the top of the sheet and the first few paragraphs, and I started to copy them, word for word, very slowly, while pretending to take notes, as we chatted about the plight of his client. It wasn’t the highest form of journalism, but neither was mass murder the highest form of military behavior. I got the first paragraph down word for word—maybe—but for sure got the first line in which Calley was accused of murdering 109 “Oriental” human beings.
Now I had some proof, but I needed to find Calley. Latimer told me he couldn’t help, but when I said I was going to fly to Fort Benning, he said nothing. I knew the base was a major relay station for young graduates of West Point to get additional training before being sent to Vietnam. It was the base where Calley was charged and where, I assumed, he would be tried.
I made a stop home in Washington to say hello to my wife and our young child, and then took an early morning flight to Columbus, Georgia, home of Fort Benning, a base as large as the five boroughs of New York City. There were no issues back then with getting onto the base in my rental car, and I figured Calley, if he was detained there, would be in one of the various stockades scattered around.
The first few visits had the same beats: I pulled up in front of the stockade and parked in the spot for a senior officer who never seemed to be there. I went inside in my ratty suit and tie and told a GI clerk I wanted to see Bill Calley, hoping that the clerk would take me for a lawyer. No Bill Calley, I was told. Another stockade, another clerk, and no prisoner named Calley. I’d driven more than 100 miles around the huge base with its firing ranges and training grounds, and I’d wasted hours. It was time to go back to the main to the Post Exchange for a burger and some thinking. I’d already checked at the Army offices for incoming and outgoing officers and been told nobody named Calley was on the books.
It was now early October. I’d been wrestling with the Calley story for more than a month. With each day the odds increased that the massacre story might slip out. As a reporter, I was in my most competitive frame of mind. Calley was my story.
Calley had returned in August from another combat post in Vietnam, where he had been promoted to 1st Lieutenant, so Latimer had told me. I recalled from my AP days in the Pentagon that military phone books were updated and published every three months, and one of those months was June. When Calley returned from Vietnam in August, he was yet to be charged. So he might have a new listing in the June phone book. I dashed to a phone booth, called the base operator, and asked for the new listings in the June book. It took some time, but there was a new listing for a William Calley at an Army engineering barracks. Off I went. By now it was mid-afternoon, and I was looking at two three-story barracks separated by an office in between. I got to the barracks and parked the rental car a block away in an excess of bad-cop-movie caution. If Calley was parked there, as I hoped, was he being watched?
I went through the three floors on one side. The bunks were made perfectly, but there was nobody there. I crawled—literally crawled—past the office connecting the two buildings and renewed my hunt for what I hoped would turn out to be Calley on the other side. And lo and behold on the second floor there was a GI dead asleep on a top bunk in the middle of a workday afternoon. It had to be Calley. But no, on closer look the GI was young and blond, clearly not an officer and clearly not my man. I was dismayed but still curious. I jarred the kid awake and asked what the hell he was doing asleep at this hour. The kid told me the friggin’ dumb Army lost his discharge records and now he was waiting for new papers. He was missing the harvest at the family farm in Ottumwa, Iowa. The crummy Army.
“So what do you do?” I asked.
“Nothing,” he said, “except sorting and handling the mail for the guys in the engineering unit.”
“Ever hear of a Calley?”
“You mean that guy that killed all those people?”
I said yes.
“I forward his mail to battalion headquarters.”
“Where’s that?”
“No sense going,” he said, “Smitty, who handles the mail there, just got busted from sergeant and he is pissed.”
“Take me there?”
“No way,” he said.
I told him that in eight minutes I’d be in a blue Chevy on the street behind the barracks. It was badly needed action for the kid, and he agreed to meet me on the street. He made it, and off we went for half an hour to the battalion headquarters. The kid insisted I drive him back. It was too far to walk, he said. I took him back, and I returned to the battalion headquarters. I really liked the kid, and I wondered for years if he made it home for the harvest.
It was an old wooden one-story building. An African-American sergeant was leaning back on a chair in front of the office door, enjoying the autumn sun and chewing on a cigar. A clichĂ© in the flesh. I stepped out of the car, and, remembering that the clerk just got busted, I said in a stern voice, “Sergeant, get Smitty’s ass out here now!” The sergeant laughed—Smitty’s done it again—and out came a skinny and very rattled Smitty, with threads from the torn stripes still on his sleeve. “Into the car,” I said. Once he was inside, I told Smitty not to worry. I was here looking for Calley. “Where is he?” I said. “I know his mail comes here.”
“I don’t know,” he said. “All I have is his 201 file.”
“His what?”
“All of his official Army papers.”
“Get them.”
He paused for a minute and said, “OK.” He returned carrying a thick file. I opened it, and the first page I saw was the same charge sheet I’d seen a few days early in Judge Latimer’s office. I quickly copied as much as I could. I didn’t want to take the sheet because to do so would bury Smitty. There was an address in the file, however, showing where Calley was now living: in a condo off the base in the city of Columbus.
It was now closing time, and there was rush-hour traffic getting to the condo. It was a townhouse on a quiet street, and just as I was ready to pull in, I was beaten to the driveway by a car carrying three brand-new 2nd lieutenants who turned out to be fresh out of West Point. I pulled in behind them, and I explained who I was and why I was there. I was invited in, and somebody fixed me a drink. We had a long discussion of what Calley had told them about a massive firefight in which some civilians were killed, perhaps by Viet Cong fire. Their story matched what Judge Latimer had told me. Calley was being a good client.
We drank and talked. They were nice guys who had no idea what was in store for them in Vietnam. Finally, one of the young officers told me that Calley, while awaiting trial, was stashed in fancy quarters on the base reserved for officers ranked colonel and higher. As a former GI, I was stunned and a little bit fascinated. The Army stashed their most important detainee in the luxurious quarters for visiting colonels and generals? Such places, I knew, invariably came with tennis courts, a pool, sometimes multi-room suites, and fresh linens. I would have been less surprised had the young new lieutenant told me that Calley had been parked in a neonatal intensive care unit for preemies at the base hospital.
I had another drink. The Army was surviving, so I thought, on cheap bourbon. I headed off to the senior officers’ quarters to dig up Calley. I was tired and hungry, but there were still hours of daylight left. Calley, here I come. Followed perhaps, by fame, fortune, and a lot of prizes. Those were the thoughts in my head.
There were two, maybe three buildings, each with two wings. I started knocking at one end, saying: “Calley, Calley, you there?” Most doors didn’t open: nobody home. Those who did open the door told me to beat it. Hours later, I was halfway through the buildings with nothing to show for it. It was now dark, and I was ready to check into a cheap motel and come back at dawn.
I walked out past a large parking lot that was mostly empty, but there were two guys working under a car with a long extension cord providing light. I told myself it was late and that everyone knows the rule: “Do not take the last run at a ski resort.” But I did. I walked over to the car, and I hollered my new mantra: “Calley? Bill Calley?”
A guy slid out and asked, very politely: “Who are you?” It was as if he was always getting called out from under a car.
I told him I was a reporter from Washington looking for Lieutenant Calley who was in a lot of trouble. The guy—he turned out to be a chief warrant officer who’d flown hundreds of combat missions in attack helicopters—said: “Follow me.”
We got to his place and he told me Calley was living upstairs, but he was out water-skiing today. He would be back late. Water-skiing? A guy who might be on the way to death row? I accused him of giving me a hard time. I was also beginning to like him. He insisted that he wasn’t kidding. Calley, he said with a shrug, does a lot of water-skiing.
I figured, What the hell? Why not learn all I can from him. The pilot poured me another bourbon, washed up, and went on to fill me in on all the trouble Calley was in and why the fuckin’ Vietnam War sucks. He was at the top of his rank as a chopper pilot and would probably retire as soon as he could. He was terribly bright and a good man, somebody to go into a foxhole with. He was clearly troubled by the war and his role in it. He asked lots of questions about who I was and what I did. I liked talking to him and drinking his booze. He fed me some dinner.
The night went on, and around midnight I’d just about had it. I told him I had to go—I ended up getting Christmas cards from him for years—and he walked me outside. We chatted for a while with mosquitoes buzzing around, and I started hiking to my car.
“Hersh!” he called out. “Rusty is here.”
“It’s too late,” I said.
“No,” he told me, “it’s Calley.”
Rusty turned out to be his nickname. I introduced myself and told him I was a reporter from Washington.
“Yeah,” Calley said. “My lawyer told me you’d be coming around.”
I remember thinking: This guy has no idea how hard I’ve been looking for him.
He invited me to his place. More bourbon was poured, and he started talking: stuff about a firefight and dirty rotten VC all around. A firefight—almost as if he believes it. I didn’t understand why he was being so open with someone he didn’t know. Perhaps Latimer told him to tell me his account of the day at My Lai. But I wasn’t not about to raise that issue. I was taking notes and going, Yeah, yeah, yeah.
He was short and slight with translucent skin. You could almost see his blue veins. He was, of course, terrified, and he seemed to understand that the next time he would see reporters would be just before beginning a long prison sentence at hard labor. At one point he went to the john. There was a large mirror on his side of the door that showed he was vomiting dark red arterial blood—the product of a significant ulcer or two, so I guessed. He was masking a hell of a lot of anxiety, and perhaps terror. But I didn’t allow myself sympathy for his plight. He had a choice to make at My Lai, and he chose to kill innocents and to order his subordinates to do the same.
At three or four in the morning, we drove out in my car to an all-night PX on the base, got a steak and more wine, and then went to a hospital to pick up his girlfriend, an Army nurse who was getting off a late shift. She was horrified to find a reporter in the car but gamely came with us and made dinner. At 6 am or so, Calley told me that his much admired company captain, a guy named Ernest Medina, who was known to his troops, I would later learn, as “Mad Dog Medina,” was also at Fort Benning awaiting legal proceedings. Medina would tell me, Calley said, that all he had done at My Lai came pursuant to Medina’s direct orders. He dialed a number, and Medina—about whom I knew nothing—picked up immediately. Calley explained that a reporter from Washington was on the phone with him.
“Please, Captain,” Calley said, “tell him what I did was under your orders.”
“I don’t know what you are talking about,” Medina said, and he hung up. Calley was stricken.
It was clear that he’d just figured out that he would be the sacrificial lamb. The bad apple. It would all be on him. The generals and colonels and captains who planned the slaughter—to get a high body count in the war and make the generals in Saigon and Washington happy—were going to ride into the sunset.
I was totally exhausted. I told him I had to leave. Calley, in a panic, said: “Let’s go bowling.”
It couldn’t happen. I left, got to the airport, took a plane to Washington, and, exhausted as I was, I began writing the first of what would be five stories over the next months about what happened at My Lai. It was almost impossible to get a serious media company to publish the story. Both Life and Look magazines, who had talked to me earlier in the year about writing for them, rejected my account, with its interview with Calley. I was afraid to go to the New York Times—I’d been writing for its Sunday magazine—because I worried the paper would take over the story and exclude me. But I got the story out. And the ball began unraveling.
After my initial Calley reports were published—the first appeared on November 12, 1969—I continued to chase the story. It wasn’t about fame and glory by this point. This was something that I, as a child of immigrants who had the greatest of love for the freedom and offerings of my country, had to share. What happened at My Lai could not stand.
And so I tracked down other enlisted men who served under Calley. One of them was a farm boy from rural Indiana named Paul Meadlo who, on Calley’s orders, shot many terrified men, women, and children who’d been marched into a ditch. At the time, as Meadlo and his colleagues didn’t know—make that couldn’t know—the soon-to-be-massacred victims, once in the ditch, were entitled to all of the benefits awarded prisoners of war under the international Geneva Convention, to which America was a signatory. Stuff like food, safe quarters, access to mail, etc. They were denied these things along with their lives.
It took me a few weeks as I was flying around America in search of My Lai veterans to find a telephone number for Meadlo. I called and got his mother’s permission to come and talk to her son, if he would agree. Paul had stepped on a land mine on the day after My Lai, and part of his foot was blown off. While waiting for a helicopter airlift, to the horror of his army mates, he kept on saying: “God has punished me, and God will punish you, Lieutenant Calley, for what you made me do.”
(I learned years later on a spur-of-the-moment call I made to Meadlo’s older brother—by this time Paul wanted no more to do with me or My Lai—that Paul had never been able to shoot rabbits when the two of them went hunting for dinner until he joined the Army. “Well,” his brother said drily, “the Army did teach him how to kill.”)
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| Civilian defense attorney George Latimer speaks to his client Army Lieutenant William Calley as they leave a court-martial hearing |
When I pulled up to the farm in New Goshen, Indiana, Paul’s mother walked outside to meet me. She told me Paul was waiting for me, and pointed me to a separate wooden shack that was now his home. This dignified woman, who was running a hardscrabble farm essentially by herself, said to me: “I gave them a good boy, and they made him a murderer.”
I went inside and said hello to the waiting ex-GI. The first thing I asked him was to take off his artificial leg and show me the stump. He did so, and he talked about the mechanics of dealing with his injury. I then told him I wanted to hear the story if he was willing to tell it. He started talking, and I started taking notes.
I had a story that made me weep for the dead and weep for their killers. It went boom, and within a day or so Meadlo was telling his tale to the world in an interview with Mike Wallace on the CBS Evening News.
I never saw or spoke to Calley again. I did not want to.
Seymour Myron "Sy" Hersh is an American investigative journalist, and political writer. Hersh first gained recognition in 1969 for exposing the My Lai Massacre and its cover-up during the Vietnam War, for which he received the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting.
Seymour Myron "Sy" Hersh is an American investigative journalist, and political writer. Hersh first gained recognition in 1969 for exposing the My Lai Massacre and its cover-up during the Vietnam War, for which he received the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting.
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