Miracles and Massacres (32 page)

“Really.”

“Because nobody told me.”

“Sorry to hear that, mister . . .” She wiped the rainwater from her glasses, and squinted at his name tag. “Mr. Davison.” She replaced her spectacles and made a note on her pad. “Should we call up your boss, because—”

“No, no,” Everly said. “I believe you, let's not make any waves. Come on with me, we'll find whoever you want to talk to.”

She told him to call her Julie and relayed the name of the resident she'd come to see. When Everly checked the room assignments it was clear that this was more bad news for the trouble-free evening he'd planned. This reporter wanted to talk to that man on D-Ward, the very one who was still down there raging like a lunatic.

“Do you mind if I slip back there so I can see your screen?” Julie asked, edging past him without really waiting for his answer.

“I don't think I'm supposed to—”

“It's okay, thanks.” She sat at the computer and started typing and clicking.

“I don't want to lose my job,” Everly said quietly.

“Neither do I.” In a few seconds she'd found the records for room D-31. “Tell you what, there's a hundred dollars cash in it for you, if I get what I need for my story. How does that grab you?”

He gave a look around the security station to make sure the coast was clear. “Sounds fine to me, I guess. Just—”

“Good.” After a bit more searching she seemed to find what she was looking for. “Morgan Campbell, age fifty-nine,” she said to herself, and she began writing again on her pad. “No next of kin . . . VA transfer, diabetes, emphysema, cancer survivor, diagnosed in '01 with early-onset Alzheimer's. . . .”

“Alzheimer's,” Everly repeated. “So how're you going to interview him if he can't remember anything?”

“Memory's strange in these patients,” she said, still scrolling through the screens of confidential data. “It's first-in, last-out. He might not know who the president is, or what day it is, he might not even remember his breakfast this morning. But I'm betting he can tell me all about what happened forty years ago. Tomorrow's the anniversary.”

She'd said this as though Everly might know what she meant. “Anniversary of what?” he asked.

In the silence that followed, Julie looked up from the computer. “Ever met a mass murderer, Mr. Davison?”

His checkered past being what it was, he had to think about that for a moment. “What do you mean, like three or four people?”

“Like three or four
hundred
. Maybe more.”

The lights flickered for a second as thunder rolled outside, and right then Everly Davison felt the full weight of the gold plastic badge pinned on his chest.

“No,” he said, “I never have.”

She nodded. “Then come with me.”

•   •   •

When they got to Morgan Campbell's room, the old guy was strapped down hand-and-foot and the safety rails on the bed were lifted and locked in place like sideways prison bars. All in all, he didn't look like much of a threat.

Campbell watched them intently as they stood in his doorway. Everly had quite an array of guard's accessories dangling from his belt, but much like his badge, they were largely for show. The most serious weapon allowed in his possession was a sample-size tube of pepper spray, its contents probably about as potent as the hot sauce at Taco Bell.

“Who is this guy?” Everly whispered.

“Ever hear of My Lai?”

“Me lie?”

“My Lai, Quang Ngai Province, Vietnam. It's a little town in a region the Americans called Pinkville during the war. That's where Mr. Campbell was, forty years ago tomorrow.”

“What did he do?”

“That's what I'm here to find out.” She stepped to the side of the bed with Everly behind her. She raised her voice a bit; it had said in his record that he was somewhat hard of hearing. “Mr. Morgan Campbell?”

The man nodded, his eyes locked on hers. He reached out, to the extent that the straps would allow. There was a tremor in his right hand, and the skin of his palm looked like it had been ravaged by an old burn that had never fully healed.

“My name is Julia. I'm a reporter. I'd like you to tell me what you remember about March 16, 1968.”

“Pinkville,” he whispered.

“That's right.” She had her pad and pen ready, resting on the bedrail. “I want you to tell me all about it.”

“Why?” The old man looked at Everly, and then back at the reporter again.

“Why not?” she replied.

“Because once you've been there,” Morgan Campbell said, “you don't ever come all the way back.”

June 1967

Morgan Campbell was nineteen years old when his number came up in the draft. He knew boys who'd dodged their service one way or another, but that kind of thing wasn't for him. His dad had been a bombardier in World War II, so going overseas to fight for freedom and stop the spread of communism seemed like the right and natural thing to do.

Before Morgan knew it he had become a soldier. He was too young to buy a six-pack of beer, but after nine weeks of basic the army suited him up, gave him an M60 machine gun, and put him on a transport bound for the last phase of preparation before their first tour in the Vietnam War.

The troops of Charlie Company trained in Hawaii for a time, learning guerrilla tactics and how to survive in jungle terrain. Those were grueling weeks, but Morgan and his squad had made it through with honors. Under the hard and watchful eye of Captain Ernest “Mad Dog” Medina they'd posted some of the highest marks on record. By the time their training was over they were tough as nails and had bonded like brothers, all 140 of them.

•   •   •

Four men stood out to Morgan Campbell in those early days, all for different reasons.

The first was Captain Medina. War truly is hell, Medina reminded them, and so the highest goal must be to win as soon as possible. He told them the only proven way for a fighting force to win was simple: You kill people and break things, better and faster than the other side. He called his men “death dealers” and handed out packs of cards that were all aces of spades. One of those cards was to be left on every dead gook body, to let others know that Charlie Company had been there. Medina hated the enemy, loved his country, was admired by most, and respected by all.

The second memorable man was Lieutenant William Calley. The soldiers of his First Platoon saw him as something of a blowhard and a bungler, and from what the men could tell he was little more than a butt-kissing yes-man to his superiors. Medina had nothing but scorn
for Calley, but that just made the lieutenant try all the harder to impress him.

The third man was Billy Weber, whom everyone genuinely liked and vice versa. Billy may have been the only soldier in the U.S. armed forces whom Lieutenant Calley could call a friend.

The last man was Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson Jr. Thompson flew a little OH-23 helicopter on recon and rescue missions, risking his life every day and night, flying low cover and drawing enemy fire so the troops on the ground could get early warning of any ambush up ahead. He saved a lot of men with the risks he took. Life expectancy was short for such pilots and their crews, but he was damned good at what he did and as brave as they came. No one ever saw Hugh Thompson sweat.

•   •   •

Morgan Campbell's first month in Vietnam passed with almost no fighting at all.

When Charlie Company visited villages on their patrols, the troops were welcomed by the Vietnamese locals. The infantry would march in and establish a safe perimeter, give some candy to the kids, and help old ladies with their chores. It was Boy Scout–type stuff, building goodwill and winning hearts and minds.

Where's the war?
That's what the men asked themselves on the long hikes back to base. It was a good time, if any time spent in a war can be called that. Between hitting the bars and beaches off duty it felt more like their training stint in Hawaii than a battle zone, but the peace was deceptive. They all knew it couldn't last.

And it didn't.

Tet Offensive

January 31, 1968

The widespread violence came without warning, in the midst of a mutual cease-fire agreed to in observance of the Vietnamese New Year's celebrations. In the largest coordinated enemy campaign to date, eighty thousand communist troops stormed into more than one hundred cities and vital strategic targets across South Vietnam.

The Americans and their allies were taken completely by surprise.
While some of the lost territory was quickly regained, the war had suddenly and permanently been redefined. The Vietcong and the North Vietnamese Army had made it clear to the world that they were more than a match for any invading force, superpower or not, and they were in it for the long haul.

A few days earlier, Charlie Company had been reassigned to Task Force Barker. This battalion-sized unit was stationed along the coast in the central region and their circle of operations included a particular stronghold of enemy activity. The place was called Pinkville because of the odd color that was used to label it on their tactical maps.

On the second night of the Tet Offensive, Morgan Campbell and Charlie Company were camped close enough to Quang Ngai City to see in the distance the very forces they'd soon be fighting. It was the Vietcong Forty-Eighth Battalion—the VC equivalent of the Green Berets—rumored to be the most elite and organized unit the enemy possessed, and Quang Ngai was thought to be their home turf.

It would be Charlie Company's job to go out, meet the Forty-Eighth Battalion head-on, and destroy them.

Pinkville

February–March 1968

In a daily briefing before a routine patrol, one of the brass actually had the stones to quote Chairman Mao with a straight face.

The enemy is the fish
, he'd said,
and the civilians are the sea
.

Mao had been preaching the gospel of guerrilla warfare when he said something similar, but now his saying was being repurposed as warning to the troops. The major's point was that you can't always tell who's who, so you can no longer trust anybody Vietnamese. There were stories of old ladies and even little kids walking up to a sentry, giving him a big hug, and then pulling the pin on a grenade hidden under their smock.

Over the weeks since Tet, something fundamental had shifted in the atmosphere.

As the fighting had intensified, the locals started to change. Before the offensive they'd welcomed the Americans into their villages. Now
that Quang Ngai was a free-fire zone, and regular bombing and shelling had begun across the region, honest friendliness was replaced with tight-lipped suspicion and distrust. The soldiers could feel themselves being watched from every shadow.

The locals knew where the minefields and booby traps were set, and where the snipers of the Forty-Eighth were hiding—but they didn't tell. They'd prefer to keep their silence and let a man walk right into a trap and lose his leg or his life.

As time went on, and reports of daily casualties mounted, there was a growing feeling among the American troops that if the civilians were aiding and abetting the enemy, then weren't
they
the enemy as well?

The war that Morgan Campbell and Charlie Company had trained for was different than the one that was closing in all around them. There were no uniformed opponents and few, if any, solid strategic goals. They'd go out on patrol every day, waiting for the inevitable attack and hoping the odds would be with them. The VC Forty-Eighth was fighting a war of attrition, picking off their enemies man by man and then retreating into the impenetrable jungle, knowing that the Americans couldn't fight what they couldn't see.

Yet even with those strategies in play, and entire villages of locals working against them, Charlie Company still hadn't taken any major losses as the war escalated. But that changed fast.

One morning, a patrol led by Lieutenant Calley was ambushed by sniper fire down by the river. No sooner had they dived for cover when Calley ordered the platoon to get up and cross the river, right out in the open, and go after the sniper nest dug in on the other side. The men knew it would be slow and dangerous wading through the water, but they followed their orders. They'd hardly taken one step forward when a well-placed bullet hit Billy Weber in the side.

It didn't look so bad at first. He was shot through the kidney, though, the organ was shattered, and the guy who got him must have known that his target would die slowly and in a lot of pain. The field medic did what he could, but nothing outside of morphine was going to help. It took almost an hour before Billy Weber finally died.

Throughout the ordeal some of the men were firing back, just
shooting randomly up into the hills, yelling for the enemy to come out and fight. But that sniper had already done his job and had slipped back into hiding again.

With Weber's death, the men of Charlie Company knew that their charmed existence in this war was finally over. Throughout February, they lost a man almost every day, yet it still seemed like there was nobody out there to fight. The VC were ghosts. They would hit hard and then melt back into the jungle and the villages around Quang Ngai.

Somewhere close to the middle of March, the First and Second Platoons were out on patrol when they walked into different minefields at the same time. The first one blew,
boom
, and as men went in to help the injured they'd step on another mine, and then another, and another. Through it all, Captain Medina ran with his troops right among the worst of it, shouting orders, pulling soldiers to safety, leading as though he were invincible.

Charlie Company had started out with 140 able soldiers. Now they were down to 105.

•   •   •

What Charlie Company lacked was a crystal-clear military objective and an enemy they could face and fight. Brigade commander Colonel Oran Henderson arrived on the scene and, with Captain Medina by his side, delivered both at a March 15 mission briefing.