The Vietnam Reader (86 page)

He found a pretty girl with her pants down. She was dead too. She looked at him cross-eyed. Her hair was gone.

He found dead dogs, dead chickens.

Farther along, he encountered someone’s forehead. He found three dead water buffalo. He found a dead monkey. He found ducks pecking at a dead toddler. Events had been channeling this way for a long while, months of terror, months of slaughter, and now in the pale morning sunlight a kind of meltdown was in progress.

Pigs were squealing.

The morning air was flaming up toward purple.

He watched a young man hobbling up the trail, one foot torn away at the ankle. He watched Weatherby shoot two little girls in the face. Deeper into the village, in front of a small L-shaped hootch, he came across a GI with a woman’s black ponytail flowing from his helmet. The man wiped a hand across his crotch. He gave a little flip to the ponytail and smiled at Sorcerer and blooped an M-79 round into the L-shaped hootch. “Blammo,” the man said. He shook his head as if embarrassed. “Yeah, well,” he said, then shrugged and fired off another round and said, “Boom.” At his feet was a wailing infant. A middle-aged woman lay nearby. She was draped across a bundle of straw, not quite dead, shot in the legs and stomach. The woman gazed at the world with indifference. At one point she made an obscure motion with her head, a kind of bow, inexact, after which she rocked herself away.

There were dead waterfowl and dead house pets. People were dying loudly inside the L-shaped hootch.

Sorcerer uttered meaningless sounds—“No,” he said, then after a second he said, “Please!”—and then the sunlight sucked him down a trail toward the center of the village, where he found burning hootches and brightly mobile figures engaged in murder. Simpson was killing children. PFC Weatherby was killing whatever he could kill. A row of corpses lay in the pink-to-purple sunshine along the trail—teenagers and old women and two babies and a young boy. Most were dead, some were almost dead. The dead lay very still. The almost-dead did twitching things until PFC Weatherby had occasion to reload and make them fully dead. The noise was fierce. No one was dying quietly. There were squeakings and chickenhouse sounds.

“Please,” Sorcerer said again. He felt very stupid. Thirty meters up the trail he came across Conti and Meadlo and Rusty Calley. Meadlo and the lieutenant were spraying gunfire into a crowd of villagers. They stood side by side, taking turns. Meadlo was crying. Conti was watching. The lieutenant shouted something and shot down a dozen women and kids and then reloaded and shot down more and then reloaded and shot down more and then reloaded again. The air was hot and wet. “Jeez, come on,” the lieutenant said, “get with it-move—light up these fuckers,” but Sorcerer was already sprinting away. He ran past a smoking bamboo schoolhouse. Behind him and in front of him, a brisk machine-gun wind pressed through Thuan Yen. The wind stirred up a powdery red dust that sparkled in the morning sunshine, and the little village had now gone mostly violet. He found someone stabbing people with a big silver knife. Hutto was shooting corpses. T’Souvas was shooting children. Doherty and Terry were finishing off the wounded. This was not madness, Sorcerer understood. This was sin. He felt it winding through his own arteries, something vile and slippery like heavy black oil in a crankcase.

Stop, he thought. But it wouldn’t stop. Someone shot an old farmer and lifted him up and dumped him in a well and tossed in a grenade.

Roschevitz shot people in the head.

Hutson and Wright took turns on a machine gun.

The killing was steady and inclusive. The men took frequent smoke breaks; they ate candy bars and exchanged stories.

A period of dark time went by, maybe an hour, maybe more, then Sorcerer found himself on his hands and knees behind a bamboo fence. A few meters away, in the vicinity of a large wooden turret, fifteen or twenty villagers squatted in the morning sunlight. They were chattering among themselves, their faces tight, and then somebody strolled up and made a waving motion and shot them dead.

There were flies now—a low droning buzz that swelled up from somewhere deep inside the village.

And then for a while Sorcerer let himself glide away. All he could do was close his eyes and kneel there and wait for whatever was wrong with the world to right itself. At one point it occurred to him that the weight of this day would ultimately prove too much, that sooner or later he would have to lighten the load.

He looked at the sky.

Later he nodded.

And then later still, snagged in the sunlight, he gave himself over to forgetfulness. “Go away,” he murmured. He waited a moment, then said it again, firmly, much louder, and the little village began to vanish inside its own rosy glow. Here, he reasoned, was the most majestic trick of all. In the months and years ahead, John Wade would remember Thuan Yen the way chemical nightmares are remembered, impossible combinations, impossible events, and over time the impossibility itself would become the richest and deepest and most profound memory.

This could not have happened. Therefore it did not.

Already he felt better.

Tracer rounds corkscrewed through the glare, and people were dying in long neat rows. The sunlight was in his blood.

He would both remember and not remember a fleet human movement off to his left.

He would not remember squealing.

He would not remember raising his weapon, nor rolling away from the bamboo fence, but he would remember forever how he turned and shot down an old man with a wispy beard and wire glasses and what looked to be a rifle. It was not a rifle. It was a small wooden hoe. The hoe he would always remember. In the ordinary hours after the
war, at the breakfast table or in the babble of some dreary statehouse hearing, John Wade would sometimes look up to see the wooden hoe spinning like a baton in the morning sunlight. He would see the old man shuffling past the bamboo fence, the skinny legs, the erect posture and the wire glasses, the hoe suddenly sailing up high and doing its quick twinkling spin and coming down uncaught. He would feel only the faintest sense of culpability. The forgetting trick mostly worked. On certain late-night occasions, however, John Wade would remember covering his head and screaming and crawling through a hedgerow and out into a wide paddy where helicopters were ferrying in supplies. The paddy was full of colored smoke, lavenders and yellows. There were loud voices, and many explosions, but he couldn’t seem to locate anyone. He found a young woman laid open without a chest or lungs. He found dead cattle. All around him there were flies and burning trees and burning hootches.

Later, he found himself at the bottom of an irrigation ditch. There were many bodies present, maybe a hundred. He was caught up in the slime.

PFC Weatherby found him there.

“Hey, Sorcerer,” Weatherby said. The guy started to smile, but Sorcerer shot him anyway.

EVIDENCE

Q: How do you evacuate someone with a hand grenade?

A: I don’t have any idea, sir.

Q: Why did you make that statement?

A: It was a figure of speech, sir.

Q: What did you mean when you said it?

A: I meant just—I meant only that the only means I could evacuate the people would be a hand grenade. And that isn’t exactly evacuating somebody.
³⁷

—William Calley (Court-Martial Testimony)

Son My Village is located approximately 9 kilometers northeast of Quang Ngai City and fronts on the South China Sea. In March 1968, the village was composed of four hamlets, Tu Cung, My Lai, My Khe, and Co Luy, each of which contained several subhamlets … The Vietnamese knew many of these subhamlets by names different from those indicated on US topographic maps of the area.… For example, the subhamlet identified on the topographic map as My Lai (4) is actually named Thuan Yen.
³⁸

—The Peers Commission

Q: What did you do?

A: I held my M-16 on them.

Q: Why?

A: Because they might attack.

Q: They were children and babies?

A: Yes.

Q: And they might attack? Children and babies?

A: They might’ve had a fully loaded grenade on them. The mothers might have throwed them at us.

Q: Babies?

A: Yes.

Q: Were the babies in their mothers’ arms?

A: I guess so.

Q: And the babies moved to attack?

A: I expected at any moment they were about to make a counterbalance.
³⁹

—Paul Meadlo (Court-Martial Testimony)

I raised him up to be a good boy and I did everything I could. They come along and took him to the service. He fought for his country and look what they done to him. Made a murderer out of him, to start with.
⁴⁰

—Mrs. Myrtle Meadlo (Mother of Paul Meadlo)

… there is a line that a man dare not cross, deeds he dare not commit, regardless of orders and the hopelessness of the situation, for such deeds would destroy something in him that he values more than life itself.
⁴¹

—J. Glenn Gray
(The Warriors)

John had his own way of handling it all. It destroyed him, you could say. But maybe in a lot of ways he was already destroyed.

—Anthony L. (Tony) Carbo

I am struck by how little of these events I can or even wish to remember …
⁴²

—Colonel William V. Wilson (U.S. Army Investigator)

Look, I don’t remember. It was three years ago.
⁴³

—Ronald Grzesik (Court-Martial Testimony)

Q: Did you ever tell any officer about what you’d seen?

A: I can’t specifically recall.
⁴⁴

—Ronald Haeberle (Court-Martial Testimony)

Q: How many people were in the ditch? A: I don’t know, sir.

Q: Over how large an area were they in the ditch?

A: I don’t know, sir.

Q: Could you give us an estimate as to how many people were in theditch?

A: No, sir.
⁴⁵

—William Calley (Court-Martial Testimony)

Q: What happened then?

A: He [Lieutenant Calley] started shoving them off and shooting them in the ravine.

Q: How many times did he shoot?

A: I can’t remember.
⁴⁶

—Paul Meadlo (Court-Martial Testimony)

All I remember now is flies. And the stink. Some of the guys made these gas masks—dunked their T-shirts in mosquito juice and Kool

Aid. That helped a little, but it didn’t help with the flies. I can’t stop dreaming about them. You think I’m crazy?

—Richard Thinbill

The ordinary response to atrocities is to banish them from consciousness.
⁴⁷

—Judith Herman
(Trauma and Recovery)

John really suffered during the campaign. Those terrible things people said, it wasn’t right. I don’t believe a word.

—Eleanor K. Wade

Q: Did you see any dead Vietnamese in the village?

A: Yes, sir.

Q: How many?

A: Most of them. All over.
⁴⁸

—Gene Oliver (Court-Martial Testimony)

Persons taking no active part in the hostilities, including members of armed forces who have laid down their arms and those placed
hors de combat
by sickness, wounds, detention, or any other cause, shall in all circumstances be treated humanely …
⁴⁹

—The Geneva Convention on the Laws of War

Q: Can you describe what you saw?

A: There was a large mound of dead Vietnamese in the ditch.

Q: Can you estimate how many?

A: It’s hard to say. I’d say forty to fifty.

Q: Can you describe the ditch?

A: It was seven to ten feet deep, maybe ten to fifteen feet across. The
bodies were all across it. There was one group in the middle and more on the sides. The bodies were on top of each other.
⁵⁰

—Richard Pendleton (Court-Martial Testimony)

Q: How did you know they were dead?

A: They weren’t moving. There was a lot of blood coming from all over them. They were in piles and scattered. There were very old people, very young people, and mothers. Blood was coming from everywhere. Everything was all blood.
⁵¹

—Charles Hall (Court-Martial Testimony)

Q: Did you see any bodies shot?

A: Right, sir.

Q: Women and children?

A: Right, sir, women and children, about twenty-five of them in the northeastern part of My Lai (4).

Q: Did you see any other bodies?

A: Right, sir. About ten of them, in that place north of My Lai. They were all women and they were all nude. Q: Were there any soldiers from your platoon there?

A: Right, sir. Roshevitz, he was there. He had an M-79. Those women, they died from a canister round from his M-79.
⁵²