This article was originally published on The New Yorker in January 1972.

Early on March 16, 1968, a company of soldiers in the United States Army’s Americal Division were dropped in by helicopter for an assault against a hamlet known as My Lai 4, in the bitterly contested province of Quang Ngai, on the northeastern coast of South Vietnam. A hundred G.I.s and officers stormed the hamlet in military-textbook style, advancing by platoons; the troops expected to engage the Vietcong Local Force 48th Battalion—one of the enemy’s most successful units—but instead they found women, children, and old men, many of them still cooking their breakfast rice over outdoor fires. During the next few hours, the civilians were murdered. Many were rounded up in small groups and shot, others were flung into a drainage ditch at one edge of the hamlet and shot, and many more were shot at random in or near their homes. Some of the younger women and girls were raped and then murdered. After the shootings, the G.I.s systematically burned each home, destroyed the livestock and food, and fouled the area’s drinking supplies. None of this was officially told by Charlie Company to its task-force headquarters; instead, a claim that a hundred and twenty-eight Vietcong were killed and three weapons were captured eventually emerged from the task force and worked its way up to the highest American headquarters, in Saigon. There it was reported to the world’s press as a significant victory.

The G.I.s mainly kept to themselves what they had done, but there had been other witnesses to the atrocity—American helicopter pilots and Vietnamese civilians. The first investigations of the My Lai case, made by some of the officers involved, concluded (erroneously) that twenty civilians had inadvertently been killed by artillery and by heavy cross fire between American and Vietcong units during the battle. The investigation involved all the immediate elements of the chain of command: the company was attached to Task Force Barker, which, in turn, reported to the 11th Light Infantry Brigade, which was one of three brigades making up the Americal Division. Task Force Barker’s victory remained just another statistic until late March, 1969, when an ex-G.I. named Ronald L. Ridenhour wrote letters to the Pentagon, to the State Department, to the White House, and to twenty-four congressmen describing the murders at My Lai 4. Ridenhour had not participated in the attack on My Lai 4, but he had discussed the operation with a few of the G.I.s who had been there. Within four months, many details of the atrocity had been uncovered by Army investigations, and in September, 1969, William L. Calley, Jr., a twenty-six-year-old first lieutenant who served as a platoon leader with Charlie Company, was charged with the murder of a hundred and nine Vietnamese civilians. No significant facts about the Calley investigation or about the massacre itself were made public at the time, but the facts did gradually emerge, and eleven days after the first newspaper accounts the Army announced that it had set up a panel to determine why the initial investigations had failed to disclose the atrocity. The panel was officially called the Department of the Army Review of the Preliminary Investigations into the My Lai Incident, and was unofficially known as the Peers Inquiry, after its director, Lieutenant General William R. Peers, “who was Chief of the Office of Reserve Components at the time of his appointment. The three-star general, then fifty-five years old, had spent more than two years as a troop commander in Vietnam during the late nineteen-sixties, serving as commanding general of the 4th Infantry Division and later as commander of the I Field Force. As such, he was responsible for the military operations and pacification projects in a vast area beginning eighty miles north of Saigon and extending north for two hundred and twenty miles.

Peers and his assistants, who eventually included two New York lawyers, began working in late November, 1969, and they soon determined that they could not adequately explore the coverup of the atrocity without learning more about what had actually happened on the day the troops were at My Lai 4. On December 2, 1969, the investigating team began interrogating officers and enlisted men in each of the units involved—Charlie Company, Task Force Barker, the 11th Brigade, and the Americal Division. In all, four hundred witnesses were interrogated—about fifty in South Vietnam and the rest in a special-operations room in the basement of the Pentagon—before Peers and a panel of military officers and civilians that varied in size from three to eight men. The interrogations inevitably produced much self-serving testimony. To get at the truth, the Peers commission recalled many witnesses for further interviews and confronted them with testimony that conflicted with theirs. Only six witnesses who appeared before the commission refused to testify, although all could legally have remained silent; perhaps one reason that Peers got such coöperation is that the majority of the witnesses were career military men, and few career military men can afford to seem to be hiding something before a three-star general.

By March 16, 1970, when the investigation ended, the Peers commission had compiled enough evidence to recommend to Secretary of the Army Stanley R. Resor and Army Chief of Staff William C. Westmoreland that charges be filed against fifteen officers; a high-level review subsequently conducted by lawyers representing the office of the Judge Advocate General, the Army’s legal adviser, concluded that fourteen of the fifteen should be charged, including Major General Samuel W. Koster, who was commanding general of the Americal Division at the time of My Lai 4. By then, Koster had become Superintendent of the United States Military Academy, at West Point, and the filing of charges against him stunned the Army. One other general was charged, as were three colonels, two lieutenant colonels, three majors, and four captains. Army officials revealed shortly after the charges were filed that the Peers commission had accumulated more than twenty thousand pages of testimony and more than five hundred documents during fifteen weeks of operation. The testimony and other material alone, it was said, included thirty-two books of direct transcripts, six books of supplemental documents and affidavits, and volumes of maps, charts, exhibits, and internal documents. Defense Department spokesmen explained that, to avoid damaging pre-trial publicity, none of this material could be released to the public until the legal proceedings against the accused men were completed, and officials acknowledged that the process might take years. In addition, it was explained, when the materials were released they would have to be carefully censored, to insure that no material damaging to America’s foreign policy or national security was made available to other countries. In May, 1971, fourteen months after the initial Peers report, officials were still saying that “it might be years” before the investigation was made public. By then, charges against thirteen of the fourteen initial defendants had been dismissed without a court-martial.

Over the past eighteen months, I have been provided with a complete transcript of the testimony given to the Peers Inquiry, and also with volumes of other materials the Peers commission assembled, including its final summary report to Secretary Resor and General Westmoreland. What follows is based largely on those papers, although I have supplemented them with documents from various sources, including the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division, which had the main responsibility for conducting the initial investigations into both the My Lai 4 massacre and its coverup. In addition, I interviewed scores of military and civilian officials, including some men who had been witnesses before the Peers commission and some who might have been called to testify but were not. I also discussed some of my findings with former members of the Army who had been directly connected with the Peers commission.

Unquestionably, a serious concern for the rights of possible court-martial defendants does exist at all levels of the Army. A careful examination of the testimony and documents accumulated by the Peers commission makes equally clear that military officials have deliberately withheld from the public important but embarrassing factual information about My Lai 4. For example, the Army has steadfastly refused to reveal how many civilians were killed by Charlie Company on March 16th—a decision that no longer has anything to do with pre-trial publicity, since the last court-martial (that of Colonel Oran K. Henderson, the commanding officer of the 11th Brigade) has been concluded. Army spokesmen have insisted that the information is not available. Yet in February, 1970, the Criminal Investigation Division, at the request of the Peers commission, secretly undertook a census of civilian casualties at My Lai 4 and concluded that Charlie Company had slain three hundred and forty-seven Vietnamese men, women, and children in My Lai 4 on March 16, 1968—a total twice as large as had been publicly acknowledged. In addition, the Peers commission subsequently concluded that Lieutenant Calley’s first platoon, one of three that made the attack upon My Lai 4, was responsible for ninety to a hundred and thirty murders during the operation—roughly one-third of the total casualties, as determined by the C.I.D. The second platoon apparently murdered as many as a hundred civilians, with the rest of the deaths attributable to the third platoon and the helicopter gunships. Despite the vast amount of evidence indicating that the murders at My Lai 4 were widespread throughout the company, only Calley was found guilty of any crime in connection with the attack. Eleven other men and officers were eventually charged with murder, maiming, or assault with intent to commit murder, but the charges were dropped before trial in seven cases and four men were acquitted after military courts-martial. In addition, of the fourteen officers accused by the Peers commission in connection with the coverup only Colonel Henderson was brought to trial. Even more striking was evidence that the attack on My Lai 4 was not the only massacre carried out by American troops in Quang Ngai Province that morning. The Army Investigators learned that Task Force Barker had committed three infantry companies to the over-all operation in the My Lai area. Alpha Company had moved into a blocking position above My Lai 4, where it would theoretically be able to trap Vietcong soldiers as they fled from the Charlie Company assault on the hamlet. Bravo Company, the third unit in the task force, was ordered to attack a possible Vietcong headquarters area at My Lai 1, a hamlet about a mile and a half northeast of My Lai 4. The men of Bravo Company were also told to prepare for a major battle with an experienced Vietcong unit. But, as the Peers commission later learned, there were no Vietcong at My Lai 1, either.

Bravo Company was told about the planned assault on My Lai 1 at a briefing on the night of March 15th. The men of Task Force Barker were called together by their officers that night and told (so one G.I. recalled), “This is what you’ve been waiting for—search and destroy—and you got it.” Captain Earl R. Michles, the company commander, outlined the mission and its objective to his artillery forward observer, the platoon leaders, and other selected members of his command group. The key target, he said, was My Lai 1, a small, often attacked hamlet that was thought to be the headquarters and hospital area of the Vietcong 48th Battalion. Army maps showed that My Lai 1 and the neighboring hamlets of My Lai 2, My Lai 3, and My Lai 4 were part of the village of Son My—a heavily populated area, embracing dozens of hamlets, that was known to the G.I.s as Pinkville, because Son My’s high population density caused it to appear in red on Army maps. To the Americans who operated in the area, Pinkville meant Vietcong guerrillas and booby traps. More than ninety per cent of the Americal Division’s combat injuries and deaths in early 1968 resulted from Vietcong booby traps and land mines. Bravo Company was to be flown into the area by helicopter to engage the Vietcong at My Lai 1, and was then to move south into other supposed Vietcong hamlets along the South China Sea. Precisely what information Michles and his platoon leaders gave their men is impossible to determine, but their briefings—like a similar briefing by Captain Ernest L. Medina, the commander of Charlie Company, at another Task Force Barker fire base, a few miles away—left the soldiers with the impression that everyone they would see on March 16th was sure to be either a Vietcong soldier or a sympathizer.

Michles’s radio operator, Specialist Fourth Class Lawrence L. Congleton, recalled that after the briefing “there was a general conception that we were going to destroy everything.” Only a few of more than forty former Bravo Company G.I.s who were interviewed by members of the Peers commission or who talked with me recalled hearing a specific order to kill civilians. Larry G. Holmes, who was a private first class at the time of the operation, summed up the recollections of many G.I.s when he told the commission, “We had three hamlets that we had to search and destroy. They told us they . . . had dropped leaflets and stuff and everybody was supposed to be gone. Nobody was supposed to be there. If anybody is there, shoot them.” No specific instructions were given about civilians and prisoners, the men told the commission. “We were to leave nothing standing, because we were pretty sure that this was a confirmed V.C. village,” former Private First Class Homer C. Hall testified. One ex-G.I., Barry P. Marshall, told the Peers commission that he had overheard a conversation between Lieutenant Colonel Frank A. Barker, Jr., the commander of the task force, and Michles (both of whom were killed in a helicopter crash three months after the operation). “I don’t want to give the idea that Colonel Barker wanted us to kill every blankety-blank person in here,” Marshall said. “They were just talking. . . . Colonel Barker was just saying that he wished he could get in here and get rid of the V.C. . . . I know Captain Michles’s own personal feeling was that he wanted to take every civilian out of there and move them out of the area to a secure place, and then go in and fight the V.C. It’s so hard, when you’ve got all these people milling around in there, to really conduct an operation of any significance.”

On the morning of the assault, nine troop-transport helicopters, accompanied by two gunships, began ferrying the men of Charlie Company from their assembly point, at Landing Zone Dottie. From Dottie, which also was the site of the task-force headquarters area, the helicopters ferried the men about seven miles southeast to their target area, just outside My Lai 4. The helicopters completed that task by 7:47 a.m., according to the official task-force journal for the day, and then flew a few miles north to Bravo Company’s assembly point to begin shuttling the men of Bravo Company to My Lai 1 for the second stage of the assault. It is not clear why Charlie Company’s assault took place first. Large numbers of Vietcong were thought to be in both hamlets, and, according to the official rationale for the mission, surprise was a key factor. As it was, the first elements of Bravo Company did not reach their target area until 8:15 a.m., and it then took twelve minutes for the full company to assemble. The men were apprehensive, and nothing at their target area soothed them. As they jumped off the aircraft, their rifles at the ready, they heard gunfire in the distance.

The shots were coming from My Lai 4, a mile and a half to the southwest, where by this time Charlie Company was in the midst of massacre. Specialist Fourth Class Ronald J. Easterling, a former machine gunner in Bravo Company’s third platoon, told the Peers commission, “When we landed we had to take cover . . . because we thought we were getting shot at. We found out later, well, about fifteen minutes or so, it was Charlie Company from over in the other direction. Some of their bullets were coming our direction unintentionally . . .” Although the sounds were frightening, there was no immediate threat to Bravo Company; no enemy shots were fired at the G.I.s as they left the helicopters. The men milled around for a few moments and then began to move out.

The first platoon, headed by First Lieutenant Thomas K. Willingham, marched a few hundred yards east. Its mission was to cross a narrow bridge to a small peninsula—a spit of land on which the small hamlet of My Khe 4 was situated—in the South China Sea. The second platoon, headed by First Lieutenant Roy B. Cochran, was to systematically search My Lai 1 and destroy it. But My Lai 1 was screened by a thick hedge and heavily guarded by booby traps. “Within minutes, a mine hidden in the hedgerow was tripped and the men of Bravo Company heard screams. In the explosion, Lieutenant Cochran was killed and four G.I.s were seriously injured. Helicopters were called in to evacuate the wounded men. The platoon was hastily reorganized, with a sergeant in command, and ordered to continue its mission. Another booby trap was tripped; once more there were screams and smoke. This time, three G.I.s were injured, and the unit was in disarray. The surviving G.I.s in the platoon insisted that they were not going to continue the mission, and said as much to Captain Michles. Colonel Barker flew in himself to see to the evacuation of the wounded, and then, rather than call on the first or the third platoon to complete the mission, he cancelled Bravo Company’s order to search and destroy My Lai 1. “[He] told them not even try to go in there,” Congleton, the radio operator, recalled to the Peers commission. “Just sort of forget about that part of the operation.” Relieved at not having to enter My Lai 1, the second platoon began a rather aimless and halfhearted movement through huts and hamlets to the south, across the water from My Khe 4 and the first platoon.

My Khe 4 was a scraggly, much harassed collection of straw-and-mud houses, inhabited by perhaps a hundred women, children, and old men. After carefully crossing the bridge, some of the G.I.s in the first platoon could see the unsuspecting villagers through heavy brush and trees. Lieutenant Willingham, according to many witnesses, ordered two machine gunners in his platoon to set up their weapons outside the hamlet. And then, inexplicably, one of the gun crews began to spray bullets into My Khe 4, shooting at the people and their homes. A few G.I.s later told the Peers commission that a hand grenade had been thrown at them; others said that some sniper shots had been fired. But no one was shot, and none of the G.I.s said they had ever actually seen the grenade explosion; they had only “heard about it.”

By now, it was about nine-thirty, and the men in the rear of the first platoon were ordered to pass forward extra belts of machine-gun ammunition and hand grenades. When the gun crew stopped, the platoon, led by four point men, or advance scouts, walked into the hamlet and began firing directly at Vietnamese civilians and into Vietnamese homes. The gunfire was intense. Former Private Terry Reid, of Milwaukee, recalled that he was standing a few hundred feet below the hamlet when it began. He knew that civilians were being shot. “As soon as they started opening up, it hit me that it was insanity,” he told me during an interview in May, 1971. “I walked to the rear. Pandemonium broke loose. It sounded insane—machine guns, grenades. One of the guys walked back, and I remember him saying, ‘We got sixty women, kids, and some old men.’ ”

After the shootings in My Khe 4, a few of the G.I.s in the first platoon started systematically blowing up every bunker and tunnel. Some Vietnamese attempted to flee the bunkers before the explosives were thrown in. They were shot. “Try and shoot them as they are coming out,” one member of the first platoon was instructed. Another ex-G.I. told me what happened to those who stayed in the bunkers: “You didn’t know for sure there were people in them until you threw in the TNT, and then you’d hear scurrying around in there. There wasn’t much place for them to go.” A helicopter flew extra supplies of dynamite and other explosives to the men, apparently at Willingham’s request. More than a hundred and fifty pounds of TNT was used, one ex-G.I. said, and between twenty and thirty homes were blown up. At some point that morning, according to several members of the platoon, word was passed along to stop the killing, and many of the surviving residents of the hamlet were allowed to flee to a nearby beach. They lived to tell Army investigators about the massacre. Others remained huddled in the family shelters inside their homes.

South Vietnamese women and children in Mỹ Lai before being killed in the massacre, 16 March 1968. According to court testimony, they were killed seconds after the photo was taken. The woman on the right is adjusting her blouse buttons following a sexual assault that happened before the massacre.  (Photo by Ronald L. Haeberle/Public Domain)

Precisely how many residents of My Khe 4 were slain will never be known. The Army later charged Lieutenant Willingham with involvement in the death of twenty civilians, but the charges were dismissed by an Army general a few months later without a hearing. Some survivors told military investigators early in 1970 that from ninety to a hundred women, children, and old men were slain. One ex-G.I. who kept a count said he knew of a hundred and fifty-five deaths; other estimates ranged from sixty to ninety. The official log of Task Force Barker for March 16th shows that Bravo Company claimed an enemy kill of thirty-eight in three separate messages to the task force during the day. At 9:55 a.m., it reported killing twelve Vietcong; at 10:25 a.m., it claimed eighteen more; and it claimed eight more at 2:20 p.m., some two hours after the massacre. At 3:55 p.m., it reported that none of its victims were women or children.

Early in 1968, the 11th Infantry Brigade had established a standard procedure for making body counts, which required an on-site identification of a dead enemy soldier before the body could be reported. All the officers of Task Force Barker interviewed by the Peers commission indicated an awareness of this regulation, and claimed that the task force adhered to it. Yet an ex-G.I., one of the first men to enter My Khe 4, gave me this version of how the totals of twelve and eighteen were arrived at: “I had this little notebook that I used to mark down the kills of the point men in. This day—well, this was a red-letter day. Seems like for about fifteen or twenty minutes there all I was doing was recording kills. Willingham got on the radio asking how many kills we got. Old Jug [the nickname of one of the point men] said he got twelve, and we called in what we had. Willingham checked with us a couple times in the early part of the day.” Another ex-G.I. testified before the Peers commission that some of his fellow-soldiers had counted thirty-nine bodies and had then told Willingham that “the biggest part of them was women and children.” Willingham’s reports were relayed by Michles, without challenge, to the task-force headquarters, although Congleton, the radioman, later told me, “When the first platoon started turning in kill counts, I figured they were destroying everything over there. At the time, I didn’t think that it was anything exceptional—maybe just a little more killing than usual.”

Dead bodies outside a burning dwelling (Photo by Ronald Haeberle/Public Domain)

The first platoon spent the night near My Khe 4, but the rest of Bravo Company joined Charlie Company to set up a defense near a cemetery along the South China Sea. In the morning, the first and second platoons of Bravo Company reunited and spent the next day marching south along the coast to the Tra Khuc River, burning every hamlet along the way. Again there was an element of revenge. A popular member of the first platoon had lost a foot early in the morning while he was probing for a mine along the bridge leading from the My Khe 4 peninsula to the mainland. The Peers commission subsequently determined that the platoon had failed to post guards on the bridge overnight, although the bridge provided the only access to the peninsula. A few men testified that the wounded G.I. was in fact attempting to defuse the mine with his bayonet when it went off, wounding him. But most of the G.I.s saw the mine as another example of treacherous enemy tactics, and this renewed their anger at anyone Vietnamese. That day, Task Force Barker provided a team of demolition experts, who blew up bunkers after the hamlets along the route were razed by fire. The techniques used in destroying the houses along the coast apparently amazed the Peers investigators. One G.I. testified that it was not his responsibility, as a demolition man, but that of the infantry to make sure no civilians were inside any of the bunkers he destroyed. He generally dropped two or three pounds of TNT into each bunker, he said, without checking for occupants. Another demolition man told of using as much as thirty pounds of dynamite to destroy each bunker, also without inspecting inside. Asked by a member of the Peers commission whether any effort was made to determine “if there were people inside,” one G.I. responded, “Not that I know of.”

Again, it is impossible to determine how many Vietnamese citizens were killed as they huddled inside their bunkers during Bravo Company’s march to the south. The G.I.s burned and destroyed almost every home they came to. Terry Reid, the private who told me that the My Khe 4 shooting seemed “insane” to him, had been considered a malcontent by his fellow-G.I.s, because he often criticized Bravo Company’s killing tactics. Of the march, he told me that he almost broke into tears as it continued. “We’d go through these village areas and just burn,” he said. “You’d see a good Vietnamese home—made with bricks or hard mud, and filled with six or seven grandmothers, four or five old men, and little kids—just burned. You’d see these old people watching their homes.” The Army’s practice of destroying bunkers and tunnels after burning the homes had always baffled him anyway, Reid said. “They call them bunkers and tunnels, but you know what they are—basements. Just basements.”

On March 18th, the third day of the operation, Bravo Company’s mission suddenly changed. Task Force Barker called in medical units, and the men were ordered to round up the civilians for baths, examinations, and in some cases interrogation by intelligence officials. Between five hundred and a thousand civilians were treated for diseases or were given food and clothing by the G.I.s. “It seemed like we just changed our policy altogether that day,” Congleton later told the Peers commission. “We went from a search-and-destroy to a pacification, because we went to this village and we washed all the kids. Maybe somebody had a guilty feeling or something like that.” Talking with me about this change a year after his testimony, Congleton said, “We reversed the whole plan just like we were going to redeem ourselves.” Former Private First Class Morris G. Michener thought that “most of the people were a little ashamed of themselves, and I was very ashamed of even being part of the group.”

On March 19th, Bravo Company was lifted by helicopter from the peninsula. A few of the Bravo Company soldiers later heard about the excesses committed by Charlie Company and about impending investigations there, but somehow there was little concern about the atrocities they themselves had committed. Only one G.I., Ronald Easterling, the machine gunner with the third platoon, considered reporting the My Khe 4 massacre to his superiors, but, as he later told the Peers commission, he quickly dropped the idea. “I guess I just let it go when I shouldn’t have,” Easterling explained. “I thought the company commander knew these things were going on. . . . it was all general knowledge through the whole company, and I didn’t see any sense in talking it over with the company. . . .”

By the time the Army’s charges against Lieutenant Calley became known in the United States, most of the men of Bravo Company were back home and out of the Army. Only a few associated their activities in Bravo Company on March 16th with the operation that Calley was accused of participating in. One who did was Reid. He walked into a newspaper office in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, in November, 1969, a few days after the Calley story broke, and gave an interview about the atrocities he had observed while he was serving with the 11th Brigade. He told of one operation in which, after some G.I.s had been wounded by a booby trap, his company responded by killing sixty women, children, and old men. Reid told me not long ago that he didn’t realize until months later that what had happened in his outfit was directly connected with Task Force Barker’s mission in Son My on March 16th. “Sometimes I thought it was just my platoon, my company, that was committing atrocious acts, and what bad luck it was to get in it,” Reid said. “But what we were doing was being done all over.”

The incident at My Khe 4 would perhaps be just another Vietnam atrocity story if it weren’t for four facts: its vital connection with the My Lai 4 tragedy; the American public’s ignorance of it; the total, detailed knowledge of it among the Peers investigators, the Department of the Army, and higher Pentagon officials; and the failure of any of these agencies to see that the men involved were prosecuted.

On March 16, 1968, Major General Koster, the commander of the Americal Division, was near the peak of a brilliant Army career. At the age of forty-eight, he was a two-star general whose next assignment would be as Superintendent of the United States Military Academy. After that would probably come a promotion to lieutenant general, and perhaps an assignment as a corps commander in Germany, or even in South Vietnam again. Another promotion, to the rank of full general, would quickly follow, along with an assignment, possibly, as commander of one of the overseas United States Armies. By the middle or late nineteen-seventies, then, he would be among a group of ambitious, competent generals seeking Presidential appointment as Army Chief of Staff. Like most future candidates for the job of Chief of Staff, Koster had been earmarked as a “comer” by his fellow-officers since his days at West Point. In 1949, he had served in the high-prestige post of tactical officer at the Point, assigned to a cadet company as the man responsible for their training. By 1960, he had served in the operations office—the sensitive planning and coordinating post known to the military as G-3—of the Far East Command, in Tokyo, and also as Secretary of Staff of the Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Powers, Europe, in Paris. His career was patterned after that of his chief patron and supporter, General Westmoreland, who in 1968 headed all military operations in South Vietnam. Westmoreland and Koster had served together in the Pentagon during the nineteen-fifties, both in key staff jobs, and Westmoreland had later become Superintendent of West Point.

Koster’s assignment in the fall of 1967 as commanding general of the Americal Division could be underestimated at first by outsiders: the Americal, a hastily assembled conglomeration of independent infantry units, was far from an élite outfit. But the job, as the Peers investigation learned, was extremely important to the young general; he had been handpicked by Westmoreland after a sharp debate inside military headquarters in Saigon over the future combat role of the division. As the Americal was initially set up, it was composed of three separate five-thousand-man combat infantry brigades, each with its own support units, such as artillery and cavalry. Within a year, the division was restructured to make it more conventional and to provide more centralized control. But when Koster took over, it was a new kind of fighting unit, highly endorsed by Westmoreland, and pressure on the new commander was inevitable. Adding to the pressure was the low calibre of some of the officers initially assigned to the Americal by headquarters units. Lieutenant Colonel Clinton E. Granger, Jr., who served briefly in the G-3 office of the new division late in 1967 , told the Peers commission about his personnel problems. “In the G-3 section the quality of the personnel was not what one would ask in a division, to be perfectly honest,” he said. “Among the field-grade officers, there was only one major in the entire section who graduated from Leavenworth [the Army command-and-staff school, in Kansas], and of all of them there were only two who had not been passed over for promotion to lieutenant colonel. That would indicate that in some cases not the highest calibre of people were being provided.”

Koster responded to the staff problems by running a virtual one-man show. He trusted no one else to make decisions on the division’s operations and maneuvers. Every military engagement or tactic, including such details as the allotment of helicopters for combat assaults, had to be personally approved by him. He filled the two most important positions in his headquarters, chief of staff and head of G-3 operations, with artillery officers—highly unusual assignments for such men in a combat infantry division. Both men, however, were West Pointers—the only ones in key headquarters jobs. Colonel Nels A. Parson, Jr., the chief of staff of the Americal Division, was inhibited by his inexperience in infantry tactics; he spent much of his time, according to testimony other officers gave the Peers commission, seeing to it that fences were painted and grass was kept closely cropped. Lieutenant Colonel Jesmond D. Balmer, Jr., the operations officer, was bolder than Parson, but he had no greater success. He told the Peers commission, “I was not a textbook G-3, either as taught at Leavenworth or throughout the Army or practiced at any other divisions. The commanding general was in fact his own G-3. . . . I was not operating that division. I was doing certain planning and trying to keep the T.O.C. [tactical-operations center] going. . . . I can’t visualize that any staff officer there would visualize Balmer, even now, as being a key mover in that division. I was far from it.” Balmer indicated that Colonel Parson had an even worse relationship with General Koster, explaining, “It was very evident to all concerned that General Koster had no confidence or did not trust much responsibility, except answering the telephone in the headquarters and doing the normal headquarters chief-of-staff job, to Colonel Parson, and to a similar degree this went down to the staff. . . . It was the most unhappy group of staff officers and unhappy headquarters I have ever had any contact with and certainly ever heard tell of it.”

Koster’s relationship with his second-in-command, Brigadier General George H. Young, Jr., one of two assistant division commanders, was less frosty, but it was still far from warm. Young, who was about a year younger than his superior, had graduated from the Citadel military academy, in Charleston, South Carolina. He, too, could exercise only a limited degree of command authority, although he had been placed in administrative control of the division’s maneuver battalions, including the aviation and artillery units. He could recommend decisions but not carry them out. Most of the other headquarters officers were either “non-ring knockers”—men who had begun their careers as enlisted men or as graduates of college reserve programs—or graduates of military schools, such as the Citadel, that many West Pointers consider second-rate.

For most of the officers and men, the commanding general was a cold figure who compelled respect—and a touch of fear. “General Koster was so smart he was too smart for the rest of us,” retired Lieutenant Colonel Charles Anistranski told me during an interview several months ago. Anistranski, who served as the Americal Division’s G-5 (in charge of pacification and civil affairs) early in 1968, told me that he particularly remembered the General’s crisp method of barking orders. “Koster would say, ‘I don’t like that, and I want you to do this and that.’ ” The General wouldn’t take part in after-dinner drinking bouts at the Officers’ Club, the former colonel said, but chose to return to his quarters instead. James R. Ritchie III, who served as an administrative sergeant at Americal Division headquarters in 1967-68, remembered Koster as being very cold. “I worked near him in that office for over five months, and I was never introduced to him,” he told me. “I passed notes to him but really I never knew the man” Ritchie said of the headquarters staff, “They were all afraid. They were all afraid of Koster.”

The normal work schedule of General Koster and his aides seemed to have little relationship to the realities of the guerrilla war going on a few miles away. Koster lived in an air-conditioned four-room house on a hill at division headquarters, in Chu Lai; he was served by a full-time enlisted man and a young officer. A few yards away was a fortified bunker with full communications, in case of attack. He spent most of his workday in a helicopter, visiting the brigades and battalions under his command. Every morning, he would give a short speech to new soldiers arriving at the division replacement center. Usually, his aides told the Peers commission, he tried to be where the action was—to monitor his troops in combat. For, just like a young company commander, Koster was being judged largely on the basis of how many enemy soldiers his men claimed to have killed.

General Koster’s arrival by helicopter at local units would cause as much of a flurry—and as much fear—as a visit from Westmoreland caused at division headquarters. And, these visits notwithstanding, Koster remained remote from the problems and fears of the “grunts”—ground soldiers—assigned to his command. When complaints arose, they were often deliberately withheld from the General by his aides. Sergeant Ritchie, as one of the chief administrative clerks in division headquarters, worked directly for Colonel Parson. He recalled that he was ordered to screen all the mail personally addressed to Koster. “Parson wanted to know anything that was on Koster’s desk other than routine stuff,” Ritchie said. “A lot of stuff I know never got to Koster.” Instead, it was handled by Parson. Most of the senior staff officers at headquarters knew of the practice, but they did not complain, even when letters they had addressed to Koster brought replies from Colonel Parson, because Parson was their rating officer, and for an ambitious lieutenant colonel who had not attended West Point one bad rating could be the end of a career. This kind of reasoning went up the chain of command. In May, 1968, for example, a Special Forces camp in the Americal Division’s area of operations was overrun by North Vietnamese troops, with heavy losses to an Americal battalion that attempted to relieve the camp. Koster ordered an investigation, but, as the Peers commission was told by Colonel Jack L. Treadwell, who became division chief of staff in late 1968, it was not filed with higher headquarters, “because it made the division look bad.”

The ultimate effect of such practices was a form of self-imposed ignorance: few things were ever “officially” learned or reported. By March, 1968, murder, rape, and arson were common in many combat units of the Americal Division—particularly the 11th Brigade, in hostile Quang Ngai Province—but there were no official reports of them at higher levels. Most of the infantry companies had gone as far as to informally set up so-called Zippo squads—groups of men whose sole mission was to follow the combat troops through hamlets and set the hamlets on fire. Yet Koster, during one of his lengthy appearances before the Peers commission, calmly reported, “We had, I thought, a very strong policy against burning and pillaging in villages. Granted, during an action where the enemy was in there, there would be some destruction. But I had spoken to brigade commanders frequently, both as a group and personally, about the fact that this type of thing would not be tolerated. I’m sure that in our rules of engagement it [was] emphasized . . . very strongly.” The rules of engagement, a seven-page formal codification of the division’s “criteria for employment of firepower in support of combat operations,” were formally published March 16, 1968—the day of the massacre. They imposed stringent restrictions on the use of firepower and called for clearance before any firing on civilian areas. The rules, unfortunately for the Vietnamese, had little to do with the way the war was being fought.

Image on the right: SP4 Dustin setting fire to a dwelling (Photo by Ronald L. Haeberle/Public Domain)

Ironically, the publication of the rules of engagement allowed commanders to treat brutalities such as murder, rape, and arson as mere violations of rules, and in any event such serious crimes were rarely reported officially. Lieutenant Colonel Warren J. Lucas, the Americal Division’s provost marshal, or chief law-enforcement officer, told the Peers commission that most of the war-crimes investigations conducted by his unit involved the theft of goods or money from civilians or, occasionally, a charge that G.I.s had raped a prisoner of war at an interrogation center. The concept of murder during a combat operation simply wasn’t raised. Sometimes, Lucas said, he or his men would hear rumors or reports of serious incidents in the field, but, he added, “if it was declared a combat action, I did not move into it at all with my investigators.” Of course, the men who could report such incidents were the officers in charge; in effect, their choice was between a higher body count and a war-crimes investigation. Murder during combat and similarly serious violations of international law were never “reported through military-police channels,” Colonel Lucas told the Peers commission. Even if they had been, he could not have begun an investigation of such incidents without the approval of Chief of Staff Parson or General Koster. During his one-year tour of duty with the Americal, Lucas apparently never conducted such an investigation. What happened was that after the publication of the rules the military honor system went into effect. Under that system, as it was applied in the Americal Division, violations of the rules of engagement simply did not take place.

Lieutenant Colonel Anistranski, the officer in charge of the Americal’s civil-affairs and pacification program, explained in his interview with me how the system worked. “Every time a hamlet would burn, it was reported to me,” he said. “If it was in a friendly area, we’d go back and rebuild it. Sometimes it would come up at the nightly briefing. General Koster would come up to me and say, ‘Check it out.’ I’d get the S-5 [the lower-ranking officer in charge of civil affairs of the unit in question] and say, ‘You’d better get on it; the old man wants to know what happened out there.’ They’d come back after a little while and say it was set on fire during a fire fight. I’d go and tell the old man that.”

Some soldiers could, of course, have been court-martialled for committing war crimes. This might have limited the number of violations, but it would also have signalled to higher headquarters that violations did occur. Koster’s efficacy as a commander would have been questioned, and the name of the division would have been sullied by the inevitable press reports. Thus, talk of war crimes simply wasn’t heard at Americal Division headquarters. The men there took their jobs at face value. Father Carl E. Creswell served as an Episcopal chaplain at Chu Lai and resigned from the Army soon after his tour with the division. He later told the Peers commission, “I became absolutely convinced that as far as the United States Army was concerned there was no such thing as murder of a Vietnamese civilian. I’m sorry, maybe it’s a little bit cynical. I’m sure it is, but that’s the way the system works.”

The freedom to kill with impunity inevitably led to the inadvertent murder of many civilians in violation of both the Geneva conventions and the division rules of engagement. The statistics tell the story: A consistent problem for the military throughout the war has been the great disparity between the number of Vietcong soldiers that have been reported killed and the number of weapons that have been captured. Although the obvious answer seemed to be that Vietcong were not the only victims of American gunfire, artillery, and gunship strikes, officers at the top headquarters commands simply could not—or would not—accept that answer. Thus, commanding officers in the Americal Division were always urging their troops to “close with the enemy” instead of relying on helicopter or artillery support, and thereby increase their chances of capturing enemy weapons. Often, the rationale for the statistical imbalance was strained. Brigadier General Carl W. Hoffman, who served as chief operations officer of the III Marine Amphibious Force early in 1968, agreed with General Peers that Task Force Barker’s March 16th report of a hundred and twenty-eight Vietcong deaths and three captured weapons represented “a ratio that we would not normally like to see,” and went on, “However, we had experienced other reports in which we later found that the attacking troops had found a graveyard with fresh graves, and they determined then that these deaths had occurred on previous days because of artillery fire or gunship fire. Therefore, the total on a given day could be quite high and the weapons invariably would be very low. . . . we did see other instances in which we had very few weapons captured and quite a number of enemy bodies counted.”

“It’s like a game,” Colonel Anistranski, the division’s pacification-and-civil-affairs officer, remarked during my interview with him. “Everybody come on, we’re going to have a bonfire. The way Koster used to look at me, he knew they [the brigades] were lying. He tried to stop it, but there’s . . . so much going on.” Anistranski remembered that on occasion Koster would storm out of the nightly briefing, obviously angered, after hearing reports of large numbers of Vietcong killed by his troops and no captured weapons. “He’d get mad,” Anistranski said. “But me? I used to look at it and laugh. ‘There’s another battalion commander who’s pushing the full-colonel list,’ I’d say.” He could laugh, Anistranski added, but the General was trapped by his position. “Koster had bird colonels working for him; he had to accept their word.”

In early 1968, the Americal Division consisted of three combat infantry brigades. One of them, the 11th, was commanded by Colonel Oran K. Henderson. Henderson had at that time been in the Army twenty-five years, and, like most colonels, he had made it clear that he wanted very much to become a general. A non-West Pointer, he had failed during a tour of duty in Vietnam in 1963 and 1964 to get the command assignments necessary for promotion; he spent nearly two of the next four years in subordinate roles with the 11th Brigade in Hawaii, moving with the unit to Vietnam in late 1967 as deputy commander. On March 15, 1968, the Army gave him a chance: on that day, he took command of the brigade’s three infantry battalions and one artillery battalion. During formal ceremonies at the brigade’s headquarters area, at Duc Pho, Henderson accepted the unit’s colors from the outgoing commander, Brigadier General Andy A. Lipscomb, who was retiring from the service. Lipscomb had recommended Henderson for the job, and was delighted when General Koster approved the choice. Henderson “was completely loyal to me,” Lipscomb later told the Peers commission. “When I left, and I made out an efficiency report on Colonel Henderson, I recommended him for promotion to brigadier general, which I didn’t do to too many colonels along the way.”

At the time of his appointment, Henderson had seen little combat in Vietnam. He told the Peers commission that Task Force Barker’s attack on My Lai 4 “was the first combat action I had been involved in or observed,” and explained, “As the brigade executive officer up to this point and time, I was pretty well limited to Due Pho. Occasionally, I could get an H-23 [observation helicopter] and get out on the periphery or something. But as a general rule I was stuck at Duc Pho. I had not participated in a C.A. [combat assault], nor had I observed any combat action except that at the Duc Pho Province.” He was referring to occasional Vietcong mortar attacks on the brigade headquarters area. Upon taking over the top job in the brigade, Henderson immediately began acting like every other commander in Vietnam. Each day, he would assemble a few personal aides and fly all over his area of responsibility, observing the infantry battalions in action. The new commander was formal and crisp with his staff; he had what military men call “command presence.” In other officers he inspired nothing less than fear. Captain Donald J. Keshel, the brigade civil-affairs officer, told the Peers investigators, “I’m scared to death of Colonel Henderson. . . . He’s just got to be the hardest man I’ve ever worked for.” But Henderson himself feared at least one man—General Koster, whose rating of him as a brigade commander would make or break his chances of becoming a general. Koster had doubts about Henderson’s intellectual ability, and these were known to the Colonel. He got along easily with General Young, Koster’s assistant division commander, but his relations with the division commander himself seemed to be tense. “You could always distinguish rank when they were talking,” Michael C. Adcock, a former sergeant who served as one of Colonel Henderson’s radio operators, told me.

Henderson, and Lipscomb before him, also followed the usual commander’s practice of emphasizing body counts, so competition for enemy kills was constant among the battalions and companies of the 11th Brigade. There were three-day passes for the men who achieved high body counts; sometimes whole units would be rewarded. At one point, Henderson personally ordered a program set up offering helicopter pilots three- to five-day passes for bringing in military-age Vietnamese males for questioning. The program, which was initiated because the brigade was unable to develop reliable intelligence information on the Vietcong, was known informally among 11th Brigade air units as Operation Body Snatch. Within weeks, the operation had degenerated to the point where the pilots, instead of “snatching” civilians, were deliberately killing them, sometimes by running them down with their helicopter skids. Other pilots devised even more macabre forms of murder, one of which involved the use of a lasso to stop a Vietnamese peasant who was attempting to flee. Helicopter crewmen would then jump out, strip the victim, and replace the rope around his neck, and the helicopter would begin to move at low speed, with the Vietnamese running along. When the victim could no longer keep up, he would fall, snapping his neck.

Many witnesses told the Peers commission of having received no meaningful instruction in the Geneva conventions or in the proper treatment of prisoners of war during training in Hawaii or in South Vietnam. “In Hawaii, the emphasis was on tactical combat operations throughout,” Specialist Fifth Class James E. Ford, a public-information clerk for the brigade, told the Peers investigators. “I think perhaps during that time . . . they might have said something about pacification and about the S-5’s function, civil affairs. But I don’t think it was an active part of the tactical training, though.”

Although Army manuals state that a brigade civil-affairs official should hold the rank of major, the 11th Brigade’s S-5, Keshel, was only a captain. The Army is loath to say so in public, but the job of division G-5 or brigade S-5 is considered a lowly one—a position for anyone who desires rapid promotion to avoid. Captain Keshel was in charge of making cash payments to Vietnamese victims of accidental American shootings. He made about thirty such solatium payments, as they were called (at that time, they amounted to about thirty-three dollars for each adult and half as much for children fifteen years of age or under), over a period of eight or nine months, ending in the fall of 1968. The total seemed high to him, Keshel told the Peers commission, and he mentioned his concern to Colonel Henderson. Henderson, in turn, “mentioned it to the battalion commanders at one of his briefings,” Keshel said, and he continued, “And all of the battalion commanders, boy, they really got down on me, now, they said, ‘Well, you know we got lieutenants out there with the platoon, or rifle-company commanders out there with the companies, he’d get fire from a village, he’s got to return fire to protect his command, and when this happens, perhaps a civilian will get shot.’ ”

The concept of a battlefield war crime just did not exist in the 11th Brigade. Major John L. Pitttman, the provost marshal of the unit, testified before the Peers commission that he could not recall giving the military policemen under his command any instructions or training in their obligations to report war crimes. On two or three occasions, Pittman said, he did report instances of prisoner mistreatment to both Lipscomb and Henderson. At a staff meeting, Lipscomb or Henderson always responded the same way—not by ordering an investigation but by putting out instructions against such practices.

Even if Henderson and some of his staff officers remained largely uninformed about the war taking place a few miles from their headquarters, the Colonel did meet the other basic requirements of a Vietnam commander: he had a superior mess hall and a rebuilt officers’ club, and there was considerable emphasis on being an officer and a gentleman. G.I.s who served in the 11th Brigade frequently talked to me with bitterness about the life style of the senior officers. “They had a fantastic mess hall,” former Specialist Fifth Class Jay A. Roberts, who worked in the public-information office, near headquarters, recalled. “The officers would have cocktail hour for an hour every night before dinner.” Other G.I.s talked about the ice cream, the shrimp, and the steak that were often on hand for the officers. Also frequently noted was the fact that the headquarters’ allotment of air-conditioners was utilized for Henderson’s mess hall and his personal quarters. Plans to blow up the mess hall—perhaps only half serious—were constantly being developed by the headquarters clerks. Some G.I.s boasted of having devised ways to appropriate bottles of whiskey and cold beer from the officers’ walk-in cooler. Former Specialist Fourth Class Frank D. Beardslee served as driver for Colonel Barker, the commander of Task Force Barker, and often took him to the Duc Pho Officers’ Club at five-thirty in time for the cocktail hour. “It was just like they were in Washington,” Beardslee said of the officers. “They would talk about promotions and all that stuff—just like a cocktail party back in the world.”

Shortly before Lipscomb, a West Pointer, retired, the brigade public-information office presented him with a scrapbook of photographs and news clippings highlighting his service with the 11th Brigade. Similar scrapbooks were made up for most senior officers who left the unit. Former Sergeant Ronald L. Haeberle, who served as a photographer for the brigade’s public-information office, considered such work routine at the time, and later, when criticized by the Peers panel for not turning photographs he had made of the My Lai 4 massacre over to higher authorities, he said he had never considered such a step, explaining, “You know something . . . ? If a general is smiling wrong in a photograph, I have learned to destroy it. . . . My experience as a G.I. over there is that if something doesn’t look right, a general smiling the wrong way . . . I stopped and destroyed the negative.”

F or a non-West Pointer, Colonel Barker had everything going for him. In January, 1968, General Koster had pulled him out of his job as operations officer of the 11th Brigade and given him command of a three-company task force of four hundred men that had been put together to find and destroy the enemy in the Batangan Peninsula area, in the eastern part of Quang Ngai Province. The peninsula was “Indian country” as far as American and South Vietnamese soldiers were concerned. Few operations had ever been mounted against the village of Son My, which was widely considered to be the staging and headquarters area for the Vietcong 48th Battalion, one of the strongest units in Quang Ngai. The area was heavily booby-trapped, and the men of Task Force Barker—the Colonel followed a custom by naming the unit after himself—suffered as a result. By March 15th, about fifteen G.I.s in the three companies had been killed and more than eighty had been wounded—a high percentage of casualties but not one that necessarily reflected much direct confrontation with the enemy. For example, four men in Charlie Company were killed and thirty-eight were wounded in those ten weeks, but the Peers commission determined that only three of the casualties, including one death, had resulted from direct contact with the enemy. But “Barker’s Bastards,” as the men of the task force were quickly dubbed by the brigade public-information office, were seemingly able to do what no other unit in the brigade could—find and destroy the enemy. “We devoted quite a bit of coverage to Task Force Barker,” Ford, the brigade public-information clerk, told the Peers commission. “Up until Task Force Barker deployed, we hadn’t been seeing too much action. As a result, our public-information coverage was kind of slim. . . . They were getting contact, and we were getting good copy out of it.” Barker’s men had the highest body count by far of any unit in the 11th Brigade, other officers would speak admiringly of the commander’s “luck” in getting solid contact. Specialist Fourth Class Donald R. Hooton, one of the Bravo Company infantrymen, had a different point of view. “Everybody said, ‘He’s got the most phenomenal luck,’ ” Hooton told me recently. “What they meant is that we’d go out and gun down a lot of people.”

But the G.I.s—even Hooton—admired Barker. He wasn’t afraid to land his helicopter in a battle area, and he would often join in the fray, firing his .45-calibre pistol at Vietnamese when his helicopter was flying low. He made sure that his troops received at least one hot meal a day in the field. There were other reasons for the widespread admiration of Barker. He was “lean and mean,” in the military tradition; handsome, with neatly chiselled features; friendly to the “grunts,” always accessible and always making it clear that he understood their problems. “Barker, in my estimation, seemed to have his finger in and was pretty well in tune with what was going on,” General Koster told the Peers commission. Barker’s responsibilities as a commander were total; he was in charge of the intelligence, the planning, and the initiation of all task-force operations—and always had the approval of his superiors.

Barker’s promotion to head the task force left a crucial administrative gap in the brigade headquarters—one that Colonel Henderson, then acting as deputy brigade commander, tried to fill himself. Then, when Henderson assumed control of the brigade, on March 15th, he was still not assigned a new administrative aide, so he was forced to do his paperwork at night. Such treatment undoubtedly galled Henderson, and so did the relationship between Koster and Barker. There were fifteen thousand lieutenant colonels in the Army in 1968 and fewer than three hundred battalions to command. Without battalion-command experience in Vietnam, a young lieutenant colonel could not expect promotion. Because the pressure for the jobs was so intense, the Army limited battalion commanders’ tours to six months. Normally, Henderson could have expected to have a powerful hold over Barker, because Barker would have needed Henderson’s approval before commanding a battalion; the bargaining and negotiating for such jobs goes on daily in