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Conspiracy of Silence
In Quang Ngai province last week, TIME Correspondent Robert Anson talked to some of the survivors of the massacre. Do Thi Chuc, an aging woman, said she had lost a 24-year-old daughter and a four-year-old nephew at My Lai. "All I remember," she said, "was people being killed. There was blood all over. White Americans and black Americans both did the killing. Heads were broken open, and there were pieces of flesh over everyone." Sobbing, she said that she too had been wounded and had fallen among the bodies.
A young lance corporal escorting Anson was unimpressed. "They're all V.C., you can just tell," he said. "You don't see many young men in there, do you? All women, children and old men. Where'd all those guys go? Out with the V.C., that's where. We come in at night and sneak into one of their hootches and you know where they are? All in their bunkers. They gotta be V.C."
Both the extent of the massacre and the number of soldiers involved make it incredible that the matter could have been kept quiet for so long. Some men of Charlie Company contend that Captain Medina assembled them, told them not to complain about the affair to anyone back home, and promised to back them up if there was an investigation. As a result of Pilot Thompson's complaint, the commander of the 11th Brigade, Colonel Oran K. Henderson, quizzed Captain Medina and some of the troops. He asked a group of the men whether they had seen any soldiers shooting civilians. The repeated response was no. He concluded that some 20 bodies he found at the scene were those of civilians caught in advance shelling and crossfire between U.S. and enemy forces. He dismissed Vietnamese claims of unnecessary killings as "common Viet Cong propaganda technique" and reported his findings orally to the commander of the Americal Division, Major General Samuel Koster, now superintendent at West Point. This "conspiracy of silence," as one participant terms it, kept any official alarm from reaching Washington for many months.
The Army's own routine reports on the action at My Lai should have aroused suspicion. As related by the Army's Stars and Stripes. "U.S. infantrymen had killed 128 Communists in a bloody day-long battle." That large an action, rare at the time, normally would call for a detailed report. The former information officer who wrote that report, Lieut. Arthur Dunn, 27, said he was puzzled at so many enemy dead and so few — only three — weapons reported found.
Although it sounded "fishy," he asked no further questions. Nor did anyone else, it seems, until a troubled Viet Nam veteran, who had served with many of the men at Charlie Company, wrote his now-famous letters to some 30 Washington officials, including the President, the Sec retary of Defense and — most important — key Congressmen.
Just Another Crank Letter
The letter writer, Ronald Lee Ridenhour, 23, had