Nation: THE MY LAI MASSACRE

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¶Company arrived in Viet Nam in February 1968, and was assigned to Task Force Barker, a three-company search-and-destroy unit located a few miles from the hamlet at a firebase on Viet Nam Highway No. 1. Almost from the moment it arrived, C Company suffered daily casualties. Most of the mayhem was caused by mines and booby traps, and they were particularly plentiful in and around My Lai. By mid-March, the company, had lost a third of its original strength of more than 100 men. One day, a 155 mm. shell rigged as a booby trap killed one and injured four or five others. As Sergeant Michael B. Terry, 22, recalled it last week, "that really bothered the guys." Evidently so. Some of the men in the unit later beat up an innocent woman whom they spotted in a field. The beating ended, said Terry, when "one kid just walked up to her and shot her."

The next morning, on orders whose origin is still unclear, C Company took on a special assignment. It was described last week by Sergeant Michael A. Bernhardt, another C Company veteran. At Fort Dix, N.J., he went before TV cameras accompanied by a base press officer. As Bernhardt told it, the company commander (Captain Ernest Medina, now stationed at Fort Benning) assembled hk men and announced that the Task Force was to destroy My Lai and its inhabitants.

The Kid Just Couldn't. According to the survivors, who spoke to newsmen last week at their shabby refugee camp at nearby Son My, the operation was grimly efficient. The inhabitants, who had a long record of sheltering Viet Cong, scrambled for cover around 6 a.m. when an hour-long mortar and artillery barrage began. When it stopped, helicopters swooped in, disgorging C Company's three platoons. One platoon tore into the hamlet, while the other two threw a cordon around the place. "My family was eating breakfast, when the Americans came," said Do Chuc, a 48-year-old peasant who claims to have lost a son and a daughter in the shooting that followed. "Nothing was said to us," he said. "No explanation was given."

The first G.I.s to enter the hamlet were led by Lieut. Calley, a slight, 5-ft. 3-in. dropout (with four Fs) from Palm Beach Junior College who enlisted in the Army in 1966 and was commissioned in 1967. Some of Calley's men raced from house to house, setting the wooden ones ablaze and dynamiting the brick structures. Others routed the inhabitants out of their bunkers and herded them into groups. Some of them tried to run, said Bernhardt, but "the rest couldn't quite understand what was going on." Sergeant Terry saw a young C Company soldier train an M-60 on the first group of huddled villagers, "but the kid just couldn't do it. He threw the machine gun down." Another man picked it up.

As Ridenhour described it, one of his C Company friends was stunned by the fate of a small wounded boy who had been standing by the hamlet trail. "The boy was clutching his wounded arm with his other hand, while blood trickled between his fingers," Ridenhour wrote. "He just stood there with big eyes staring around like he didn't understand. Then the captain's RTO [radio operator] put a burst of 16 [M16 rifle] fire into him."