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Lunch Break. Few were spared. Stragglers were shot down as they fled from their burning huts. One soldier fired his M-79 grenade launcher into a clump of bodies in which some Vietnamese were still alive. One chilling incident was observed by Ronald L. Haeberle, 28, the Army combat photographer who had been assigned to C Company.* He saw "two small children, maybe four or five years old. A guy with an M-16 fired at the first boy, and the older boy fell over to protect the smaller one. Then they fired six more shots. It was done very businesslike."
Most of the shooting had died down by the time the men of the other two platoons filed into the hamlet. Sergeant Terry told newsmen that he and his squad were settling down for some chow when they noticed that some Vietnamese in a pile of bodies in a nearby ditch "were still breathing." Continued Terry: "They were pretty badly shot up. They weren't going to get any medical help, and so we shot them, shot maybe five of them." Then they broke for lunch.
Not all of C Company took part in the madness. At My Lai, Ridenhour reported, one soldier shot himself in the foot so that he would be Medevacked out of the area. A few others, himself included, says Bernhardt, refused to fire. That evening, he said, his company commander told him "not to do anything like write my Congressman."
Many questions about My Lai remain unanswered. Who had ordered the attack on the hamlet, which was apparently designated as a "free-fire" zone? What exactly were the orders? The answers may come out in a court-martial; Fort Benning Commander Major General Orwin Talbott is expected to announce a decision this week on whether Lieut. Galley is to be tried. Even so, time has already erased much of the evidence.
Outrage Again. There have been other American atrocities in Viet Nam. Ten Marines were prosecuted in 1967 after a nighttime rampage in Xuan Ngoc in which two women were raped and a family of five killed. Daniel Lang's Casualties of War describes the kidnap-rape-murder of a young girl by four G.I.s in 1966. Yet such incidents are only a small part of the mosaic of brutality for which both sides are responsible. Terror is a principal Viet Cong tactic. So far this year, by actual count, the Communists have killed 5,754 civilians, wounded 14,520 others and kidnaped 5,887. The allies have taken to such tactics too, though on a more limited scale. Under the so-called Phoenix program, the U.S. and South Viet Nam last year began a struggle to break the Viet Cong infrastructure of tax collectors and other officials. In its first year, according to the Pentagon, Phoenix "neutralized" more than 14,000 Communist civilians—meaning captured them, converted them to the allied side—or killed them as they tried to escape capture.