(4 of 10)
Not All Took Part
"So we started to gather more people, and we had about seven or eight, and we put them in the hootch and then we dropped a hand grenade in there with them. And then they had about 70-75 people all gathered up by a ravine, so we threw ours in with them and Lieut. Calley told me, 'Meadlo, we got another job to do.' And so he walked over to the people, and he started pushing them off and started shooting. We just pushed them all off and just started using automatics on them."
According to SP5 Jay Roberts, the rampaging G.I.s were not interested solely in killing, although that seemed foremost on their minds. Roberts told LIFE: "Just outside the village there was this big pile of bodies. This really tiny kid —he only had a shirt on, nothing else —he came over to the pile and held the hand of one of the dead. One of the G.I.s behind me dropped into a kneeling position thirty meters from this kid and killed him with a single shot." Roberts also watched while troops accosted a group of women, including a teen-age girl. The girl was about 13 and wearing black pajamas. "A G.I. grabbed the girl and with the help of others started stripping her," Roberts related. "Let's see what she's made of," a soldier said. "V.C. boom-boom," another said, telling the 13-year-old girl that she was a whore for the Viet Cong. "I'm horny," said a third. As they were stripping the girl, with bodies and burning huts all around them, the girl's mother tried to help her, scratching and clawing at the soldiers.
Continued Roberts: "Another Vietnamese woman, afraid for her own safety, tried to stop the woman from objecting. One soldier kicked the mother and another slapped her up a bit. Haeberle [the photographer] jumped in to take a picture of the group of women. The picture shows the 13-year-old girl, hiding behind her mother, trying to button the top of her pajamas. When they noticed Ron, they left off and turned away as if everything was normal. Then a soldier asked, 'Well, what'll we do with 'em?' 'Kill 'em,' another answered. I heard an M60 go off, a light machine gun, and when we turned all of them and the kids with them were dead."
A Cursory Investigation
Private Richard Pendleton arrived after most of the killing was over. "But some guys were still shooting people who were running around the village. There were big groups of bodies lying on the ground, in gullies and in the paddies." He said he saw a boy standing among the bodies of 15 adults. "There was just this little kid there, this little boy, and I looked over and saw Medina [the company commander] shoot him. I don't know why he did it, except that there was a bunch of bodies there—and I guess the boy's mother was one of them."