It was murder. I wasn't happy about shooting all the people anyway. I didn't agree with all the killing, but we were doing it because we had been told.
With those stark words, Sergeant Charles Hutto told an Army investigator what he had done at My Lai. He followed orders, Hutto said; the orders, by all accounts, had been to kill every living thing in the small village. The defense at Hutto's court-martial last week never refuted the statement. The prosecution was unable to buttress it with eyewitness testimony. But the precise facts concerning Hutto's actions seemed almost academic. Rather the issue became one of perception and intelligence at the bottom of the chain of command.
Hutto's civilian defense attorney, Edward Magill, argued that his client had "thought that the Army would only give him legal orders," hence he was not guilty of assault with intent to kill. Colonel Kenneth Howard, the trial judge, set one milepost in the My Lai saga by declaring that a superior's directive to kill unarmed civilians was "illegal."* But, Howard said in his charge to the jury of six officers, the question really came down to the accused's ability to decide for himself whether the order was illegal. In two hours, the six combat veterans acquitted Hutto, the second enlisted man found not guilty since the trials began.
The matter of orders has become the central theme in the defense of those charged in the March 1968 massacre. In Hutto's court-martial and in the separate trial of Lieut. William Calley, the emphasis was on passing the buck upward toward the commanders who directed the assault on My Lai. The names of superiors, among them Company Commander Ernest Medina, Task Force Commander Frank Barker (who was killed three months after My Lai) and Brigade Commander Oran K. Henderson, were mentioned on the witness stand.
Paul David Meadlo recalled the briefing his company received from Captain Medina the afternoon before the assault. Medina told the men, Meadlo testified, that all the My Lai villagers were "Viet Cong or Viet Cong sympathizers, and we were supposed to kill everything there —women, children, livestock." Three defense witnesses corroborated that.
Staff Sergeant Dennis R. Vasquez, who was a witness at both trials last week, gave some of the most damaging testimony against the officers so far. Vasquez was an artillery air observer flying in Lieut. Colonel Barker's helicopter that morning. He reported landing inside the village, where Barker and Medina conferred. According to Vasquez, Barker told Medina that "everything was going fine, going smooth, going to plan." The day before, Vasquez recalled, there had been a meeting of officers in which Colonel Henderson urged his brigade officers to "go in there aggressively, close with the enemy and wipe them out for good." Henderson has been charged with dereliction of duty. Medina has undergone the Army's equivalent of a grand jury investigation that could result in a court-martial, but no formal charges have been announced.