(2 of 2)
Loaded Babies. As he had done on television more than a year ago, Paul Meadlo described how he and Calley shot more than 100 Vietnamese. Meadlo, who left the Army before the criminal investigation began and testified only after being assured his testimony would not be used against him, talked about his constant fear, even of babies in their mothers' arms: "They might have been loaded with grenades that the mothers could have throwed." The image of an American soldier cringing before infants was in its own way as shattering as the massacre.
Throughout his testimony, Meadlo referred to the villagers as Viet Cong, even correcting Trial Judge Reid Kennedy's use of the term Vietnamese. "You mean Viet Cong, sir," said Meadlo. Just once did he betray any emotion or deviate from his insistence that he had followed orders to kill a feared enemy: "Captain Medina was there before this ditch. With all the bodies laying around, why didn't he put a stop to all the killing?"
With Meadlo's testimony, the prosecution rested its case. Defense Attorney George Latimer continued to call witnesses to corroborate evidence against the chain of command. He also succeeded in getting several previously confidential documents entered into the record of Galley's court-martial. One was a combat-action report filed by Barker after the incident. It claimed 128 "enemy casualties" and described problems of "population control and medical care of those civilians caught in the fire of opposing forces." The overwhelming burden of testimony has shown that there were neither enemy forces nor hostile fire in My Lai that day. Another document was a memorandum from Americal Division Headquarters banning the term "search and destroy" from the division's official vocabulary and suggesting the use of other phrases that would "give the reader no basis for assuming a lack of compassion on the part of members of this command." Indeed, compassion was not completely absent at My Lai. Immediately after the slaughter, G.I.s found two survivors, little girls. They fed the children and delivered them safely to neighboring Vietnamese.
*An illegal order is one that violates the U.S. military code or an accepted international convention. In this case, international law covering the treatment of non-belligerents was involved.