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19 women and children were rounded up
as Vietcong suspects, and the lieutenant that rounded them up called the
captain on the radio and he asked, "What should be done with them?"
The captain simply repeated the order that came down from the colonel
that morning.
The order that came down from the
colonel that morning was to kill anything that moves, which you can take
any way you want to take it. And when the captain told the
lieutenant this, the lieutenant rang off, I got up and I started walking
over to the captain thinking that the lieutenant just might do it
because I'd served in his platoon for a long time. As I started
over there I think the captain panicked. He thought the lieutenant
might do it too. And this was a little more atrocious than the
other executions that our company had participated in, only because of
the numbers. But the captain tried to call him up, tried to get
him back on the horn, and he couldn't get a hold of him.
As I was walking over to him, I turned
and I looked in the area. I looked to where the VCS were -- supposed VCS
-- and two men were leading a young girl, approximately 19 years old,
very pretty, out of a hootch. She had no clothes on, so I assumed
she'd been raped, which was pretty SOP. That's standard operating
procedure for civilians. And she was thrown onto the pile of the
19 women and children, and five men around the circle opened up on full
automatic with their M-16s. And that was the end of that.
Now the lieutenant that was there -- not the lieutenant who was there --
there was a lieutenant who heard this over the radio in our company, he
had stayed back with some mortars. When we got back to our night
location, he was going half way out of his mind, because he had just
gotten there, relatively. He was one of these, I don't know, I
guess he was naive or something, believed in the old American ideal.
And he was going nuts. He was going to report it to everybody.
And after that day he calmed down. The next day he didn't say
anything about it. We got in a wretched firefight the next day,
and the whole thing was just sort of lost in the intensity of the war.
I would like to point out that if you
took the Vietnamese war, or the American war as it is, and compare it to
the Indian wars 100 years ago, it would be the same thing.
All of the massacres were the
same, and nowadays they use chemical warfare.
Back then they put smallpox in the
blankets and gave them to the Indians.
And you could just
go right down the line and name them off, and they would be the same
thing.
When I was small I was exposed to this.
And I kept growing and I kept growing, and learning. But it was so
much that when I watched TV and something, and watched the Indian and
the cavalry, I would cheer for the cavalry. That's how bad it was.
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