Lieutenant accused of murdering 109 civilians: By SEYMOUR HERSH
The Pulitzer prize winning My Lai story, as readers experienced it when it was first published in 1969
In the fall of 1969, a friend with a source in the military called a part-time political columnist for The Village Voice with a tip: a U.S. soldier was being court-martialled for leading a massacre of Vietnamese civilians, and the Army didn’t want it reported. The columnist, Geoffrey Cowan, decided to pass the tip on.
On Oct. 22, he called Seymour M. Hersh, a 32-year-old freelancer who had quit his wire service job and served the previous winter as press secretary in Sen. Eugene McCarthy’s insurgent presidential campaign. Hersh decided to give the story a go. From a dingy office in Washington he made more than two dozen calls before someone gave him a sketchy account of what had happened. He called Fort Benning in rural Georgia, where he believed the accused officer was being held. A public affairs officer there referred him to a short piece buried in the Sept. 7 New York Times. From this Hersh learned that Lt. William L. Calley was being held for murdering an unspecified number of Vietnamese civilians in 1968.
Hersh found Calley’s lawyer and flew to Salt Lake City to interview him. He traveled to Fort Benning and prowled the base until he found Calley. Shortly after Hersh interviewed Calley and just three weeks after the tip, the story he uncovered shocked the nation.
It also won the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting.
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FORT BENNING, Ga., Nov. 13 – Lt. William L. Calley Jr., 26 years old, is a mild-mannered, boyish-looking Vietnam combat veteran with the nickname “Rusty.” The Army is completing an investigation of charges that he deliberately murdered at least 109 Vietnamese civilians in a search-and- destroy mission in March 1968 in a Viet Cong stronghold known as “Pinkville.”
Calley has formally been charged with six specifications of mass murder. Each specification cites a number of dead, adding up to the 109 total, and charges that Calley did “with premeditation murder . . . Oriental human beings, whose names and sex are unknown, by shooting them with a rifle.”
The Army calls it murder; Calley, his counsel and others associated with the incident describe it as a case of carrying out orders. “Pinkville” has become a widely known code word among the military in a case that many officers and some Congressmen believe “will become far more controversial than the recent murder charges against eight Green Berets. Army investigation teams spent nearly one year studying the incident before filing charges against Calley, a platoon leader of the Eleventh Brigade of the Americal Division at the time of the killings.
Calley was formally charged on or about Sept. 6, 1969, in the multiple deaths, just a few days before he was due to be released from active service. Calley has since hired a prominent civilian attorney, former Judge George W. Latimer of the U.S. Court of Military Appeals, and is now awaiting a military determination of whether the evidence justifies a general court-martial Pentagon officials describe the present stage of the case as the equivalent of a civilian grand jury proceeding.
Calley, meanwhile, is being detained at Fort Benning, where his movements are sharply restricted. Even his exact location on the base is secret; neither the provost marshal nor the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division knows where he is being held. The Army has refused to comment on the case “in order not to prejudice the continuing investigation and rights of the accused.” Similarly, Calley — although agreeing to an interview — refused to discuss in detail what happened on March 16, 1968.
However, many other officers and civilian officials, some angered by Calley’s action and others angry that charges of murder were filed in the case, talked freely in interviews at Fort Benning and Washington.
These factors are not in dispute….
https://www.pulitzer.org/article/i-sent-them-good-boy-and-they-made-him-murderer
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