TRIALS: My Lai: A Question of Orders

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.

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.