The Page 99 Test: Howard Jones's "My Lai"

Howard Jones is University Research Professor of History Emeritus at the University of Alabama.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, My Lai: Vietnam, 1968, and the Descent into Darkness, and reported the following:

From page 99:
[PFC Michael Bernhardt] from the 2nd Platoon had not entered My Lai 4 along with his company commander; [Captain Ernest] Medina ordered him to inspect a suspicious-looking wood box just outside the subhamlet to determine whether it was a booby trap. After finding it harmless, Bernhardt caught up with the command group inside My Lai 4 and was shocked to see the 3rd Platoon setting the huts afire and shooting their inhabitants as they ran outside, or breaking into them and shooting everyone inside. Other GIs assembled the villagers in small groups outside their homes and shot them on the spot. "The whole thing was so deliberate,” he told [reporter Seymour] Hersh. “It was point-blank murder and I was standing there watching it. It's kind of made me wonder if I could trust people anymore."

The 3rd Platoon, led by Lieutenant Jeffrey LaCross, began the final phase of the operation before the other two platoons had made it through the village, but its so-called “mop-up mission” quickly became a euphemism for killing anyone still alive. Photographer and Sergeant Ronald Haeberle took picture after picture of civilians scattered everywhere, some already dead and the others now slain by the 3rd Platoon. No doubt out of concern for his own safety, he decided against photographing soldiers shooting villagers, but his camera recorded a great number of bodies spread out or together, depending on where the victims had been when they were murdered. It also showed bunkers, sometimes filled with villagers, ripped apart by grenades; domestic structures damaged or destroyed by what he at first assumed was errant artillery fire; hooches burned to the ground by Zippo squads; pigs and water buffaloes killed; wells contaminated by animal remains.

“I knew it was something that shouldn’t be happening but yet I was part of it,” Haeberle recounted in an interview years later. “I think I was in a kind of daze from seeing all these shootings and not seeing any return fire. Yet the killing kept going on.” Several soldiers rounded up the civilians and shot them, while others killed them individually or in small groups on the spot. Everyone in Haeberle’s mind bore responsibility, including Major General [Samuel] Koster and Lieutenant Colonel [Frank] Barker for failing to monitor and control their troops. All refused to take prisoners. “It was completely different to my concept of what war is all about.”

Numerous soldiers’ accounts confirmed the continuing slaughter. In the CID Report, Sergeant [Charles] West admitted that they had killed women and children. PFC Richard Pendleton and his men shot a half dozen men and women running from the village, killing three of them. Fred Dustin watched his fellow grunts kill a group of Vietnamese that included children. Stephen Glimpse saw a soldier behind him shoot a wounded youth.
I was amazed that so many themes of my book ran through page 99.

Not everyone killed with impunity. Even in the absence of return fire, the GIs were at first convinced the enemy was there and more than a few of them sought to survive by following orders to kill everyone, whether man, woman, or child—or baby. Bernhardt refused to kill non-resisting villagers and was appalled and sickened by what he witnessed. Yet he felt powerless to stop the killing. His commander, Captain Medina, later warned him not to tell his congressman what he saw. And from his vantage point, Bernhardt saw a microcosm of the whole: Vietnamese villagers rounded up and shot in groups or one by one; grenades tossed into bunkers and homes with the survivors running outside only to be shot, while others remained inside, perhaps injured and also shot; wanton and illegal destruction of property, including homes, buildings, and contamination of wells, along with the slaughter of water buffaloes, pigs, and other animals.

The mass killings and widespread destruction were purposeful and could not be attributable to so-called inadvertent collateral damage. Despite U.S. intelligence warnings to the contrary, no Viet Cong forces were in My Lai 4, which meant that the infantry had gunned down unarmed civilians erroneously believed to be the enemy—including those killed after it was clear that there was no enemy in the village. No superiors were in charge after the first few moments of the operation. The Americal Division commander, Major General Koster, was not monitoring the situation; Lieutenant Colonel Barker was in a helicopter hovering over the village and lacked firsthand information on what was going on below; and Medina quickly lost control of his three platoons of about a hundred troops in Charlie Company, allowing 2nd Lieutenant William Calley and others to follow their orders as they perceived them to be.

In the meantime, army photographer Ronald Haeberle took pictures of the victims, providing evidence of a massacre that he at first kept hidden and thereby became part of a cover-up. And he was not alone. Most soldiers, whether or not they participated in the killings, maintained their silence about what had happened—doubtless for fear of death at the hands of the perpetrators. Some GIs told their story to members of the army’s Criminal Investigation Division; but as time passed, most of them either changed their accounts or asserted that they could no longer remember what happened in those four hours that day. Yet Haeberle and every other soldier in My Lai that morning realized they were part of this massacre and would carry the memory of these events with them for the rest of their lives.