On March 16, 1968 U.S Infantrymen from Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry, 11th Light Infantry Brigade of the 23rd Americal Division moved in on a tiny subhamlet of the Son My village in the Quang Ngai Province of Vietnam. What followed was a disgusting act of malice carried out on the defenseless. Some five hundred Vietnamese civilians were killed in the incident. Women, children, infants, the elderly. However, this was not a spasm of violence. Not an uncontrollable twitch, flinch, or otherwise of sadistic persona-malcontent. This was a half-a-day's trudge through cleared jungle and mangled bodies. A seven-hour-long, eerily relaxed and pinpointed assault through fire and ruin. Through destroyed homes, families, and livelihoods.
Life Magazine ran a cover story on December 5, 1969 on African wildlife featuring a remarkably beautiful variety of antelope. Tucked inside the same issue was a set of obscene color photographs: A trench full of bodies, obviously dead; a close-up of a baby, smeared with its own wet blood; a group of women and children huddled together in panic and disbelief, and what would come to be the final breathes of their lives. It took this long for the story to reach the shores of America. It was of course greeted with passionate disbelief by the patriots of a God-fearing, Nation-building, Democracy-spreading superpower.
In the aftermath of the story coming to light as the worst atrocity in an already atrocious war, the defense of American Foreign Policy was as follows: "everybody does it". This was, of course, an unacceptable explanation for the Americans who grew up knowing that their country would never sink to the level sunken to on March 16, 1968. Indeed, the "everybody does it" defense was unacceptable to Americans like my cat, Milo.
After a long day of eating, sleeping, and occasionally going outside, Milo retired to his favorite quilt on the couch in my finished basement. Though he has painfully relived the events in the past, I ask him once again to dig into the trenches of his memory and bring to life his story. Milo was a helicopter door-gunner who aided in the stoppage of killing at My Lai. The pilot of the whirlybird, Frank Thompson, landed the chopper in the heart of the ongoing bloodbath to try and save the lives of a group of villagers being cornered by GIs. Milo, Thompson, and the other crewman, Perry Brighton, were prepared to shoot and kill any and all Americans threatening the lives of the Vietnamese villagers. Three decades later, the US Army awarded the Soldier's Medal for Gallantry to Thompson, Milo, and Perry Brighton (who died two weeks after the My Lai Massacre of a shrapnel wound on or around his neck area).
Milo began...
I wasn't some pacifist. I wasn't one of those pussy conscientious objectors. Not some Amish prick from Hershey, Pennsylvania too busy being scared, too busy sucking down chocolate and riding roller coasters to pick up a weapon and fight for my country. You have to realize, back then, we really did think that that's what we were doing. Fighting for our country. But I didn't shoot people just to shoot people. It wasn't a game to me. I wasn't out there playing John Wayne. If somebody shot at me, I'd shoot at them. It was easier for me to justify my own killing when I could tell myself, "well it's either him or me. If I get hit nine times I'm done for." I wanted to get back to The States in one piece.
We were of a new breed for the US Military. We were aerial scouts. Not an assault helicopter. We flew an OH-23, a small, light, gasoline-engine, bubble helicopter. A goofy looking thing, sure, but that bastard kept me alive, so I won't complain. I should be blunt here: Aerial Scouts we were indeed. But only in title. What we really were was bait. You see, they'd send us in ahead, with two gunships or so covering us. We'd fly around looking for trouble, basically, and when we found trouble, trouble found those gunships that were flying behind us. We'd just mark the spots with smoke, throw back some fairly light return fire, then book it the fuck out of there and let the big boys handle the rest. That's mostly what my time in Vietnam consisted of.
On the day in question here, The boys and I came on station at 7am sharp. No real briefing that morning, just that we were going to sweep this village. No "baiting" mission, which, looking back on it now should have raised an alarm in my head, but it didn't. It was a typically warm, typically unbearably humid day, luckily most of my winter-coat was gone by March. My body clock was still on East Coast time. Christ, I was in the God damn bush in December sweating and panting my nuts off, well, if I still had nuts, with at least a pound of extra fur. Not ideal, as you might believe. Anyway, the fog was lifting from the rice paddies, you could swear you heard the sun vaporizing that moisture sometimes. Sounded like those extra few drops of water on the bottom of a pot touching down on the stove top. And with that, we took to the sky.
Round about 8:30, our first pass, we spotted a man in uniform. He was carrying a pack and carbine coming out of some tree line. I remember Thompson saying, "who wants him?". I said, "I'm on it." You see, he was clearly Viet Cong. As soon as Thompson aimed the chopper at him he started running for the trees and evading. I couldn't hit this fucker to save my life. We circled the area a few times to no avail. I hit nothing but elephant grass and dirt. Point of the story is, that is the only armed Vietnamese that I saw that day.
After that we started working the perimeter of My Lai. We saw a few wounded women in the fields, so we marked their bodies with smoke for the medics to take care of. It was market day, so there were women out on the roads, which we saw, carrying baskets and things down to the market. Nothing out of the ordinary so we kept making the round.
When we got back to the road we saw the same women we had seen headed to market on the ground dead. Baskets empty. They were in piles. We didn't know what to make of it. Me and Thompson and Perry began trying to come up with a possible scenario for this, and we just couldn't. The American soldiers nearby were just walking around, just sort of strolling. Nobody was crawling, or hiding, or running. Nothing suggested a battle, nothing suggested there was return fire from anywhere.
We saw a young girl lying in the grass. She was unarmed and wounded in the chest. We moved over to her, did the usual. We hovered real low, about 10 feet off the ground, marked her body with smoke for the medics. Then, Captain Medina came over to the girl. He kicked her in the head, took two steps back and finished her off. I saw him do it. We all did, we were right there. Then it all made sense, sort of. It had to be that our guys were doing the killing.
Here we are, marking wounded bodies with smoke, basically telling the soldiers on the ground where they were so they could go ahead and finish them off. I was feeling like I was personally responsible for their deaths, and I just wouldn't stand for it. None of us would. We were sane. We were rational.
Thompson set the chopper down at around 10am near an earthen bunker. Perry had spotted some faces sticking out of it, horrified, as some soldiers advanced on their position. We landed in the way of their advance, and had a stare down with them. Thompson stepped in the path of the soldier leading the march, shouting over the noise of the helicopter still cooling off, "These are civilians! How do we get them out of this bunker?!" The soldier responded, "I'll get them out with hand grenades." This is what we were dealing with. Almost immediately, Thompson just said "fuck it" and went in the bunker, and took the civilians out. Brighton hopped on the radio and called a gunship friend of his and he somehow convinced him to use the gunship for medivac which was just completely unheard of. I think he had to make two trips to get all of those people out of that fucking village.
A few hours later we flew over this ditch. there must have been a hundred or more dead bodies in there, man. Just a mess. The worst you can think of. Remember that time i threw up in the litter box? But I sort of missed the box, and the puke was cascading down the side of the box? Remember that, when you had to clean that up? Well, this ditch was worse than that. There was no vomit visible to me from the OH-23, but I'm sure there was some in there. What was visible to me was movement. I caught something out of the corner of my eye. I had Thompson land, and I moved in. It was a baby. I couldn't tell if he was hurt, he was covered in blood, but everybody was. He was crying, this helped because I could always keep tabs on his position whilst I waded through blood and guts and shit, and like I said, probably vomit. I finally made it over to him. He wasn't shot, none of the blood was his, he was okay. He stopped crying when he saw me, probably because I'm a kitty cat and, not to brag, but i looked adorable in my helmet and flak jacket. I instructed him to grab onto me so i could drag him out. He didn't obviously, because he was a baby, and Vietnamese, so on two levels he had no idea what I was saying. Much like my winter-coat incident in December, this was again, not ideal. Luckily, the child had some hair on his head i could tangle my claws on. It's all I could do, so I did it. I dragged that baby out of there by the hair on his head. I took him back to the chopper and we got out of there.
And that was that.
I don't know how people can reach a point like that reached by those soldiers that day in My Lai. I just know that it happened, and I know I was there. I take comfort in the fact that I know in my heart I did everything I could to stop it.
Milo then got sleepy. He quickly added, as he got up from lying down only to spin around once and lay down again, "Also, I really do prefer the Newman's Own cat food. That Nine Lives stuff really blows, and it reminds me of the kinds of things I crawled through in that ditch in My Lai." For an American hero, like my cat, Milo, the least I could do is get him the food that he likes. But I can't afford Newman's Own on my salary, and he's a fucking cat.
*Author's Note* *This is based off the true story of Larry Colburn captured brilliantly by Christian G. Appy in his novel, "Patriots". I edited some of it to include my cat.*
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