Word: kill
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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West describes Charlie Company as a close group in which "we cared about each individual." The men, he told LIFE, considered Captain Medina a tough soldier whom they knew, approvingly, as "Mad Dog" Medina. The captain, he contends, "didn't give an order to go in and kill women or children. I don't think any of us were aware of the fact that we'd run into civilians." When the shooting started, he said, the men "might have been wild for a while, but I don't think they went crazy...
Another soldier in the group following Calley's was SP4 Varnado Simpson, 22. "Everyone who went into the village had in mind to kill," he says. "We had lost a lot of buddies and it was a V.C. stronghold. We considered them either V.C. or helping the V.C." His platoon approached from the left flank. "As I came up on [the village], there was a woman, a man and a child, running away from it toward some huts. So I told them in their language to stop, and then they didn't and I had orders to shoot them down...
...know what to do with them, don't you?' And I said 'Yes.' And he left and came back about ten minutes later, and said, 'How come you ain't killed them yet?' And I told him that I didn't think he wanted us to kill them, that he just wanted us to guard them. He said, 'No, I want them dead.' So he started shooting them. And he told me to start shooting. I poured about four clips [68 shots] into them. I might have killed 10 or 15 of them...
...group of women. The picture shows the 13-year-old girl, hiding behind her mother, trying to button the top of her pajamas. When they noticed Ron, they left off and turned away as if everything was normal. Then a soldier asked, 'Well, what'll we do with 'em?' 'Kill 'em,' another answered. I heard an M60 go off, a light machine gun, and when we turned all of them and the kids with them were dead...
...they deliberately slay so many defenseless civilians? West claims that the orders read to them by the company commander, Captain Medina, were "to destroy Pinkville and everything in it." Another member of the company, Lenny Lagunoy, 25, said Medina had told them to "kill everything that moves." "Well, hell," adds Meadlo, "I was just following the orders of my officer like any good soldier?what's the good of having officers if they've nobody to obey them?" More thoughtfully, he explains: "It just seemed like it was the natural thing to do at the time. My buddies had been...