Word: lai
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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...
...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...
...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...