A My Lai a Month (Page 2)

Research support for this article was provided by the Investigative Fund of The Nation Institute. Research assistance was provided by George Schulz of the Center for Investigative Reporting, Sousan Hammad and Sophie Ragsdale.

The Butcher of the Delta and Rice Paddy Daddy

During Ewell's time commanding the Ninth Division, from February 1968 to April 1969, his units achieved remarkably high kill ratios. While the historical US average was ten to one, Ewell's troops reportedly achieved seventy-six to one in March 1969. Ewell's obsession with body count was enthusiastically shared by his deputy, then Col. Ira "Jim" Hunt, who served as a brigade commander in the Ninth Division and as Ewell's chief of staff.

"Hunt, who was our Brigade Commander for awhile and then was an assistant general...used to holler and curse over the radio and talk about the goddamn gooks, and tell the gunships to shoot the sonofabitches, this is a free fire zone," wrote the Concerned Sergeant. Hunt, he said, "didn't care about the Vietnamese or us, he just wanted the most of everything, including body count"; "Hunt was...always cussing and screaming over the radio from his C and See [Command and Control helicopter] to the GIs or the gunships to shoot some Vietnamese he saw running when he didn't know if they had a weapon or was women or what."

The sergeant wrote that his unit's artillery forward observer (FO) "would tell my company commander he couldn't shoot in the village because it was in the population overlay." The battalion commander would then "get mad and cuss over the radio at my company commander and...declare a contact [with the enemy] so the FO would shoot anyway. I was there, and we wasn't in contact but my company commander and the FO would do anything to get the COL [colonel] off there back." He went on, "He wouldn't even listen when the FO wanted to wait till after dark and use air burst WP [white phosphorus] rounds to adjust...so as not to zap any hooches." Instead, the colonel said "it had to be HE [high explosive] right in the houses."

In a 2006 interview I conducted with Deborah Nelson, then a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, Ira Hunt claimed that the Ninth Division did not fire artillery near villages. He also denied any knowledge of the Concerned Sergeant's allegations and argued against the notion that a command emphasis on body count led to the mass killing of civilians. "No one's going to say that innocent civilians aren't killed in wartime, but we try to keep it down to the absolute minimum," he said. "The civilian deaths are anathema, but we did our best to protect civilians. I find it unbelievable that people would go out and shoot innocent civilians just to increase a body count." But interviews with several participants in Speedy Express, together with public testimony and published accounts, strongly confirm the allegations in the sergeant's letters.

The Concerned Sergeant's battalion commander, referred to in the letters, was the late David Hackworth, who took command of the Ninth Division's 4/39th Infantry in January 1969. In a 2002 memoir, Steel My Soldiers' Hearts, he echoed the sergeant's allegations about the overwhelming pressure to produce high body counts. "A lot of innocent Vietnamese civilians got slaughtered because of the Ewell-Hunt drive to have the highest count in the land," he wrote. He also noted that when Hunt submitted a recommendation for a citation, citing a huge kill ratio, he left out the uncomfortable fact that "the 9th Division had the lowest weapons-captured-to-enemy-killed ratio in Vietnam."

During Speedy Express, Maj. William Taylor Jr. saw Hunt in action, too, and in a September interview he echoed the Concerned Sergeant's assessment. Now a retired colonel and senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Taylor recalled flying over rice paddies with Hunt: "He said something to the pilot, and all of a sudden the door gunner was firing a .50-caliber machine gun out the door, and I said, 'What the hell is that?' He said, 'See those black pajamas down there in the rice paddies? They're Vietcong. We just killed two of them.'" Immediately afterward, Hunt spoke again to the pilot. "He was talking body count," Taylor said. "Reporting body count." Later he asked Hunt how he could identify VC from the helicopter, without seeing weapons or receiving ground fire. "He said, 'Because they're wearing black pajamas.' I said, 'Well, Sir, I thought workers in the fields wore black pajamas.' He said, 'No, not around here. Black pajamas are Vietcong.'"

Like Hackworth, Taylor recalled an overriding emphasis on body count. It was "the most important measure of success, and it came from the personal example of the Ninth Division commander, General Julian Ewell," he said. "I saw it directly. Body count was everything."

In August I spoke with Gary Nordstrom, a combat medic with the Ninth Division's Company C, 2/39th Infantry, during Speedy Express, who described how the body count emphasis filtered down to the field. "For all enlisted people, that was the mentality," he recalled. "Get the body count. Get the body count. Get the body count. It was prevalent everywhere. I think it was the mind-set of the officer corps from the top down." In multiple instances, his unit fired on Vietnamese for no other reason than that they were running. "On at least one occasion," he said, "I went and confirmed that they were dead."

In recent months, I spoke with two Ninth Division officers who feuded with Ewell over division policies. Retired Lt. Gen. Robert Gard, who commanded the division's five artillery battalions during his 1968-69 tour, spoke to me of Ewell's heavy emphasis on body count and said he was never apprised of any restrictions about firing in or near villages. "There isn't any question that our operations resulted in civilian casualties," he told me in July. Gard recalled arguing with Ewell once about firing artillery on a village after receiving mortar fire from it. "I told him no, I thought it was unwise to do that," he said in a 2006 interview with me and Nelson. "We had a confrontation on the issue." Gard also served with Hunt, whom he succeeded as division chief of staff. When asked if Hunt, too, pressed for a large body count, Gard responded, "Big time." "Jim Hunt dubbed himself 'Rice Paddy Daddy,'" Gard recalled, referring to Hunt's radio call sign. "He went berserk."

Maj. Edwin Deagle served in the division from July 1968 until June 1969, first as an aide to Ewell and Hunt and then as executive officer (XO) of the division's 2/60th Infantry during Speedy Express. In September he spoke to me about "the tremendous amount of pressure that Ewell put on all of the combat unit operations, including artillery, which tended to create circumstances under which the number of civilian casualties would rise." Concerned specifically that pressure on artillery units had eroded most safeguards on firing near villages, he confronted his commander. "We'll end up killing a lot of civilians," he told Ewell.

Deagle further recalled an incident after he took over as XO when he was listening on the radio as one of his units stumbled into an ambush and lost its company commander, leaving a junior officer in charge. Confused and unable to outmaneuver the enemy forces, the lieutenant called in a helicopter strike with imprecise instructions. "They fired a tremendous amount of 2.75 [mm rockets] into the town," Deagle recalled, "and that killed a total of about 145 family members or Vietnamese civilians."

Deagle undertook extensive statistical analysis of the division and found that the 2/60th, one of ten infantry battalions, accounted for a disproportionate 40 percent of the weapons captured. Yet even in his atypical battalion, a body count mind-set prevailed, according to combat medic Wayne Smith, who arrived in the last days of Speedy Express and ultimately served with the 2/60th. "It was all about body count," he recalled in June. When it came to free-fire zones, "Anyone there was fair game," Smith said. "That's how [it] went down. Sometimes they may have had weapons. Other times not. But if they were in an area, we damn sure would try to kill them."

Another American to witness the carnage was John Paul Vann, a retired Army lieutenant colonel who became the chief of US pacification efforts in the Mekong Delta in February 1969. He flew along on some of the Ninth Division's night-time helicopter operations. According to notes from an unpublished 1975 interview with New York Times Vietnam War correspondent Neil Sheehan, Vann's deputy, Col. David Farnham, said Vann found that troops used early night-vision devices to target any and all people, homes or water buffalo they spotted. No attempt was made to determine whether the people were civilians or enemies, and a large number of noncombatants were killed or wounded as a result.

Louis Janowski, who served as an adviser in the Delta during Speedy Express, saw much of the same and was scathing in an internal 1970 end-of-tour report. In it, he called other Delta helicopter operations, known as the Phantom program, a form of "non selective terrorism." "I have flown Phantom III missions and have medivaced enough elderly people and children to firmly believe that the percentage of Viet Cong killed by support assets is roughly equal to the percentage of Viet Cong in the population," he wrote, indicating a pattern of completely indiscriminate killing. "That is, if 8% of the population [of] an area is VC about 8% of the people we kill are VC."

An adviser in another Delta province, Jeffrey Record, also witnessed the carnage visited on civilians by the Phantom program during Speedy Express. In a 1971 Washington Monthly article, Record recalled watching as helicopter gunships strafed a herd of water buffalo and the six or seven children tending them. Seconds later, the tranquil paddy had been "transformed into a bloody ooze littered with bits of mangled flesh," Record wrote. "The dead boys and the water buffalo were added to the official body count of the Viet Cong."

The Cover-Up

In April 1969 Ewell was promoted to head II Field Force, Vietnam, then the largest US combat command in the world. That same month, in an AP story, Ira Hunt defended the body count against those who called it a "terrible measure of progress." The story also quoted a senior officer who denied deliberately killing noncombatants, while granting that noncombatant deaths resulted from Ninth Division operations. "'Have we killed innocent civilians?' [he] asked rhetorically during an interview. 'Hell yes,' he replied, 'but so do the South Vietnamese.'"

In the spring of 1970, as Ewell was readying to leave Vietnam to serve as the top US military adviser at the Paris peace talks, R. Kenley Webster, the Army's acting general counsel, read the Concerned Sergeant's letter at Army Secretary Stanley Resor's request. According to a memo Webster wrote at the time, which was among the documents I uncovered in the National Archives, he was "impressed by its forcefulness" and "sincerity" and commissioned an anonymous internal report from a respected Vietnam veteran. That report endorsed the Concerned Sergeant's contentions:

It is common knowledge that an officer's career can be made or destroyed in Vietnam.... Under such circumstances--and especially if such incentives as stand-downs, R&R [rest and relaxation] allocations, and decorations are tied to body count figures--the pressure to kill indiscriminately, or at least report every Vietnamese casualty as an enemy casualty, would seem to be practically irresistible.

In June 1970 Webster sent a memo, with the review, to Resor, recommending that he confer with Westmoreland and Creighton Abrams, by then the top commander in Vietnam, about the matter. According to Army documents, Resor and Abrams discussed the allegations, but no investigation was launched.

News of the atrocities in the Delta was already leaking into public view. That winter, veterans of Speedy Express spoke out about the killing of civilians at the National Veterans' Inquiry in Washington, and the Winter Soldier Investigation in Detroit. In April 1971, at hearings chaired by Representative Ronald Dellums, Vietnam veteran West Point graduates testified to Ewell's "body count mania." That same month, Record's Washington Monthly piece appeared.

Within days, Robert Komer, formerly a deputy to Westmoreland and chief of pacification efforts in Vietnam, wrote to Vann seeking his assessment of the article and noting, "It rings all too true!" In early May 1971, Vann replied to Komer, by then a consultant with the RAND Corporation, that "the US is on very shaky ground on either the Phantom or other 'hunter-killer' airborne missions and literally hundreds of horrible examples have been documented by irate advisors, both military and civilian."

By this time, Ira Hunt had returned from Vietnam and, in a strange twist of fate, was leading the Army's investigation of Col. Oran Henderson, the brigade commander whose unit carried out the My Lai massacre. Although Hunt recommended only an Article 15--a mild, nonjudicial punishment--Henderson was court-martialed. On May 24 Henderson dropped a bombshell, stating that the mass killing was no aberration. "Every unit of brigade size has its My Lai hidden someplace," he said. The only reason they remained unknown was "every unit doesn't have a Ridenhour." In fact, Hunt's brigade did have a whistleblower like Ron Ridenhour, but instead of sending letters to dozens of prominent government and military officials, the Concerned Sergeant fatefully kept his complaints within the Army--fearing, he wrote, that going public would get the Army "in more trouble."

The lack of public exposure allowed the military to paper over the allegations. In August 1971, well over a year after the sergeant's first letter to Westmoreland, an Army memo noted that the Criminal Investigation Division was finally attempting to identify and locate the letter writer--not to investigate his claims but "to prevent his complaints [from] reaching Mr. Dellums." In September Westmoreland's office directed CID to identify the Concerned Sergeant and to "assure him the Army is beginning investigation of his allegations"; within days, CID reported that the division had "tentatively identified" him and would seek an interview. But on the same day as that CID report, a Westmoreland aide wrote a memo stating that the general had sought the advice of Thaddeus Beal, an Army under secretary and civilian lawyer, who counseled that since the Concerned Sergeant's letters were written anonymously, the Army could legitimately discount them. In the memo, the aide summarized Westmoreland's thoughts by saying, "We have done as much as we can do on this case," and "he again reiterated he was not so sure we should send anything out to the field on this matter of general war crimes allegations." Shortly thereafter, at a late September meeting between CID officials and top Army personnel, the investigation that had barely been launched was officially killed.

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