Miracles and Massacres: True and Untold Stories of the Making of America

11

The My Lai Massacre: A Light in the Darkness

Tuttle-Woods Convalescent Home

Camden, New Jersey

March 15, 2008

Close to midnight, a commotion started halfway down the D-Ward corridor. Though outbursts weren’t all that unusual, this one was different: unceasingly shrill and somewhat violent, like some old codger was trying to raise the dead.

Sticking to unofficial procedure, Everly Davison ignored the rising clatter and pressed on with his crossword puzzle.

Everly, who was better known as E-bomb among his off-duty circle of friends, was head of the security shift that night. This temporary promotion had been awarded by default, not by merit. All three of his useless superiors had called in sick on this cold, rainy, late winter evening.

Not that Everly was complaining. He so rarely got the chance to be the boss that he was making the most of it: feet up on the desk, microwaved hot chocolate with hazelnut Coffee Mate and a secret splash of Jim Beam, and the keys to all the snack machines on his utility belt. Hell, if this was work, he couldn’t wait to see vacation.

That one disturbed resident down the hall was the only thing keeping this from being a great night. No need to make an issue of it, Everly thought. Not just yet. Even crazy people have to blow off a little steam once in a while. Waiting out his outburst would be safer and simpler for all concerned—and keeping things simple was what Everly did best.

Following his early release from Riverfront State Prison, Everly had swabbed out a few thousand of the world’s nastiest porta-johns, manned a medical waste incinerator, delivered pizzas on foot through the worst gang-war hot zones of Newark, washed a nightly truckload of dishes in an institutional kitchen, and spent three bloody weeks as an apprentice on the kill-floor at a slaughterhouse. After all that, he’d finally stuffed enough padding into his ex-con’s résumé to land his first real, full-time job: janitor at Tuttle-Woods.

Everly was perfectly happy with the work—climate control was a wonderful thing—but a few months later things got even better when he was promoted to security guard. To most people, walking the halls of an old folks’ home on the graveyard shift might not seem that glamorous, but to Everly Davison it was like winning the lottery—even though he knew that lottery ticket was being cashed at someone else’s expense.

A couple of weeks earlier, one of the guards had called the home’s outside security contractor for help with an elderly lady who’d gotten it into her head that her daughter-in-law was coming to kill her and steal all her money. She’d taken a swing at the doctor who was trying to bring her meds, then she grabbed some silverware and holed up in the public bathroom. The rulebook says to call in reinforcements, so to speak, when things get out of hand, and that’s what the guard on duty had done.

The rent-a-cops arrived at the home in riot gear and cleared out the regular workers. They hit the old woman with a Taser and a twelve-gauge beanbag gun, and she died right where she fell.

The security contractors later issued a report saying that the woman had come at them with a butcher knife. The guard who’d called for reinforcements was quickly fired for making noise about what he’d seen, and with nobody else alive willing to say otherwise, that was the end of it. Everly Davison happily accepted his promotion from the janitorial department into his new cushy security job.

The lady from Human Resources had laid out the requirements for the promotion, adding at the very end that she was specifically looking for someone who understood that discretion was the better part of valor. Whatever that phrase had meant when it was first written down, Everly knew what she was getting at. See nothing; say nothing. He nodded his head in agreement and that was that—Everly Davison was officially a security guard.

The yelling on D-Ward hadn’t stopped and now it sounded to Everly like somebody down there had started throwing furniture around. A number of orderlies were in sight and Everly motioned for them to handle the disturbance while he went to the front entrance to answer the shrill buzzing of the doorbell.

The young woman standing outside was not unattractive, though she looked like a drowned rat in the driving rain. She was dressed for business and had an official-looking clipboard in her hand. Everly’s first thought was that she was some kind of a state inspector, which wouldn’t be good at all, but when she pressed her ID against the glass it said she was from the newspaper.

“Thanks,” she said, after he’d let her inside the foyer. “I’m Julia Geller, from the Courier-Post. I made an appointment a couple of days ago. I’m here to interview one of your residents.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“Because nobody told me.”

“Sorry to hear that, mister . . .” She wiped the rainwater from her glasses, and squinted at his name tag. “Mr. Davison.” She replaced her spectacles and made a note on her pad. “Should we call up your boss, because—”

“No, no,” Everly said. “I believe you, let’s not make any waves. Come on with me, we’ll find whoever you want to talk to.”

She told him to call her Julie and relayed the name of the resident she’d come to see. When Everly checked the room assignments it was clear that this was more bad news for the trouble-free evening he’d planned. This reporter wanted to talk to that man on D-Ward, the very one who was still down there raging like a lunatic.

“Do you mind if I slip back there so I can see your screen?” Julie asked, edging past him without really waiting for his answer.

“I don’t think I’m supposed to—”

“It’s okay, thanks.” She sat at the computer and started typing and clicking.

“I don’t want to lose my job,” Everly said quietly.

“Neither do I.” In a few seconds she’d found the records for room D-31. “Tell you what, there’s a hundred dollars cash in it for you, if I get what I need for my story. How does that grab you?”

He gave a look around the security station to make sure the coast was clear. “Sounds fine to me, I guess. Just—”

“Good.” After a bit more searching she seemed to find what she was looking for. “Morgan Campbell, age fifty-nine,” she said to herself, and she began writing again on her pad. “No next of kin . . . VA transfer, diabetes, emphysema, cancer survivor, diagnosed in ’01 with early-onset Alzheimer’s. . . .”

“Alzheimer’s,” Everly repeated. “So how’re you going to interview him if he can’t remember anything?”

“Memory’s strange in these patients,” she said, still scrolling through the screens of confidential data. “It’s first-in, last-out. He might not know who the president is, or what day it is, he might not even remember his breakfast this morning. But I’m betting he can tell me all about what happened forty years ago. Tomorrow’s the anniversary.”

She’d said this as though Everly might know what she meant. “Anniversary of what?” he asked.

In the silence that followed, Julie looked up from the computer. “Ever met a mass murderer, Mr. Davison?”

His checkered past being what it was, he had to think about that for a moment. “What do you mean, like three or four people?”

“Like three or four hundred. Maybe more.”

The lights flickered for a second as thunder rolled outside, and right then Everly Davison felt the full weight of the gold plastic badge pinned on his chest.

“No,” he said, “I never have.”

She nodded. “Then come with me.”

• • •

When they got to Morgan Campbell’s room, the old guy was strapped down hand-and-foot and the safety rails on the bed were lifted and locked in place like sideways prison bars. All in all, he didn’t look like much of a threat.

Campbell watched them intently as they stood in his doorway. Everly had quite an array of guard’s accessories dangling from his belt, but much like his badge, they were largely for show. The most serious weapon allowed in his possession was a sample-size tube of pepper spray, its contents probably about as potent as the hot sauce at Taco Bell.

“Who is this guy?” Everly whispered.

“Ever hear of My Lai?”

“Me lie?”

“My Lai, Quang Ngai Province, Vietnam. It’s a little town in a region the Americans called Pinkville during the war. That’s where Mr. Campbell was, forty years ago tomorrow.”

“What did he do?”

“That’s what I’m here to find out.” She stepped to the side of the bed with Everly behind her. She raised her voice a bit; it had said in his record that he was somewhat hard of hearing. “Mr. Morgan Campbell?”

The man nodded, his eyes locked on hers. He reached out, to the extent that the straps would allow. There was a tremor in his right hand, and the skin of his palm looked like it had been ravaged by an old burn that had never fully healed.

“My name is Julia. I’m a reporter. I’d like you to tell me what you remember about March 16, 1968.”

“Pinkville,” he whispered.

“That’s right.” She had her pad and pen ready, resting on the bedrail. “I want you to tell me all about it.”

“Why?” The old man looked at Everly, and then back at the reporter again.

“Why not?” she replied.

“Because once you’ve been there,” Morgan Campbell said, “you don’t ever come all the way back.”

June 1967

Morgan Campbell was nineteen years old when his number came up in the draft. He knew boys who’d dodged their service one way or another, but that kind of thing wasn’t for him. His dad had been a bombardier in World War II, so going overseas to fight for freedom and stop the spread of communism seemed like the right and natural thing to do.

Before Morgan knew it he had become a soldier. He was too young to buy a six-pack of beer, but after nine weeks of basic the army suited him up, gave him an M60 machine gun, and put him on a transport bound for the last phase of preparation before their first tour in the Vietnam War.

The troops of Charlie Company trained in Hawaii for a time, learning guerrilla tactics and how to survive in jungle terrain. Those were grueling weeks, but Morgan and his squad had made it through with honors. Under the hard and watchful eye of Captain Ernest “Mad Dog” Medina they’d posted some of the highest marks on record. By the time their training was over they were tough as nails and had bonded like brothers, all 140 of them.

• • •

Four men stood out to Morgan Campbell in those early days, all for different reasons.

The first was Captain Medina. War truly is hell, Medina reminded them, and so the highest goal must be to win as soon as possible. He told them the only proven way for a fighting force to win was simple: You kill people and break things, better and faster than the other side. He called his men “death dealers” and handed out packs of cards that were all aces of spades. One of those cards was to be left on every dead gook body, to let others know that Charlie Company had been there. Medina hated the enemy, loved his country, was admired by most, and respected by all.

The second memorable man was Lieutenant William Calley. The soldiers of his First Platoon saw him as something of a blowhard and a bungler, and from what the men could tell he was little more than a butt-kissing yes-man to his superiors. Medina had nothing but scorn for Calley, but that just made the lieutenant try all the harder to impress him.

The third man was Billy Weber, whom everyone genuinely liked and vice versa. Billy may have been the only soldier in the U.S. armed forces whom Lieutenant Calley could call a friend.

The last man was Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson Jr. Thompson flew a little OH-23 helicopter on recon and rescue missions, risking his life every day and night, flying low cover and drawing enemy fire so the troops on the ground could get early warning of any ambush up ahead. He saved a lot of men with the risks he took. Life expectancy was short for such pilots and their crews, but he was damned good at what he did and as brave as they came. No one ever saw Hugh Thompson sweat.

• • •

Morgan Campbell’s first month in Vietnam passed with almost no fighting at all.

When Charlie Company visited villages on their patrols, the troops were welcomed by the Vietnamese locals. The infantry would march in and establish a safe perimeter, give some candy to the kids, and help old ladies with their chores. It was Boy Scout–type stuff, building goodwill and winning hearts and minds.

Where’s the war? That’s what the men asked themselves on the long hikes back to base. It was a good time, if any time spent in a war can be called that. Between hitting the bars and beaches off duty it felt more like their training stint in Hawaii than a battle zone, but the peace was deceptive. They all knew it couldn’t last.

And it didn’t.

Tet Offensive

January 31, 1968

The widespread violence came without warning, in the midst of a mutual cease-fire agreed to in observance of the Vietnamese New Year’s celebrations. In the largest coordinated enemy campaign to date, eighty thousand communist troops stormed into more than one hundred cities and vital strategic targets across South Vietnam.

The Americans and their allies were taken completely by surprise. While some of the lost territory was quickly regained, the war had suddenly and permanently been redefined. The Vietcong and the North Vietnamese Army had made it clear to the world that they were more than a match for any invading force, superpower or not, and they were in it for the long haul.

A few days earlier, Charlie Company had been reassigned to Task Force Barker. This battalion-sized unit was stationed along the coast in the central region and their circle of operations included a particular stronghold of enemy activity. The place was called Pinkville because of the odd color that was used to label it on their tactical maps.

On the second night of the Tet Offensive, Morgan Campbell and Charlie Company were camped close enough to Quang Ngai City to see in the distance the very forces they’d soon be fighting. It was the Vietcong Forty-Eighth Battalion—the VC equivalent of the Green Berets—rumored to be the most elite and organized unit the enemy possessed, and Quang Ngai was thought to be their home turf.

It would be Charlie Company’s job to go out, meet the Forty-Eighth Battalion head-on, and destroy them.

Pinkville

February–March 1968

In a daily briefing before a routine patrol, one of the brass actually had the stones to quote Chairman Mao with a straight face.

The enemy is the fish, he’d said, and the civilians are the sea.

Mao had been preaching the gospel of guerrilla warfare when he said something similar, but now his saying was being repurposed as warning to the troops. The major’s point was that you can’t always tell who’s who, so you can no longer trust anybody Vietnamese. There were stories of old ladies and even little kids walking up to a sentry, giving him a big hug, and then pulling the pin on a grenade hidden under their smock.

Over the weeks since Tet, something fundamental had shifted in the atmosphere.

As the fighting had intensified, the locals started to change. Before the offensive they’d welcomed the Americans into their villages. Now that Quang Ngai was a free-fire zone, and regular bombing and shelling had begun across the region, honest friendliness was replaced with tight-lipped suspicion and distrust. The soldiers could feel themselves being watched from every shadow.

The locals knew where the minefields and booby traps were set, and where the snipers of the Forty-Eighth were hiding—but they didn’t tell. They’d prefer to keep their silence and let a man walk right into a trap and lose his leg or his life.

As time went on, and reports of daily casualties mounted, there was a growing feeling among the American troops that if the civilians were aiding and abetting the enemy, then weren’t they the enemy as well?

The war that Morgan Campbell and Charlie Company had trained for was different than the one that was closing in all around them. There were no uniformed opponents and few, if any, solid strategic goals. They’d go out on patrol every day, waiting for the inevitable attack and hoping the odds would be with them. The VC Forty-Eighth was fighting a war of attrition, picking off their enemies man by man and then retreating into the impenetrable jungle, knowing that the Americans couldn’t fight what they couldn’t see.

Yet even with those strategies in play, and entire villages of locals working against them, Charlie Company still hadn’t taken any major losses as the war escalated. But that changed fast.

One morning, a patrol led by Lieutenant Calley was ambushed by sniper fire down by the river. No sooner had they dived for cover when Calley ordered the platoon to get up and cross the river, right out in the open, and go after the sniper nest dug in on the other side. The men knew it would be slow and dangerous wading through the water, but they followed their orders. They’d hardly taken one step forward when a well-placed bullet hit Billy Weber in the side.

It didn’t look so bad at first. He was shot through the kidney, though, the organ was shattered, and the guy who got him must have known that his target would die slowly and in a lot of pain. The field medic did what he could, but nothing outside of morphine was going to help. It took almost an hour before Billy Weber finally died.

Throughout the ordeal some of the men were firing back, just shooting randomly up into the hills, yelling for the enemy to come out and fight. But that sniper had already done his job and had slipped back into hiding again.

With Weber’s death, the men of Charlie Company knew that their charmed existence in this war was finally over. Throughout February, they lost a man almost every day, yet it still seemed like there was nobody out there to fight. The VC were ghosts. They would hit hard and then melt back into the jungle and the villages around Quang Ngai.

Somewhere close to the middle of March, the First and Second Platoons were out on patrol when they walked into different minefields at the same time. The first one blew, boom, and as men went in to help the injured they’d step on another mine, and then another, and another. Through it all, Captain Medina ran with his troops right among the worst of it, shouting orders, pulling soldiers to safety, leading as though he were invincible.

Charlie Company had started out with 140 able soldiers. Now they were down to 105.

• • •

What Charlie Company lacked was a crystal-clear military objective and an enemy they could face and fight. Brigade commander Colonel Oran Henderson arrived on the scene and, with Captain Medina by his side, delivered both at a March 15 mission briefing.

The new intelligence, Henderson told Charlie Company, was rock solid: the Forty-Eighth Vietcong Battalion was using a nearby group of villages called My Lai as a base of operations from which to launch attacks against the American forces. If Charlie Company struck fast and hard, Medina and his death-dealers could take them out once and for all. The mission would take place the following day.

After Colonel Henderson left on a reconnaissance flight with the other unit commanders, Captain Medina stepped up to add his own perspective to the briefing. The Americans would be outnumbered two or three to one, but the good news was that almost all of the civilians in the area had already fled the zone. Anyone they encountered, he told them, was to be considered a combatant, either VC or VC sympathizers.

Lieutenant Calley chimed in here and there like a teacher’s pet, and the room soon became electric, taking on the tone of a pep rally rather than a mission briefing.

Every soldier was told to pack three times the ammunition that would be carried on a normal raid. They would go in strong and blow away everything that moved, laying waste to the crops and the livestock, fouling the wells, and burning the place to ashes so that the village would be useless to any surviving enemy.

Medina implored Charlie Company to remember who and what they’d lost so far: Billy Weber and all the others. They were to gut up and go in with one stone-cold intent: to kill people and break things, to search and destroy until not even a stick was left standing. This was their chance to even the score.

My Lai, Vietnam

Early morning, March 16, 1968

As Morgan Campbell and the rest of Charlie Company strapped into the transport helicopters they heard Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson, the recon pilot, reporting over the radio. He’d flown in first, as usual, braving enemy fire so the infantry could get a picture of what they were about to face. His door-gunners had strafed the tree line on either side of the target village and, according to Thompson, theirs was the only gunfire to be seen or heard. There wasn’t an enemy in sight. Then again, there was nothing so unusual about that.

They were almost to the landing zone when Medina gave his last orders.

“I don’t give a damn what recon says, this is a hot zone we’re landing in. Maybe the hottest you’ve seen so far. The colonel’s in the command craft up above us, and believe me, he knows what’s what. You hesitate and you’ll get us pinned down in there, understand? Remember your orders! This is your fight to win! You’ve heard the old-timers talk about Iwo Jima? Well, this is yours, boys, right here today!”

• • •

The helos had barely touched grass when Morgan Campbell and all the others jumped out and hit the ground running. There was sporadic gunfire as the men fanned out and headed in toward the hamlet. Campbell saw movement among the trees and fired into them before moving on while others backed him up and laid down heavy suppression fire so they wouldn’t get flanked in the advance.

Somebody ran past the window of a hut and Campbell swung his M60 around and cut the place up. Every fifth round was a tracer, and that allowed him to shoot from the hip with enough accuracy to hit what he was aiming at. Fleeing the hail of lead, two people burst through the door and Campbell shot them down just as his first ammo belt ran out.

As Campbell knelt and reloaded, he saw the rest of his company moving into the hamlet. There were people running away from them, some with hands in the air, and they were easily killed as the troops went house to house and cleared each dwelling of danger.

Campbell turned and saw a soldier he’d had dinner with the night before. The man walked up behind a young Vietnamese woman with an infant in her arms and shot her point-blank through the chest.

By then, some of the huts were burning. The helicopters overhead whipped up the smoke, hurting visibility and casting a dark, eerie shadow over the village. Campbell thought back to what he’d just seen. Or, more precisely, what he thought he’d seen. He couldn’t be so sure anymore.

Campbell stood up and felt the deadly hesitation that Captain Medina had warned them about. He shook it off, assessed the scene again, and continued his advance. The sound of gunfire was dying down, but intermittent shots still echoed throughout the village.

By the time he reached the center of the village it looked like their orders had changed. With Lieutenant Calley directing, a few hundred people had been rounded up and were being marched to the east, toward a long drainage ditch that ran the length of the clearing. When they got there the scene grew still. The Vietnamese stood with their backs to the ditch and a line of soldiers facing them. Morgan Campbell walked over and joined his friends in that line.

Some of the wounded Vietnamese were being dragged to the edge and tossed into the ditch by other soldiers. As those bodies began to stack up, an OH-23 landed nearby, and seconds later, Hugh Thompson walked up in his flight suit and got right into Calley’s face.

“What the hell’s going on here, Lieutenant?” Thompson shouted. Calley outranked him but it looked to Campbell as though military hierarchy was not on Thompson’s mind just then. “These are unarmed civilians; you can see that, can’t you?”

“This is my business,” Calley said. “We’ve got our orders.”

“Orders? Whose orders?”

“I’ve got my orders, Thompson, and you’ve got yours. Intel tags all these people as the enemy—”

“Intel? Tell me, Lieutenant, have you never known intel to be dead wrong before?”

“I told you, I’ve got my orders! Now get the hell out of here so we can damn well do our job!”

“You ain’t heard the last of this,” Thompson spat, heading back for the radio in his aircraft.

When the helicopter had taken off again, Calley walked up to Campbell and the others, and he said, “Now, men, let’s do what we came here to do.”

• • •

More than any other detail in those next minutes, Campbell remembered the feel of pulling the trigger—the unholy ease of it. He hadn’t been the first to start shooting all those people—grandmothers and grandfathers, women and boys and girls, almost no one of fighting age at all—but once he’d brought himself to make that one small motion with his right-hand index finger, the hardest part was behind him. From then on he killed efficiently and without hesitation.

As people died and fell to the ground there was nowhere for the others to run. Many began to jump down into the drainage ditch, some shielding their children with their own bodies. A few started forward, pleading, their arms outstretched as if they could stop the bullets with their hands. They were cut down like all the others.

When his ammo ran out, Campbell knelt to reload, then stood again and stepped to the edge of the ditch to scan for survivors. Each time he saw movement, he fired.

At last the ditch grew quiet; a still sea of arms and legs and bodies and faces with empty, staring eyes. Morgan Campbell looked around when it seemed like it was over and realized he was the only soldier remaining at his post and ready to fire.

It appeared that some of the men had put down their weapons and refused Calley’s orders. Others seemed to have simply fled the area. Another dozen or so were following the lieutenant as he chased a small group of villagers that had somehow been missed in the sweep of the town.

Campbell followed them, watching the pursuit. The survivors ran toward a bunker with the small contingent of Charlie Company in hot pursuit.

Campbell caught up just as the Vietnamese disappeared underground. Calley called out for his grenadiers to advance on the bunker, and that’s when Hugh Thompson landed his helicopter again, right between the soldiers and their unarmed, fleeing prey.

Thompson’s door-gunners unharnessed their machine guns and stepped out, facing their fellow Americans. It was a standoff; neither side took aim, but neither side looked like it was going to back down, either. And then the unarmed pilot walked out between all those guns and made an announcement.

“I’m going to go over to that bunker, now,” Thompson shouted, so all the soldiers could hear him clearly, “and I’m going to fly those civilians out of here myself. And Lieutenant, if you make a move to shoot them or me, by God you’d better be ready to take the consequences!”

Campbell continued to watch as three, then seven, then maybe fifteen people were brought out of the bunker. It was far too many to fit into his helo, but Hugh Thompson wasn’t going to leave anyone behind. He called down a pair of gunships to help ferry the group away.

Then, as he was departing, Thompson made one last pass over the drainage ditch. He hovered low, and Morgan Campbell saw the gunners jump down and wade into all that death and gore to pull a small boy, alive, from the depths of the mountain of bodies.

It wasn’t until that moment that he understood what he had done. What they’d all done.

Campbell dropped to his knees, numb from the realization, gritted his teeth, and grabbed the barrel of his M60 with his bare right hand. The metal was still hot as a branding iron from all the killing he’d done. He held on tight, his skin burning to the bone, until the pain overcame him and finally swept his consciousness away.

Tuttle-Woods Convalescent Home

Camden, New Jersey

March 16, 2008

Except for the storm outside, the room was quiet again. Morgan Campbell had stopped talking, as though he’d reached a moment in the retelling of his past that he didn’t wish to venture beyond.

“And what happened next?” Julia Geller asked.

Campbell blinked a time or two.

“Next?”

“Yes. What happened to everyone?”

The old man answered slowly, as though each detail required a deeper search of his failing memory.

“They covered it up, that’s what happened next. They told us to shut up about My Lai, and then they sent all of us up into the highlands, the real dangerous country. We were up there, cut off from civilization, for fifty-eight days. I don’t think they wanted any of us who’d been part of the mission to ever come back.

“Same for Hugh Thompson. After they debriefed him they sent him out to one of the worst hellholes possible. He was shot down five times. The last crash broke his back. But Hugh had already raised such a stink that they had to investigate. Colonel Henderson handled the job himself. Surprise, surprise, it was a total whitewash. After a month his people issued their verdict: Only twenty civilians had been killed in My Lai that day, not four or five hundred. All twenty had apparently died by accident.

“It took more than a year before the American press got enough real information to take notice, and then the military finally had to take some real action. The first truth to come out was that our intel for that day had been completely wrong. The morning we came into My Lai the entire Forty-Eighth VC Battalion that we were supposed to wipe out was camped one hundred and fifty miles away.”

“There were trials and convictions,” Julia said. “I remember that much. What happened to everyone?”

“Captain Medina was brought up on charges,” Campbell said, “but F. Lee Bailey did for him what he later helped do for O. J. Simpson, and he got off with hardly a hitch. The heart of his defense was that he’d never given any orders to kill civilians.

“Calley was found guilty on twenty-two counts of premeditated murder and it caused an uproar among some. Jimmy Carter was the governor of Georgia at the time and he asked people to drive with their lights on for a week in protest of the verdict. George Wallace flew up from Alabama to visit Calley in the stockade and petition for a presidential pardon. State legislatures across the country made resolutions and requests for clemency.

“They handed down a life sentence for Calley, but a few days later Nixon intervened on his behalf and had him transferred to Fort Benning for a term of house arrest in a two-bedroom apartment. Three years later he was released for time served.

“I’m not sure if anyone was ever punished, not really—except for Hugh Thompson. Some congressman tried to get him court-martialed. He held a press conference and said that Hugh Thompson was the only one at My Lai that day who should be charged with a crime. Hugh got death threats and hate mail, and people drove by and threw dead animals onto his front porch.

It was thirty years before anyone in power ever bothered to officially call Hugh Thompson a hero and a patriot for what he did. In 1998 they gave him and his crew the Soldier’s Medal. That’s the highest award the U.S. Army can give for bravery in action not involving direct contact with the enemy.”

“And what about you?” Julia asked quietly.

“What about me?” Campbell repeated. His voice was weak; it was like he was fading away from where he’d been.

“Yes, Mr. Campbell. What happened to you?”

“I got off, all right.” He struggled against his restraints. “But don’t you see? I never really got away.”

• • •

Later that night, Everly Davison hung up his uniform, walked out, and never came into work again.

He watched the newspaper for days afterward, but Julia Geller’s story never appeared. When he called her up to ask about it, she told him that her editor had turned it down, saying there was nothing new in Morgan Campbell’s story, and certainly nothing that the paper’s dwindling audience would be very interested in reading about. In its place they ran a puff piece about some local beauty pageant for rich little girls and their pampered mothers.

That should have been the end of it, but something was sticking in Everly’s mind.

He kept thinking about Hugh Thompson, and the truth, and about doing the right thing, no matter if it meant you might never live it down. He thought of that old woman who’d died at the hands of those storm troopers for hire, of the guard who’d spoken up and been fired, and of the promotion he’d taken as a result.

Everly Davison picked the phone back up and called Julia Geller. He told her that he had an idea for another story, one that, if there was any justice left in this world, might just make the front page.