Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (24 page)

Seymour Hersh questioned each of his soldier-informants about rape at My Lai. He concluded, "Most of the company knew there were rapes that day in March, but remained reluctant to talk about them." A philosophic explanation from John Smail, a squad leader in the 3rd Platoon, struck Hersh as quotable. "That's an

everyday affair," Smail said. "You can nail just about everybody on that-at least once. The guys are human, man."

Informant John Paul told Hersh that later in the evening some of the GI's brought two women from one of the My Lai hamlets down to the beach, but Paul wasn't certain what happened to them. Gregory Olsen and Roy Wood recalled a vivid incident

.
during the following morning's mopping-up operation. Three Viet namese men and a woman were sighted running from a burning hut in one of the hamlets and members of the 2nd Platoon gave chase. The men got away but the woman was caught. Olsen saw the woman stripped naked and flung over a GI's shoulder. "He said he was going to put it to her, but she was too dirty," Olsen reported. Roy Wood had a more specific recollection. The whole 2nd Platoon "caught her ass," he remembered. "They all raped her . . . tore her up." Bleeding badly, the woman later managed to make an escape. Most of Charlie Company eventually learned of the 2nd Platoon's group rape and the grapevine had it that the woman was a North Vietnamese Army nurse. "She sure must have been tough," Wood mused with some wonderment. "She took en all of them."

Helicopter door gunner Ronald
L.
Ridenhour was the con science-striken GI whose persistent letters to Washington did much to keep alive the My Lai investigation. Ridenhour's first view was from the air a few days af ter Charlie Company's assault. The hamlet was deserted. Flying over a rice paddy, Ridenhour and his pilot sighted a body on the field below. The pilot propelled their craf t downward for a closer look. "It was a woman," Ridenhour later said with emotion. "She was spread-eagled, as if on display. She had an 11th Brigade patch between her legs-as if it were some type of display, some badge of honor."

At least three members of Charlie Company were formally charged with rape in connection with the My Lai massacre. Al though the Army eventually confirmed in its official findings that systematic rapes had indeed taken place, the charges against the accused men were quietly dropped.

Three months af ter My Lai, another gang rape by members of the
u
th Infantry Brigade, America} Division, occurred near divi sion headquarters at Chu Lai. Adjudged "a serious incident" by the military, this case involved two officers and at least four enlisted

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AGAINST OUR WILL

men. According to undisputed testimony presented at the various court-martial proceedings-the men, as usual, were tried sepa rately-members of the ist Platoon of Company B captured some male and two female "Oriental human beings" during the af ter noon of June
2,
i968, while on operations in the Dragon Valley. The two females, teen-age girls, were suspected of being Vietcong or NVA nurses. The younger one, Yen, was fourteen years old.

Captain Leonard Goldman, commanding officer of Company B, heard from battalion headquarters via radio that no helicopters were available to transport his prisoners to an interrogation unit, so he ordered a sergeant to secure the prisoners for the night. "The events which transpired during the night are not in dispute," reads the stilted language of Goldman's several appeals:

. . . suffice it to say that the two female detainees were subject to multiple rapes, sodomy, and other mistreatments at the hands of various members of the First Platoon of Company B. On the morn ing of 3 June i968, these detainees, including the two females, were escorted to the landing zone where one female nurse [Yen] was murdered by a member of the appellant's unit. Lieutenant D, who had been Acting Company Commander while the appellant was on R
&
R [rest and recuperation], had ordered a V.C. male detainee to shoot the nurse and provided him with a loaded
M-16
rifle to accomplish that purpose. The V.C. shot the nurse in the neck and Lieutenant D thereaf ter fired two more shots into the nurse's head. The appellant was not present when the killing occurred, and when he was informed of the incident he was advised that "some gink grabbed a rifle and shot one of the nurses."

Yen's body was found on an inspection visit two days later. The older nurse, who had been locked in a shed for three days, was freed. At Goldman's trial there was testimony that he had told his sergeant,
"If
she's taken back to the MI interrogation and she tells what happened in the field we'll all swing for it."

But nobody swung for it. Captain Goldman, charged with failing to report Yen's rape and murder, was fined
$1,200
for "failing to enforce adequate safeguards to protect female Ori entals" and was allowed to resign from the Army. Lieutenant William H. DeWitt, referred to as "Lieutenant D" in the briefs, was declared mentally incompetent to stand trial, was released from service and shipped back to the States. Enlisted men Marlyn

D. Guthmiller and William C. Ficke, Jr., one charged with rape, the other with sodomy, each received a year at hard labor, knocked down on review to six months. A fif th man was acquitted, and a sixth, who served as primary witness against the accused, was granted immunity.

A court-martial, a conviction and a knocked-down senten
.
ce was not the way it usually went. Rape was, in the words of one Vietnam veteran, "pretty SOP"-standard operating procedure, and it was a rare GI who possessed the individual courage or morality to go against his buddies and report, let alone stop, the offense.

"They only do it when there are a lot of guys around," veteran George Phillips told writer Lucy Komisar. "You know, it makes them feel good. They show each other what they can do-'I can do it,' you know. They won't do it by themselves."

"Did you rape too?" "Nope."

"Why not?"

"I don't know, I just got a thing. I don't-Of course it got around the company, you know, well, bah, 'the medic didn't do it.' "

"Did anybody report these incidents?"

"No. No one did. You don't dare. Next time you're out in the field you won't come back-you'll come back in a body bag. What the hell, she's only a

"Me and one of the buck sergeants and two other guys took these four chicks in the elephant grass," a Vietnam deserter who uses the nam
.
e "Jerry Samuels" told writer Roger Williams in Toronto. "We balled these chicks. They were forcibly willing they'd rather do that than get shot. Then one of the girls yelled some derogatory thing at the guy who'd balled her. . . . He just reached down for his weapon and blew her away. Well, right away the three other guys, including myself, picked up our weapons and blew away the other three chicks. Just like that. . . . Me and this other guy, we got high together in the bunker a lot, and we talked a lot about why we did it. The thing we couldn't understand was that when this other guy shot the first chick, we picked up our weapons without giving it a second thought and fired up the rest."

In February,
1971,
more than one hundred veterans convened in Detroit to give testimony in a public forum concerning atrocities

they had witnessed and committed during their period of service in Vietnam. They were now Vietnam Veterans Against the War and they named their convocation "The Winter Soldier Investigation: An Inquiry into American War Crimes." Using the vernacular of young men whose wartime aggressor experience had lef t them cynical, guilt-ridden and wised-up fast, they spoke to one another and to their audience with a mixture of anguish and toughness. From vet to vet, the stories they told were amazingly similar: cans of C rations thrown from trucks and deliberately aimed at the heads of Vietnamese beggar children who lined the road; "Mad Minutes"-indiscriminate firing along the perimeter of the base camp; "the Bell Telephone Hour"-wiring the genital areas of male and female prisoners to field phones during interrogation procedures; the burning of villages; the destruction of crops; and always, the special systematic abuse of women.

Sergeant Scott Camil, a forward observer with the 1st Bat talion, 11th Marine Regiment, 1st Marine Division from March, 1966, to November, 1967, and later a leader of the VVAW, had this exchange with a panel moderator:

CAM L:
When we went through the villages and searched people the women would have all their clothes taken off and the men would use their penises to probe them to make sure they didn't have anything hidden anywhere. And this was raping but it was done as searching.

MODERATOR:
As searching. Were there any officers present there?

CAM L:
Yes there were.

MODERATOR:
Was this done on a company level?

CAM L:
Company level.

MODERATOR:
The company commander was around when this happened?

CAMIL:
Right.

MODERATOR :
Did he approve of it or did he look the other way or—

CAMIL:
He never said not to or never said anything about it. The main thing was that if an operation was covered by the press there were certain things we weren't supposed to do, but if there was no press there,
it
was okay. I saw one case where a woman was shot by a sniper, one of our snipers. When we got up to her she was asking for water. And the lieutenant said to kill her. So he

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ripped off her clothes, they stabbed her in both breasts, they spread

her eagle and shoved an E tool up her vagina, an entrenching tool, and she was still asking for water. And then they took that out and they used a tree limb and then she was shot.

MODERATOR:
Did the men in your outfit, or when you wit nessed these things, did they seem to think it was all right to do anything to the Vietnamese?