Funding for Frontline is provided by this station and other public television stations nationwide,
and by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
In 1968, in a Vietnamese village called My Lai, American soldiers massacred hundreds of unarmed civilians.
I just started killing any kind of way I could kill them.
The legacy of that day still haunts the soldiers and the people of My Lai.
It still hurts to think about us doing things like that.
And they had to live with it. They have to live with it. So do I. So do we all.
Tonight on Frontline, Remember Me Live.
From the network of public television stations, a presentation of KCTS Seattle, WNET New York, WPBT Miami, WTVS Detroit, and WGBH Boston.
This is Frontline with Judy Woodruff.
Good evening. Since the Vietnam War ended 14 years ago this spring, many of its scars have begun to heal.
America has confronted some of its political and military failures,
and finally honored the sacrifice of the young men and women who served in Vietnam.
But there are some things time does not heal. My Lai is one.
Tonight, Frontline offers a disturbing, surprising, and profound film
that for the first time examines the darkest chapter of the Vietnam War
through the memories of American soldiers and Vietnamese villagers who were in My Lai that savage day more than 20 years ago.
Our program was produced by Kevin Sim and Michael Bilton of England's Yorkshire Television.
It is called Remember Me Lai.
Can you tell me, Fernando, what this book is, why you've kept it?
This is my life. This is my past. This is my present. This is my future.
And I keep it to remind me. But it's always there.
This is it. This is my life. This is everything.
This is the way I am. This is what made me this way.
This is My Lai today, a small hamlet in central Vietnam near the coast of the South China Sea.
On their maps, the U.S. Army called this area Pinkville.
That is how the massacre was known at first, the Pinkville Massacre.
Today, the villagers are farmers and fishermen, just as they were more than 20 years ago.
But then My Lai was at the center of a bitterly contested region in the Vietnam War.
Early one morning in March 1968, Charlie Company of the 1st 20th American Infantry Battalion landed here by helicopter and attacked the village.
By the time they left four hours later, the young GIs of Charlie Company had killed hundreds of unarmed civilians, old men, women, and children.
The village of My Lai had ceased to exist.
In Benning, Georgia, new infantry recruits in the U.S. Army receive their first rounds of ammunition and take their first steps as soldiers.
In 1967, at the height of the war, thousands of young men were sent here for basic training.
Most were bound for Vietnam, including many of those who would eventually make up Charlie Company.
The transition from civilian to soldier is a very distinct and very rigorous training.
Soldiers are taught all the things that they need to know about being a good soldier in those very early days and weeks in basic training.
They are taught how to use weapons, how to use weapons to kill. They are taught how to drill, how to march with weapons.
All of these drills and different maneuvers are carried out by orders.
They are taught hand-to-hand fighting. They are taught close order fighting.
They are taught how to deal with the enemy when they come face-to-face with them. They are trained to be killers.
As a member, as one of the sergeants who trained the men of Charlie Company, I was very pleased with the way they turned out.
They turned out to be very good soldiers.
The men of Charlie Company arrived in Vietnam in December 1967.
They'd had no combat experience, but had performed well in training and were considered the best company in their battalion.
They'd been drawn together from all over America. An Army report would later describe them as the typical cross-section of American youth assigned to most combat units.
Their average age was 20.
The majority of the men in C Company were just your average, normal Americans. Most of us were all middle-income, middle-class families.
They were from all across the United States, Indiana. I was from Pennsylvania.
So I'd say you had a good cross-section of the total population of the United States at that point in time.
A lot of times when we were first in country, we would go to the villages up and down the highway, Highway 1.
You'd play with the kids in between pulling guard duty.
And one bridge in particular, there was a boy that always hung around up there with the GIs.
We'd nickname him Six Fingers because he had an extra thumb. He had six fingers.
But you'd always take him stuff, candy, pop, take pictures with him, you know, GIs with the kids.
You got to meet a lot, a lot of people.
American soldiers on patrol in 1968. In Vietnam, this was the job of the infantry, the Grunts.
Barely a month after their arrival in Vietnam, Charlie Company was deployed on operations like these in Quang Ngai Province,
around the area they called Pinkville, which was known to be sympathetic to the Viet Cong.
When we first started losing members of the company, it was mostly through booby traps and snipers.
We never really got into a main conflict, per se, where you could see who was shooting at you,
and you could actually shoot back one-on-one.
Booby traps was the main problem.
In the weeks leading up to Meli, Charlie Company experienced many scenes like these.
From a unit of about 120 men, they lost four killed and 38 wounded, almost all by mines, booby traps, and snipers.
Charlie Company could seldom find an enemy to shoot back at, and as the casualties mounted,
their frustration rapidly eroded the distinction between soldiers and civilians.
I seen an enemy, yes. But who is the enemy?
You know, we had little kids over there that would shoot you or stab you in the back when you walk away.
You know, who is the enemy? How can you distinguish between an enemy? The good or the bad? All of them looked the same.
The war was so different. It wasn't like Germans over here or Japanese over there.
They all looked like North and South. So how can you tell?
On March 15, 1968, the Army drew up plans for an attack on Meli,
which Army intelligence believed was the headquarters for a Viet Cong battalion.
A fierce battle was expected.
Well, I was division artillery chaplain, which meant essentially I went to every fire base and division area.
And the day before Meli, I'd gone down to the landing zone, LZ, and I don't even remember the name of it,
where Task Force Barker was setting up for a briefing.
They were going to do an insertion or combat assault or whatever it took in Pinkville, which was, quite frankly,
it was the home of 48th and B.C. Battalion.
And I went in there, and it was just a courtesy call. I had no business there chaplains do this.
I just stopped in to say hello and meet the new commander.
While they were there, they had the maps laid out on the board, and there was a major in there who was on the Task Force staff.
And I remember he said, we're going in there, and if we get one round out of there, we're going to level it.
And I looked at him and I said, you know, I didn't really think we made war that way.
And he looked at me and he said, there's a tough war chaplain.
I left shortly after that and got in my bird and went back to division headquarters.
The brigade commander, Colonel Orrin Henderson, expressed irritation at past failures to engage the enemy and demanded more aggression.
Lieutenant Colonel Frank Barker drew up detailed plans for Charlie Company to mount the main attack
and passed on the orders to its commander, Captain Ernest Medina.
All these senior officers would later deny responsibility for what happened at Meli.
But for Lieutenant William Cowley, leader of the first platoon, and for the rest of Charlie Company, there seemed little doubt about what they were supposed to do.
The understanding or the order that was given was to kill everybody in the village.
Someone asked if that meant the women and children, and the order was everyone in the village.
Because those people that were in the village, the women, the kids, the old men, were VC, and they were Viet Cong themselves, or they were sympathetic to the Viet Cong.
They were not sympathetic to the South Vietnamese Army, and they weren't sympathetic to the Americans.
They weren't giving us any assistance, they weren't helping us in the war effort whatsoever.
So it was quite clear that no one was to be spared?
It was quite clear that no one was to be spared in that village.
My understanding was we were going in, we were going to get into one hell of a fight, and we were going to kick some ass when we got done.
There wasn't going to be anybody left.
It didn't turn out that way.
News film of a helicopter assault, one of thousands conducted by the Army during the Vietnam War.
The attack on My Lai started the same way, just after seven o'clock in the morning.
It was a Saturday. According to intelligence reports, all civilians would have already gone to market.
Anyone still in the village would be Viet Cong. But the intelligence was wrong.
As the troops embarked, twelve minutes flying time away, many villagers were still finishing breakfast.
At seven twenty-two, the first helicopters left for My Lai.
The first helicopters appeared over My Lai at seven thirty-five a.m. There was no hostile fire.
Within twenty minutes, all one hundred twenty men and five officers of Charlie Company had landed.
There was no opposition.
I was nineteen when I went to Vietnam.
I was a rifleman specialist, fourth class.
I was trained to kill, but the reality of killing someone is different from training and pulling the trigger.
So you knew when you went into the village that if you found women, old men, children, anything that was living, you knew that you were going to have to kill them that day?
Women and children to dogs and cats, yes.
But I didn't know it, that I was going to do that. I knew the women and children was there.
But for me to say that I was going to kill them, I didn't know I was going to do that until it happened.
I didn't know I was going to kill anyone. I didn't want to kill anyone. I wasn't raised up to kill.
Now she was running with her back from a tree line, but she was carrying something. I didn't know if it was a weapon or what, but it was a woman.
I knew it was a woman. I didn't want to shoot a woman, but I was given the order to shoot.
So I'm thinking that she had a weapon running. So when I shot and I turned over, it was a baby.
I shot about four times, three or four times, and the bullet just went through and shot the baby too.
And I turned over and I saw the baby face where we're half gone.
And I just blanked. I just went.
The training came to me, the programming to kill, and I just started killing.
What do you mean you just started killing? Did you go looking for people to kill or what?
You didn't have to look. They was there. They was trying to get away, but they was just there.
It wasn't hard to kill. It wasn't hard to find anyone to kill.
There was nothing. It was very peaceful here.
But when the police came, they threw their guns at us. They threw their guns and they shot us.
I saw this guy, he was holding a gun and he was shooting. He was shooting a bunch of people.
He was holding a gun and he was shooting a bunch of people. He was holding a gun and he was shooting a bunch of people.
He was holding a gun and he was shooting a bunch of people.
He was shooting a bunch of people.
He was holding a gun and he was shooting a bunch of people.
He was holding a gun and he was shooting a bunch of people.
That day in my life, I was personally responsible for killing between 20 and 25 people. Not 25 people personally.
From shooting them, to cutting their throats, to scalping them, to cutting off their hands and cutting out their tongue. I did that.
Why did you do all that? You didn't tell me. Why did you kill the man and do that?
I just went. My mind just went. I wasn't the only one that did it. A lot of other people did it.
I just killed once I started. The training, the whole programming part of killing just came out.
But your training didn't tell you to scalp people or to cut ears?
No. But a lot of people were doing it. So I just followed suit. I just lost all sense of direction or purpose.
I just started killing any kind of way I could kill. It just came. I didn't know I had it in me.
But like I said, after I killed the child, my whole mind just went. It just went.
The most disturbing thing I saw was one boy. This is what haunts me from the whole ordeal down there.
This boy with his arms shot up, half hanging on. He just had this bewildered look in his face.
What did I do? What's wrong? It's hard to describe. I couldn't comprehend.
I shot the boy. Killed him.
I'd like to think of it more or less as a mercy killing because somebody else would have killed him in the end.
But it wasn't right.
Throughout the morning of March 16, a photographer and a reporter from an Army newspaper followed Charlie Company through Meli.
These official black and white photographs taken with an Army camera did not show what was happening to the people whose homes were burning
or the fate of villagers rounded up by the GIs.
But the photographer was also carrying his own camera that day.
I happened up on a group of GIs surrounding these people, and one of the American GIs yelled out,
Hey, he's got a camera. So they kind of all dispersed just a little bit, and I came up on them and looking at the photograph,
I noticed the one girl was kind of frantic and an older woman trying to protect a small child.
And the older woman in front was just, you know, kind of pleading, trying to beg, you know, begging and that.
And the other person, that woman was buttoning her blouse and holding a small baby.
Okay, I took the photograph. I thought they were going to question the people.
But just as soon as I turned and walked away, I heard firing. I looked around over the corner of my shoulder.
I saw the people drop. I just kept on walking.
At the time, it was just, you know, capturing a reaction. But when you look at it later on in life,
you know now these people are dead. They were shot.
It's just kind of an eerie type feeling that goes through your own body. And you think back, could I have prevented this?
How could I have prevented this? That's the question I still kind of, you know, ask myself today.
You lined up people? You were one of the people who was mowing down big groups of people?
A group of about ten. Yes.
What happened? Did you round them up?
We just round them up. Put them in a circle.
Put me, a couple of more guys, and just put the M16 on automatic.
Just mowed them down. Just killed them.
Have you ever seen any photographs of the people you killed?
Yes, yes.
Have you got those photographs? I have photographs of the people I killed.
Which photographs are they?
The man, the child, the woman and the baby.
How can you bear to look at those today?
Because this is my life.
This is my life.
Even if I don't open a book, I see it.
In my nightmares.
If I never open this book, it's still there.
During the mission as it was going on, we kept just reconning around.
Started seeing a lot of bodies.
It didn't add up, you know, how these people were getting killed and wounded.
And we weren't receiving any fire.
It just didn't make sense. There was too many casualties there.
And how they were, the locations they were in, you know, figured out artillery couldn't do this.
Because there were, you know, bodies in places that artillery didn't hit, trying to get out of the village.
The radio traffic recorded between command helicopters high above Meli betrays no knowledge of the slaughter warrant officer Thompson was witnessing as he hovered just above the ground.
Between 9.30 and 10 o'clock, when Thompson saw GIs advancing on another group of women and children, he decided to do something.
He landed the aircraft in between the American forces and the Vietnamese people in the bunker.
Got out of the aircraft, had us get out of the aircraft with our weapons to cover him, and he went and had words with a lieutenant on the ground.
He asked the lieutenant how he could get these people out of the bunker.
The lieutenant said the only way he knew was with hand grenades.
So when Warrant Officer Thompson came back to the aircraft, he was furious.
And he was desperate to get these people out of the bunker.
He told us he was going over to the bunker himself to see if he could get them out.
I don't even think he took a rifle with him.
I think he was, besides his sidearm, he was relatively unarmed.
He told us if the Americans were to open fire on these Vietnamese as he was getting them out of the bunker, that we should return fire on the Americans.
When I did instruct my crew, my crew chief and gunner, you know, to open up on them, if they open up on any more civilians,
I don't know, I don't know how I'd have felt if they would have opened up on them.
But that particular day, I wouldn't have given it a second thought.
They were the enemy at that time, I guess. They were damn sure the enemy to the people on the ground.
With the aid of larger helicopter gunships, Hugh Thompson and his crew airlifted to safety over a dozen old men, women, and children.
The first time they came in, when they saw us, they gave us candy.
They gave us candy, candy, candy, candy, candy, candy, candy, candy.
We didn't speak, we didn't speak. We just walked. We just walked. We didn't know the language. We just walked.
When we walked, we knew the language.
When we walked, we knew the language.
This monument marks the ditch where the largest number of people were executed.
Scores of villagers rounded up in sweeps through My Lai were herded here to be shot, but Lieutenant Calais and others acting on his orders.
They were just playing around. They were just playing around. They were just playing around.
They were just playing around.
They were just playing around.
During flying around, we came across a ditch. It had bodies in it, a lot of them. Women, kids, old men.
I remember thought going through my mind, how did these people get in the ditch?
And I finally thought about the Nazis, I guess, and marching everybody down the ditch and blowing them away.
Here we are supposed to be the good guys in the white hats. It upset me.
As we were flying over it, one time we noticed some movement in it. And Gerada, who was my crew chief, spotted a child moving around amongst the bodies that were in there.
So we landed the aircraft next to the ditch and we got out of it. My gunner stood on one side of the aircraft and I stood on the other.
And Gerada went down wading through the bodies and brought back up a little child about three years old.
It was obvious how the people got in the ditch by then, I guess. So we got there, the child on board, and we were getting that child out of there.
There was more we probably could have saved, but we couldn't carry it.
So we flew the child to Quang Ngai Hospital, I believe it was, and dropped it off with a nun there.
It was a very sober flight going over there, very quiet, trying to figure it out.
I was looking at the kid, which I thought was a boy about four years old, three years old, and I had a son at home, same age.
I was thinking it could be your kid.
It was a quiet flight. Later found out in some investigations and hearings that it was actually a girl.
You know, you really couldn't tell. We checked arms or legs, you know. There was no bullet wounds.
It still hurts to think about us doing things like that.
So I heard my sister screaming.
When I looked out of the window, I saw my sister. She was 14 years old at the time.
She was so pretty. She was so pretty. She was so pretty. She was so pretty.
She was so pretty. She was so pretty.
But at that time, I didn't understand what it was.
And later, my sister tried to stop her.
And then, the American shot her.
And then the American stood up.
She put on her clothes, put on her clothes, and shot her.
She never...
She was American.
And...
And I didn't know how long it would take.
I didn't hear a single sound.
When I went down to the basement, the house was on fire.
And right at the bottom of the house,
my relatives were burned to death.
And in the middle of the house,
my mother,
and my brother,
my sister,
and my brother,
they were burned to death.
At that time, I didn't know what it was.
I didn't know what it was.
As a professional soldier, I had been taught to carry out the orders,
and no time had ever crossed my mind to disobey or to refuse to carry out an order
that was issued by my superiors.
So if one of your men had refused to shoot, what would have happened to him?
What would you have said to him?
If one of my men had refused to shoot,
I shudder to think what had been the repercussions,
because it's hard to say now what I would have done, looking back.
At the time that it actually...
If it had...
When it happened, he would have been in serious trouble.
What kind of trouble?
He could have faced court-martial.
He could have been shot on the spot for refusing an order in face of the enemy.
In face of hostile fire.
If someone refuses to carry out an order, he's in trouble.
But there was no hostile fire?
At the time, we didn't realize that there was no hostile fire at the time.
So are you suggesting that if one of your troops had refused to shoot,
shall we say, an old woman or a young child at Milai on that day,
that they would have faced disciplinary action?
They most definitely would have faced disciplinary action
had they refused to fire or kill or carry out the orders, yes.
But these were young kids.
Most of them had never killed anybody before.
To kill a child seems a monstrous thing.
Why were these people able to do this without questioning it?
I feel that they were able to carry out the assigned task, the orders,
that meant killing small kids, killing women,
because they were soldiers, they were trained that way.
They were trained that when you get into combat, it's either you or the enemy.
And the people that were in that village, the women, the little kids,
the old men, were all considered the enemy.
So, leaving aside the question of following orders,
do you think that that order was morally right
and that the actions of the troops that followed that order,
yourself included, were behaving in a moral fashion?
I feel that we carried out the orders in a moral fashion,
and the orders of destroying the village, of killing the people in the village,
I feel that we carried out our orders,
and I feel that we did not violate any moral standards.
This GI was the only American casualty at Meli.
He accidentally shot himself in the foot.
Despite the total absence of hostile fire,
Kelly continued to order his men to shoot.
Most obeyed, a few refused.
Lieutenant Kelly ordered certain people to shoot these people,
and I was one of them, and I refused.
And he told me that he was going to have me a court-martial
when we got back to base camp.
I told him what was on my mind at the time.
Ordering me to shoot down innocent people,
that's not an order, that's craziness to me, you know?
And so I don't feel like I have to obey that.
And if you want a court-martial, you need to do that,
if you can get away with it.
I feel like it was horrible, you know,
just a terrible thing to be going on,
and American boys doing this, you know?
And I feel like I'm a red-blooded American boy,
just like any of the rest of the guys that was there, you know?
And to see that, I'm talking black or white,
black and white guys doing this, you know?
It didn't make any difference, I'm saying.
It just seemed like a horrible thing.
We all came from the same place, to me, you know?
We all came from the same place,
and I know they all had the same values that I had,
somewhere along the line.
If they didn't get it in school, they had to get it in religion,
church, or someplace, you know?
If you didn't go to school, you know,
you could pick it up from a stranger, you know?
It's just simple, you know?
But then to go and do something like this,
it's immoral to me, you know?
That's just the way I feel about it.
By 11.30, when Charlie Company broke for lunch,
they had killed about 400 people.
In the United States, newspapers reported the operation
as a significant American victory,
with many Viet Cong killed.
For more than a year,
what really happened at My Lai
would remain hidden from the outside world.
Gentlemen.
It was late in April, 1968,
that I first heard of Pinkville
and what allegedly happened there.
I received that first report with some skepticism,
but in the following months,
I was to hear similar stories
from such a wide variety of people
that it became impossible for me to disbelieve
that something rather dark and bloody
did indeed occur sometime in March, 1968,
in a village called Pinkville
in the Republic of Vietnam.
After this letter was sent
to several members of Congress,
the Army finally began to confront
the truth about My Lai.
Its author was an ex-G.I.
who had heard about the massacre
while serving in Vietnam.
When I sat down with a friend
who had been there three weeks after the massacre
and we were telling each other war stories
and we hadn't seen each other in three months
and I said, what have you been doing?
He said, what have you been doing?
He said, oh man, did you hear what we did at Pinkville?
I said, no, what did you do at Pinkville?
He said, we went in there and we killed everybody.
I said, killed everybody? What do you mean?
He said, we just shot them, lined them up
in front of people, I don't know how many.
And my immediate reaction was,
you know, these no good sons of bitches.
Look what they've gotten me into,
look what they've gotten us all into.
They left me now with a choice to turn in my friends
and be a part of this horrible crime.
And I'm not going to be a part of this horrible crime.
The only way to not be a part of the horrible crime
is to discover the truth and to pursue it
and let the chips fall wherever they land.
And that's what I set out to do.
When you murder a village of 500 people
or you know that a village of 500 people
has been murdered in one afternoon, in one morning,
it's pretty tough to evade the reality of that
and the implications of that.
One of my friends, when he told me about it,
said, you know, it was this Nazi kind of thing.
And that's exactly right, it was this Nazi kind of thing.
We didn't go there to be Nazis.
At least none of the people I knew
weren't there to be Nazis.
I didn't go there to be a Nazi.
News of the massacre finally broke in November 1969.
In the United States, initial incredulity
quickly turned to shame and national anguish.
As the inquiries and trials began,
the men of Charlie Company emerged to public view.
Sergeant David Mitchell accused of shooting people
at the ditch site in Meli.
I'm not guilty.
Charlie Company's commanding officer, Captain Ernest Medina.
I can further say that I did not see any slaughter
at Mile 4 that day, and none was reported to me.
And I'll further state that I did not order
any massacre at Mile 4.
Lieutenant William Calley originally charged
with 109 murders.
Calley came to embody the issues at the heart of the case.
His defense that he was just following orders
evoked disturbing comparisons
with the Nazi defense at Nuremberg.
Meanwhile, Army investigators had returned to Meli
as a part of a massive inquiry
that left the facts of the massacre beyond dispute.
The original list of charges drawn up
by the Army's Criminal Investigations Department
left no doubt about the nature
of Charlie Company's operation in Meli.
Based on the original documents that we received
as a result of our investigations,
it was a massacre.
It was a violation of all the rules of land warfare
that I've ever known in my life
because it was this cold-blooded killing
of people who appeared to be defenseless civilians.
But America was still deeply divided by the war itself,
and the men of Charlie Company soon found public opinion
swinging to their defense.
All I can say is thank you all very much,
each and every one of you that has supported me,
and also those that are supporting the men
still over in Vietnam and the United States Army.
Thank you very much.
There was a change in the public attitude,
and now they say, wait a minute,
you shouldn't be prosecuting soldiers
for just carrying out their duties.
All of a sudden, the public sentiment
had swung the other direction,
and when Cali's sentence was announced,
his conviction in sentence was announced,
there was an outcry.
In the end, the Army decided not to prosecute
most of the 46 soldiers seriously investigated
for crimes at My Lai.
William Cali was the only man ever convicted.
Today, Cali runs a jewelry store in Columbus, Georgia.
He does not give interviews about My Lai.
At his court martial,
these were his last words of explanation to his judges.
If I have committed a crime,
the only crime that I have committed
is in judgment of my values.
Apparently, I valued my troops' lives
more than I did that of the enemy.
When my troops were getting massacred in Maul
by an enemy I couldn't see, I couldn't feel,
and I couldn't touch,
that nobody in the military system
ever described as anything other than communism.
They didn't give it a race, they didn't give it a sex,
they didn't give it an age.
They never let me believe it was just a philosophy
in a man's mind,
and that was my enemy out there.
And when it became between me and that enemy,
I had to value the lives of my troops,
and I feel that is the only crime I have committed.
William Cali served only three days in the stockade
before President Nixon released him into house arrest
pending appeal.
Three years after his original life sentence,
he was released on parole, a free man.
I couldn't sleep because I didn't know how to think.
I was so lonely, I didn't know what to do.
I felt so guilty.
I felt so guilty that I had to kill myself.
When I was young, I was so tall,
and I could only write on my feet.
I couldn't even write on my feet.
I felt so guilty.
My 30-year-old mother-in-law
told me that I had to kill myself.
When we went in there,
we went in there with a purpose,
and deep down we felt what we were doing was right.
But after it was over, everyone knew it was wrong,
and the damage was already done.
It was too late.
Then I said to myself,
if you are greedy and try to sell yourself,
feel free to do so.
If you are the enemy of the enemy,
feel free to detect and kill it.
It's because 매xa is
a terribleれ.
We loiter, curse and burn like fire.
If you do it until you're considered guilty
and thisception with the expression mixing with the words had no intent...
it was as if we are the victim of a sick person,
in the midst of freedom of speech,
not redほo...
but oil metal
and hidden oil
and hidden in there
so...
Yes, of course.
When this is holding you back, I can't put my mind to anything positive because it's always negative.
These people were tortured by this. They were kids. 18, 19 years old, most of them had never been away from home before they went to the service.
And they end up in Vietnam, and in a moment, following orders in a context in which they've been trained, prepared to follow orders, they do what they're told and they shouldn't have, and they look back a day later and realize that they probably made the biggest mistake of their life.
There are only a few people who were in those circumstances who had the presence of mind and the strength of their own character that would see them through that circumstance. Most people didn't. And for most of them, even people that I personally just was stunned to discover that they'd made the wrong choice, they did.
And they had to live with it. They have to live with it. And so do I. So do we all.
How much of this stuff do you have?
I take 1200 milligrams every four hours, four times a day of drugs and medication. I have to take it. I need it. And something held me somewhat stable, not as nervous. I stay nervous, even with the medication. But if I don't take it, I go. I just go off. It keeps me out of control.
It helps me. Because if I don't, I may do something to someone, even though I still have a tendency to think that of hurting someone. But the medication helps me, really helps me.
But I had to take a lot of it. And it's strong. It's very strong.
My little boy ran into my grandmother's front yard here in Jackson, at his grandmother's house. There were some teenagers across the street, got into an argument. It was 14 and 15. And one went home and got a gun.
And Elvin just ran in the direction where my little boy was playing. And he shot. He shot him in the head.
I was in the house. And I came out and picked him up. But he was already dead. He was dying. So when I looked at him, his face looked like the same face of the child that I had killed.
And I said, this is the punishment for me killing the people that I killed. And when the picture that I had, I had his funeral. I got back from the funeral that night. That's the way it cracked. And I left it like that. It just cracked.
Do you think this really dreadful condition that you're in, this terrible life that you're leading, do you think it's ever going to come to an end?
Yeah, when I kill myself, you have to come to me. Like I said, I tried suicide three times. Maybe the good Lord is not ready for me to go because I could have been dead with all the stuff I had taken and tried to. But eventually, it's not out of my mind.
Like I'm sitting and talking to you now, I can't promise that when you come again, I'll be here. Because before you came, I had to get out of the hospital from trying suicide for the third time.
The good Lord didn't appear to have treated you very well to have put you through all this.
I still believe in him. But I guess life, you live a life for a reason, for a purpose. Now what that purpose is to have me still here, I don't know.
Are you ashamed or sorry for what you've done?
Yes, I'm ashamed, I'm sorry, I'm guilty. But I did it. What else can I tell you? It happened. You're looking at someone that did it. It can happen if you go to war, those are the type of things that will happen and can happen to anyone.
After they train you and they program you, it can happen. It happens. That's reality. That's what war is. War is not something that I shoot at you, you shoot at me. Well, we take time out. Well, don't shoot me here, don't shoot at me. War is war. It's killing in all types of ways.
And that's why we don't need another war.
Don't be walking up to that man's back. Keep that distance. I told you what it was. Hey, keep your head and eyes straight to the front. Why, you seem like you can't hang? Keep that distance.
Put your weapon up.
Frontline is produced for the Documentary Consortium by WGBH Boston, which is solely responsible for its content.
Funding for Frontline is provided by this station and other public television stations nationwide and by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.