Word: captain
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...inexperienced Charlie Company, commanded by Captain Ernest Medina, 33, thus had ample cause for fear as it prepared to assault My Lai, a village with bricked-up huts and extensive hidden tunnels in an area called Pinkville (because its cluster of nine hamlets was populous enough to be tinted pink on war maps). The infantrymen were also angry. Repeatedly lashed by booby traps and sniper fire from unseen Viet Cong, the company's strength had already been cut from 190 to about 105. Of those, about 80 men were helicoptered into a grassy spot on the outskirts...
...hard to tell "mama-sans from papa-sans," since both wear black pajamas and conical hats. He and his squad helped round up the women and children. When one of his men protested that "I can't shoot these people," West told him to turn the group over to Captain Medina. On the way out of the village, West recalls seeing a ditch filled with dead and dying civilians. His platoon also passed a crying Vietnamese boy, wounded in both a leg and an arm. West heard a G.I. ask: "What about him?" Then he heard a shot...
West describes Charlie Company as a close group in which "we cared about each individual." The men, he told LIFE, considered Captain Medina a tough soldier whom they knew, approvingly, as "Mad Dog" Medina. The captain, he contends, "didn't give an order to go in and kill women or children. I don't think any of us were aware of the fact that we'd run into civilians." When the shooting started, he said, the men "might have been wild for a while, but I don't think they went crazy...
...they deliberately slay so many defenseless civilians? West claims that the orders read to them by the company commander, Captain Medina, were "to destroy Pinkville and everything in it." Another member of the company, Lenny Lagunoy, 25, said Medina had told them to "kill everything that moves." "Well, hell," adds Meadlo, "I was just following the orders of my officer like any good soldier?what's the good of having officers if they've nobody to obey them?" More thoughtfully, he explains: "It just seemed like it was the natural thing to do at the time. My buddies had been...
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