Christopher Levesque
speaker
103 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Christopher Levesque’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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And they take significant casualties despite not being in regular combat, not facing ambushes or anything like that. So by the time we get to the middle of March, Charlie Company has lost about half of its strength. Lieutenant William Calley's 1st Platoon has lost 27 of its 45 men. Wow. So it's a much smaller fighting force that has faced an enemy that they can't come to grips with.
And at the same time, as I mentioned before, they don't have the experience of war seasons troops who had been to Vietnam. And the reason that they don't have that is that during their training in Hawaii, they found that many of those more experienced troops had been to Vietnam too recently to be sent back. And that's why they were pulled out of the unit.
And Captain Medina, one of the things that he testified to later was that he had lost 70% of his company's strength during that and had to deal with the issue of replacements that were not as experienced.
Right. And so there are two types of scenarios here. The assault on My Lai was just what it sounds like. They're supposed to assault a village that has a Viet Cong force in it. But their typical pattern up to that was patrols. And frequently what they would say is that they felt like they were being sent to wander around in the jungle waiting to be shot at. This is a pattern that developed.
The idea was that American small units, platoons and companies would go out looking for the enemy and wait to be attacked, would then either assault the people who are attacking or settle into a position and then call for support from artillery or airstrikes. The idea was to draw the enemy out and then to punish them.
But from the point of view of the regular infantry soldier who's just been told to go out in patrol waiting to be shot at, that can have a pretty significant effect on their morale.
So Charlie Company had three infantry platoons. Each of those should have had 60 or 70 men in the platoon divided up into squads and then fire teams.
Calley was the... Commanding officer of the 1st Platoon, and he had supporting noncommissioned officers. His platoon sergeant was Isaiah Cohen. And so Calley was supposed to be in charge of this group of men. The problem for Calley was that they did not respect him. And his commanding officer, Ernest Medina, also did not respect him.
One of the things that happened that led into the effects of what happened at My Lai is that Medina regularly called Cali demeaning nicknames like sweetheart, berated them in front of not just his own platoon, but the rest of the company and his platoon sergeant. Viewed Kelly as not a particularly effective leader who he only followed due to Kelly's rank.
Yes. And that goes back to when he was in elementary school. He was the kind of student who tried to anticipate his teacher's requests and needs. Yeah. Cleaning erasers and doing that type of thing. Right.
Sergeant George Cox was killed by a booby trap. If I remember correctly, it wasn't just a landmine in the way that we probably think about a device designed for somebody to be stepped on. It was what we would call now an improvised explosive device, an IED. That had been made out of an unexploded 105mm artillery shell. Unexploded ordnance is a continuing problem in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.
But what would happen is the Viet Cong would find... Bombs, whether they came from an airplane or artillery shells or mortar shells that had not exploded, and then make them into a mine. And that's the type of thing that killed Sergeant Cox. And not only was he popular, but right before the mission briefing, they held a memorial service for Cox.
And at that memorial service, Medina reemphasized their losses and said that the company needed to be more aggressive in their pursuit of the enemy. So they have lost all these people. They have this event. They have a memorial service led by a chaplain and Medina telling them that they need to remember their losses and to be more aggressive. Right.
It can. So artillery fire, in this case, 600 meters from My Lai, which is one of a cluster of hamlets forming the village of San Mai. And They have their barrage in preparation to landing. They come into land and they're expecting combat because they have been told that there are Viet Cong in the village.
They've been told, based on intelligence, they've been told that women and children will be away from My Lai at a marketplace. There you go. And they're expecting to have an actual battle.
Right. And so we get two platoons that initially land and they set up a security perimeter waiting for their third platoon to arrive. The idea is that the first two platoons, including Cali's first platoon, will then assault through the village and that the third platoon will provide rear area security and then eventually follow them.
And their mission is to kill the people who resist, to kill livestock, to destroy wells and to level buildings. And Captain Medina has told them that everybody that's left in the village was either Viet Cong or a Viet Cong sympathizer.
They go wrong pretty quickly. One of the challenges is that The Hamlet of My Lai, like many Vietnamese villages, was divided by hedgerows. And so as the line of infantry proceeds through the village, they become broken up into smaller and smaller groups where it's more difficult for them to be observed and controlled by their officers.
And so their typical process is going to be that as they move through a village and they take prisoners, they hold those villagers so that those villagers can be processed by an officer. Said either keep this one as a potential enemy prisoner of war or let them go and keep them secure in this other location away from any potential combat.
And one of the things that happens is that as they get divided up and they start to gather potential prisoners, they get bogged down. And Medina orders Callie and his other platoon leaders to get their men back online and to continue to push through the village. Are they taking fire in any way? They are not. They've received no fire.
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