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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Appearances
They kill a farmer shortly after they land who is waving his arms at them from a distance. But other than that, not posing a threat. And so they haven't been fired on.
Sometimes they think they're provoked, but there aren't any shots fired at them, and they only recover three old N1 Garand rifles. So these are World War II or Korean War era weapons that they recover.
This is going to unfold over the course of several hours. They essentially are on the ground early morning, and then everything is over by mid-afternoon. So give it a six-hour period for all of this to happen. And the first real incident for us to think about is that as First Platoon is moving through My Lai, Callie comes across some of his men.
One of them is forcing a woman to perform oral sex on him. And Callie tells the guy to get back to work. Get back to the process of clearing the village and capturing prisoners. And as he takes this guy with him, they run into Paul Meadlow, who is going to be one of the most famous or infamous figures of the Milan Massacre.
And he finds Meadlow with a large group of prisoners and tells Meadlow to take care of them and then leaves. Shortly later, Callie comes back. He's frustrated because Medina has told him to get his men moving through the village and asks Meatlo why he hasn't taken care of these villagers.
Now, their normal procedure would be to hold the prisoners for an officer to process, to say, let them go or keep them prisoner or whatever. But that's not what Callie meant. Callie ordered Meatlo to kill the villagers. Wow. Meatlo... Didn't really want to do this. He kind of resists, but Kali forces the situation. Amidlo fired three magazines from his M16.
Kali reportedly fired four or five magazines, killing this group of prisoners. There's another soldier there who has an N79 grenade launcher who does not participate because... Not only does he not want to kill villagers, he also doesn't want to use a 40 millimeter grenade in close proximity. There's a variety of issues there. And this is the first really real evidence of what is going to happen.
There's some disagreement about what the intent was. And also about how many of the members of Charlie Company actually took part in killing people. Many of the men who were there fired things or killed livestock, destroyed Wellsburn buildings to make it look like they were taking part. But it turns out there may have been fewer than 20 individuals who actually killed or raped people in the line.
Medina's briefing... left some questions about what the intent was. Private Dennis Bunning later said that Medina had ordered them to kill everyone because all of the women and the children were supposed to be there. James Burkhold summed up the general feeling among the company after the briefing, saying that although Captain Medina didn't say to kill everyone in the village,
that he had heard other members of the company talking and that they were of the opinion that everyone in the village was to be killed. And that seems to have been the message that at least Calley took from their initial briefing.
Well, he ordered Meadlow directly to kill people. And then the major incident... that sort of stands out beyond this initial killing was that a large number of villagers had been herded together toward a ditch. And some of them had been pushed into this ditch. One of them was a Buddhist monk. There were a large number of women and children and elderly men.
There are no young men really in the village. And once they get to this ditch, Callie orders his men to open fire on the people that have been herded into the ditches. He gives them direct orders. When some of them resist, Callie threatens to kill them. The one that really stands out is Robert Maples, who was a machine gunner.
And when Callie ordered him to fire on the villagers in the ditch, he refused. Cali reportedly stuck his rifle into Maples' midsection, said he would kill him if he didn't follow orders. And Maples pulled his sidearm on Cali and threatened to shoot him as well, saying that they were going to all die in Vietnam and that they might as well die then. Yes.
Later, he said he didn't consider shooting women and children who weren't armed to be a legal, valid order, and that he just simply wasn't going to do it.
Another machine gunner, his last name was Stanley, had also, Harry Stanley, had also been ordered to fire on the villagers in the ditch, refused, threw down his M60 machine gun, and when Calley threatened to kill him, they were separated by other soldiers.
And so ultimately, some of the soldiers cooperated with Kali. Kali himself opened fire. So in regard to the larger numbers of people that were killed at My Lai – Alley appears to have been the prime mover, the perpetrator. And that's why he was ultimately convicted for murdering people in My Lai. Right.
Hugh Thompson was flying over My Lai in support of the assault of Charlie Company on My Lai and of Bravo Company on the neighboring village of My K, where there was also a smaller massacre. Hugh Thompson flew an OH-23 reconnaissance helicopter, which meant he was low to the ground, and his role was to mark potential enemies for the company to deal with using smoke to
communicate what was going on to helicopter gunships that were flying above him from his unit. As he did this, he can see people being killed. He marked a wounded woman with the idea that she would get medical assistance and observed Captain Medina walk up to the woman and shoot her. Medina later claimed that he thought that she was going to throw a grenade at him.
But so Thompson's observing all of this and is he and the other pilots were getting relatively heated over the air about it. And he finally got to the point where he couldn't stand by and watch this to happen. And to understand why this happens, we have to really understand Hugh Thompson as a person. He came from a military family. His father served both in the Navy and in the Army.
Thompson joined the Navy as a young man right out of high school, got out of the Navy, became a funeral director for a short time, and then in 1966, as the war is really ramping up, joins the Army, was selected for pilot training, and was sent to Vietnam in 1967. In Vietnam, he had a reputation of being an aggressive pilot who believed in the Army's mission in Vietnam.
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