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 that's really important to remember. He had the respect of all of the other aviators there. And some of the things he did were risky. At one point, he captured someone. And because he didn't have room in his helicopter to have a prisoner, actually forced the guy to hold on to the skid of the helicopter to fly him back to base. So this is the type of person Hugh Thompson is.
Thompson landed his helicopter, which is itself unusual, between Halley's platoon and people who were in a bunker. and approached Callie, got out of the helicopter, approached Callie, and said, well, we need to get these people out of here, and Callie's response was, well, the only way we can do that was with a grenade.
Before he had gotten out, Thompson had told his door gunners, Larry Colburn and Glenn Andriotta, to cover him, and that if somebody... started shooting at the civilians to fire upon them. Whether he was serious in that or not is conjecture. But he confronted Kelly, who was a commissioned officer. Hugh Thompson was a warrant officer and sort of sit between the NCOs and the officers in rank.
And he convinced the other helicopter pilots that were there who were flying overhead in gunships to land and evacuate the people from the bunker. He somehow convinced the people in the bunker to come out, convinced the other pilots to land and take them off away from Beeline, saving them.
And this is a really very strange thing for a helicopter gunship to land in what is supposed to be a combat operation and then to fly away with civilians.
Correct. And people further away... could hear what the pilots were saying was going on, but did not report it themselves. Yeah. This is going to be an issue later.
Even before the 17th, Hugh Thompson reported the massacre to Major Fred Watkey. And he reported it to Lieutenant Colonel Frank Barker, the commanding officer of Task Force Barker, and Colonel Oren Henderson, who was the commanding officer of the 11th Infantry Brigade. So we have this reporting structure starting to happen.
But at the same time, we have people starting to cover it up almost immediately. Medina flat out lied to the commander of the 23rd Infantry Division, Major General Samuel Koster. And told him that all of the casualties were from artillery. There also developed a narrative that they were killed in a crossfire. The number of people was downplayed.
So that when Watkey went to Barker and Henderson, he told them that it was 25 people. He didn't say they were killed in a crossfire because there had been no fire and no Viet Cong on site. But... The focus was on Thompson's confrontation with Cowley.
And that allowed some of the senior officers in the brigade and the division to move the investigation that they did away from this idea of a massacre. And after that, it gets bigger.
That's a little complicated. Initially, My Lai was reported as a victory by the New York Times with 128 Viet Cong killed and three weapons captured. The media starts to take notice when Cali's court-martial is starting to begin, is becoming underway. There's an investigation going on.
Yes, but only because Ron Ridenour, who had been friends with members of Charlie Company, even though he was assigned as a door gunner elsewhere in the division, found about it from people who had been present. Okay. And he talked to multiple people who had been at My Lai to verify what was happening, because it sounded like an outlandish story, like propaganda. Where is Ron Rittenhour?
He's back in the States, isn't he? He's back in the United States at this point. And basically, he had found out about this when Charles Groover had a beer with him and told him we did something terrible. Oh, I see. And so he talks to all these other people and then writes a letter.
But he only writes this letter after consulting with family and friends who basically told him, well, you don't want to be involved in this. But despite that, he wrote a letter to 22 different officials saying,
at the Pentagon, and in Congress, including the Secretary of the Army, Stanley Rezor, General William Westmoreland, who at this point is Chief of Staff of the Army, and Congressman Udall, Morris Udall. And that's what ultimately gets things started.
Correct. And his letter to these public officials led to two official investigations, one into the events at My Lai and one into attempts to cover up My Lai.
These investigations, which took a year, so from September, October, November of 69 into 1970, where we start getting actual trials, resulted in charges for 14 officers and a few convicts. Enlisted personnel. But yes, it all starts with Ridenour's letter. Right.
Right. And so Sergeant Ron Haberly was a combat photographer for the Public Information Office. He was assigned to follow Charlie Company. On March 16th, along with a reporter who was a specialist. And so they follow the company through My Lai. Haverly's got multiple cameras rather than weapons and ammunition. One of the cameras was an official army camera loaded with black and white film.
And the other one was his personal camera loaded with color film. And that color film that he kept personally was what ended up being published.
But he destroyed the really terrible pictures that he took that identified individual soldiers shooting at people. And the reason he did that is he didn't want those photos to be used to identify individuals and to prosecute them.
Showing 61–80 of 103 · page 4 of 6
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