THE EXECUTION OF WANDA JEAN

Gentle Readers,

I watched an excellent documentary recently called The Execution of Wanda Jean. It was very well made, and of course, it reinforced my belief that our country should do away with the death penalty.

The movie came out in 2002, and it's not easy to watch Jean's (the name she used most often) family go through the ups and downs of appealing her death sentence.

Wanda Jean Allen was in a lesbian relationship. She shot and killed the woman she loved because Gloria Leathers was leaving her. Jean had also killed once before and had received a very lenient sentence. But the second time, she received the death penalty. The lawyer who represented her during the trial openly admitted that he was not qualified to do so, and he did not present evidence of her brain damage and low IQ.

Evaluations revealed that the brain damage (she had been hit by a truck and suffered a head injury as a teenager and had been stabbed in the head) kept her from processing everyday logic that most of us take for granted, and she did not understand cause and effect relationships. Her IQ was 69.

Jean also lied and said she had graduated from high school and completed two years of college. Maybe she was accustomed to telling these stories to try to feel smarter. I don't know; the clemency board didn't seem to care that she was actually a high school dropout. They decided that if she had that education then she couldn't have such a low IQ.

By the time more qualified experts took on the case and presented the evidence that should have been provided during her trial, it was too late. No one had any mercy for Jean. Even Jesse Jackson could not convince the governor of Oklahoma, Frank Keating, to spare Jean, who was upbeat and seemingly more happy with her life as a prisoner than most people would be. I suspect the routine was reassuring to someone who had difficulty with day-to-day life.

Jean was sentenced in 1988, but not executed until 2001. As she went to the table where she would receive her lethal injection, she danced and stuck out her tongue at her lawyer, whom she liked. She believed she would return to her cell in the morning.

One of Leathers' family members was aghast at her behavior, which I can understand. He lost a loved one.

But it seems pretty apparent that Jean, despite all the coaching she received from her lawyer, really didn't know what was going on.

How can we execute people who don't know they are being executed, who do not understand the consequences of firing a gun? When I lived in another state, there was a lovely woman with whom I was acquainted. She had three children, all elementary school age. Her husband kept hunting rifles in the house. One evening the children were playing upstairs and their eight-year-old son shot and killed his six-year-old sister. Should that child be executed for killing his sister?

I don't believe that Wanda Jean Allen knew what she was doing any more than that eight-year-old child did.

The United States should not execute people for the following reasons:

1. Too many innocent people have been executed or sentenced to death. The Innocence Project has proven this and it was well known even before DNA evidence came into use. The execution of even one innocent person is too many.

2. The former chaplain at Huntsville State Prison in Texas, Rev. Carroll Pickett (where they carry out the highest number of executions in the nation), accompanied 95 men and women on their journey toward death. He states in At the Death House Door -- another excellent documentary -- that prisoners who are placed in solitary confinement are so miserable they beg to be executed. So wouldn't society achieve a "higher" level of punishment by letting killers rot in prison?

3. Where there is life, there is hope. When we kill people, all hope for redemption is lost.

We can achieve separation of church and state and still behave as if we are a Christian nation.

Infinities of love and life,

Lola

THE STATUE OF LIBERTY

Gentle Readers,

Someone I Love has had a little extra time lately, so she's been doing a little gynecological genealogical research and reporting back to me. I had thought about looking into my family's past at a well-known site that costs money, but she found a site that's free: www.familysearch.org

I've established an account there myself, but for the most part I've provided her with family names I already have and let her do the research. She seems to enjoy it, and I can just spend so much time sitting in front of the computer before my back hurts, my feet swell, all this miserable old lady crap, blah blah blah.

I'm fascinated by some things she's learned. First, she discovered that my mother's parents once lived in the same boarding house -- before they were married. It must be where they met. She found my grandfather's record of death, which occurred when my mom was 18. I said, And guess what my grandmother did after her husband died? Naturally, Someone I Love asked What, and I said, She ran a boarding house. It's deja vu all over again.

Then she really surprised me by finding the ship's manifest from my grandmother's family's arrival in the United States. I always knew they had come here from another country when my grandmother was 12, but I didn't know how they arrived, other than by ship.

It seems they left their country and somehow went to Liverpool, where they sailed to the U.S., arriving at Ellis Island. And I thought, Wow! I wonder how they felt as they arrived and saw that first view of the Statue of Liberty.

Of course, maybe they thought, Jeeeezus, it's about time. They had traveled a long way to Liverpool and then spent ten days on board the ship with several children, including a one year old, and there weren't no pampers then. How would you manage diapers during ten days on a ship? And did they all get seasick?

The ship's manifest even says how much money each person had. My great-grandfather arrived in the U.S. with $150. And a dream. At least I hope he had a dream because that's part of the classic immigrant story. Why did they come to the U.S.? I have all these questions I want to ask them, like what were the bathrooms like on the ship and how do you travel so far with a one year old without murdering somebody.

I have romantic thoughts of the famous poem associated with the statue:

Give me your tired, your hungry, your poor

Your one year old who had the shits the entire voyage

The six year old you longed to throw overboard 

The twelve year old who suddenly developed a case of smart-ass mouth as the journey began

The sixteen year old who pretended not to know you as you barfed over the side of the ship while holding the baby

The husband who never helped with the kids once but instead spent his days wandering the decks with the other husbands and chatting up the unmarried whores

And I will detain them all on Ellis Island while you make your getaway to a land where you will never have to wash a baby's butt again.

(Make sure you pick your husband's pocket and grab the $150, leaving him high and dry.)

Then Someone I Love started looking at my father's side of the family and surprised me even more by discovering that my dad's paternal grandmother's father fought in the Civil War from 1864 to 1865 when he was 40 years old. I didn't even know that branch of the family was in the U.S. at that time.

And my dad's paternal grandparents had four children who died and eight who lived to adulthood. My dad's maternal grandparents had 14 kids and all lived to adulthood.

I did get some family information from my parents before they died; for example, my mom had a distant relative who ran away with the milkman and nobody ever spoke to her again (tee hee).

If only we still had milkmen I could find my true love.

Infinities of love,

Lola

MEMORIAL DAY: AFTER THE FALL

Gentle Readers,

Memorial Day, for most of us, is a day to honor our fallen heroes. But for a particular hate group in my home town of Topeka, Kansas, every day is a day to despise our fallen heroes.

Yes, you may have heard of them before: It's Fred Phelps and his family, who use their Westboro Baptist Church as a front for their campaign against the people they call fags. According to the Phelps, 9/11 was caused by the fags because God was showering his wrath on the people of the United States. And people who serve in America's military are fags, and I'm a fag, you're a fag, everyone except the Phelps family is a fag, fag.

(By the way, they call their church Baptist, but they are not recognized as such by any other Baptist churches.)

I'm not going to provide a link to any of the Phelps' Web sites. You can find their crap if you want. I write this to call attention to their activities in case you are not aware of them, and because my dad served in the military and died on Memorial Day. I know my parents detested the behavior of the Phelps.

The Phelps like to protest. They go out with their signs and call people fags and blame the fags for everything that's wrong. Worst of all, they protest at the funerals of our fallen soldiers. Because of them, President George W. Bush signed a law that prohibits protests within a certain distance of military cemeteries before, during, and after a funeral. But that doesn't stop them from protesting at other cemeteries and it doesn't stop them from protesting at other venues and it doesn't stop them from protesting at other times. They also protest at the funerals of gay people. They were there for Matthew Shepard's funeral, as if his family hadn't already suffered enough.

I've seen some news clips about various ways people deal with the Phelps, and don't think the Phelps are just a Topeka problem. They show up all over the place. In one town, the Phelps obtained permission to picket on a certain corner. So, many people in town showed up and parked their vehicles near the corner so the Phelps would have difficulty getting a place to park their bus, and then the townspeople took over the corner and left no room for the Phelps, who actually gave up and left. When they protest at a funeral, sometimes motorcyclists show up and form a ring around the family and rev their engines to drown out their noise.

Yes, the Phelps family is entitled to freedom of speech. But families should be entitled to bury their loved ones in peace.

I recall Fred Phelps mostly from his days as a lawyer, when I was growing up in Topeka. His antics were always in the news, and eventually he was disbarred for unethical conduct. Some of his 13 children have become lawyers and they now fund the protests with the money they earn from the family law firm, according to an article I read in the Topeka newspaper. Although Topekans hate what the Phelps do, one person admitted that if you want to win your case, you go to the Phelps. It's a shame Kansans don't boycott the firm in a shared commitment to dry up their money.

Recently I watched a documentary about the family called Fall From Grace: Westboro Baptist Church. It was  made by a young man named K. Ryan Jones, first as a short film for a film class he was taking at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, and then it became a full-fledged documentary. As Jones himself says in a DVD extra, he had to try very hard to be fair to the Phelps because "everybody hates them."

As I watched Fall From Grace, there I saw one of the boys, now in his fifties just as I am, but with the same face he had when we were in the seventh grade together. And I saw one of the girls, who was in the ninth grade. I sometimes saw the girl in the ninth grade laughing and talking with other kids, but the seventh grade boy seemed to stick pretty close to his brother, who was in the eighth grade. Those boys looked so sad, and I have never forgotten the miserable and embarrassed silence that fell over the school cafeteria the day those two boys came to school with their heads shaved. Guys did not shave their heads then, and we felt so sorry for them.

Other students who had known the Phelps for years explained to me that Fred Phelps had shaved his sons' heads to punish them, just as they were punished by having to run to Lawrence from Topeka and then back home again. They also had to sell candy for hours after school to support the church. One of them came to our door once, and my mother said NO immediately. She mentioned afterwards that she knew the money went to the church so she wouldn't buy anything from the Phelps.

What I didn't know was that the children and Mrs. Phelps were severely abused, according to two of the children who have left the family. One of them, Nate Phelps, writes a thoughtful and intelligent blog that I suggest you check out. Nate is interviewed by telephone during the documentary, and he recommends ignoring his family if you should encounter one of their protests. They are definitely attention whores, so cut them dead (figuratively of course). Don't engage them in an argument; don't give them what they want so desperately.

Why do they do what they do? Who knows why such evil lives in the hearts of humankind? Fred Phelps is a sick man and his sickness has infected most of his children. And now his grandchildren, right down to the youngest ones who are barely understandable when they speak, parrot what they hear from their parents and their grandfather, although it's obvious they don't know what they're saying. They are already brainwashed and if someone doesn't help them, it will only get worse.

I found it fascinating that in the documentary one of the Phelps daughters says, My father had 13 children. Hmmmm . . . did he become pregnant and give birth? Mrs. Phelps is never mentioned, I think because her husband's control over the family is so complete.

Thus, I recommend the documentary; I recommend Nate Phelps' blog; and I recommend ignoring the Phelps family if you should ever have the misfortune of seeing them in your town. They have fallen. Don't let them take you down with them.

Infinities of love,

Lola

DEE DEE UPDATE FROM CAROL

Carol writes:

Just want to let you know how things are going.   Dee dee went for her 5th treatment Friday but her blood count was so low she had to get a unit of blood instead. She has an appointment for this upcoming Friday for the 5th trearment.   Keep us in your prayers please.   Carol

CHEAP AND RUDE?

Gentle Readers,

Before I get into how loose and nasty we are, we must welcome a new follower. It's a hot dad named Trooper Thorn at http://hotdads.blogspot.com/, whose photo you can see with those of my other followers, except LegalMist, who hasn't posted lately and is a mere shadow of her former self. You can also find the Super Trooper, who is extremely amusing, blogging at some other sites, which I trust you to be smart enough to find yourself once you've clicked on the link I provided or you can click on his photo. Welcome, welcome, welcome Trooper Thorn!

I find it very interesting and highly amusing that for someone with a "mere" (I value each and every one of you, Darling Followers, so don't be confused by my use of the word mere) nine followers, I get a lot of hits. I find I am increasingly popular in Slovenia and South Korea, so I say God bless you Slovenians and South Koreans and keep on comin' on.

Now, loose and nasty? Nah, that's not really what I want to talk about. Cheap and rude is my topic today because I was over at The Restaurant Managers Rant. The manager says that Sunday morning shifts are the worst in restaurants because church-going people have high expectations but are low tippers.

I posted a comment mentioning that I am a Christian and I typically tip 15 - 20% or more, especially since I rarely order an expensive meal so why shouldn't I give some extra money to that hard-working server?

However, the restaurant manager received many comments agreeing with him and stating that people who go to church are indeed cheap and rude.

I feel terrible.

I don't like it when Christians go out of their way to make Christians look bad.

I admit I have gotten pissy with servers a few times over the years, but only when the service has been really, really bad. I prefer to write something on a comment card or on the receipt. Or, if it's absolutely necessary, I say something to the manager. I also sometimes write compliments on the receipt.

On Mother's Day, Favorite Young Man and I went out for a nice meal. The food was great, but the service was extremely slooooooow. We waited a long time for the server to bring the check. He didn't, but he brought food to the next table. When he walked by, I asked for the check.

We continued to wait.

No check.

So, finally we went up to the cash register, and there our server was at a table near the front, serving meals to a very large group.

Favorite Young Man and I told the cashier we needed our check, but we didn't complain. It wasn't a big deal. I think they had more business than they expected to have at 3 p.m. on a Sunday. Normally, when F.Y.M. and I go out at mid-afternoon, the restaurant is dead. I think the server simply had more than he could handle. The gentleman at the cash register apologized. I replied, It's not a problem. Then I left the same tip I usually leave.

Please don't stereotype Christians/church attendees. I often go out with other Christians and I have never seen a single one behave in a disrespectful manner or leave a tiny tip. My Kathy, in particular, is generous with absolutely everyone.

However, if you go out to eat after church and this message has made you think you could be nicer and more generous, then please take the spirit-filled feeling you enjoy in church and carry it with you into the restaurant. Be as friendly and kind as you can be while your server brings you your meal that you now don't have to cook and serve yourself. Then when your tummy is full and you know you can go home and take a nap, please leave a generous tip for your tired server who can't go home yet.

My Brother and Sister Christians, we must watch ourselves and let the world see the love in which we believe.

Infinities of love,

Lola

DEEDEE NEEDS A MIRACLE

Gentle Readers,

We need your help. My friend Carol has learned that her daughter DeeDee has multiple myeloma (bone marrow cancer). Please pray for DeeDee.

You can pray, ask your friends and relatives to pray, ask safe strangers to pray, ask any congregation to pray. If you aren't someone who prays, then please send positive thoughts to DeeDee.

If you would like to write a prayer or a message to DeeDee, I will pass it on. With your permission, I will publish your prayers.

DeeDee needs a miracle!

Infinities of love,

Lola

Dear Lord, our Father, 


We ask that you send healing and comfort to your daughter DeeDee. Be with her in this time of great need. Please help her doctors know the best treatment for her. And please help her family. Give them the strength to do everything that DeeDee needs.


In Jesus' name we pray.


Amen.

THE TILLMAN STORY

Gentle Readers,

I read and recommended to you Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tilman by Jon Krakauer. I have now seen and recommend to you The Tillman Story, a documentary directed by Amir Bar-Lev.

I will not recommend the book over the movie, now will I recommend the movie over the book. You should read the book and then watch the people described as they turn into living, speaking human beings, some of whom cry with grief and some of whom lie their asses off to protect their part in the cover- up of Pat Tillman's murder.

The details presented over the course of the book fascinate, while the film, which of course does not take as much time to watch as it does to read the book, encapsulates the events and allows us to quickly see lie after lie after lie perpetuated by the U.S. Army.

It was April 22, 2004. Pat Tillman, former big bucks NFL player, had enlisted in the U.S. Army after 9/11, thinking it was the right thing to do when the United States went into Afghanistan to hunt down Osama Bin Laden. Little did he know that he would be deployed to Iraq to fight what he believed was an illegal war. Redeployed, along with his brother Kevin, to Afghanistan, the military tried to claim that he was killed by the Taliban. Tillman was even awarded the Silver Star for bravery.

But there was no shoot out with the Taliban. In truth, Pat Tillman was murdered by a fellow Army Ranger. Although the euphemism for this type of killing is Friendly Fire, I prefer to be a little more blunt and tell it like it is.

The Tillman family has fought and struggled to try to learn exactly how Pat was killed that April 22nd. What they do know is that Tillman and the men with him realized that their own team was firing on them. The shooters were probably 20 - 40 yards away from Tillman who was screaming, I'm Pat Fucking Tillman.

Then someone blew his head off. Was it the excitement of the fire fight -- someone eager to earn the Red Badge of Courage by getting into the battle? Or maybe somebody got scared and thought, Oh my God, that's Pat Tillman right in front of me and I've been shooting at him and I already killed the guy next to him. I'd better go ahead and shoot him to shut him up.

God only knows what happens in the heat of these situations.

Krakauer's explanation of what happened that day is more precise than that which the Tillman family feels sure of, though they don't seem to feel really sure of anything except that a lot of generals used the words "I don't recall" repeatedly when they were asked about how Tillman died and when they found out that the cause of death was fratricide.

Everyone in the platoon was warned not to tell Pat's brother Kevin how Pat had been killed, but the truth will out, even if it's just the partial truth. After Kevin found out that Pat was murdered, he finished his tour of duty with their platoon.

The cover-up was just so pathetically obvious and even amateurish. The army burned Pat's uniform and other personal effects, which is against the law, unless the items are a biohazard. So they concocted a report that stated CPR was performed on Pat at the aid station. This was 45 minutes after he died, and he had no head. How do you perform CPR on someone whose head has been shot off?

I don't know what else to say to you about this kind of bullshit. Donald Rumsfeld, fuck you but not the horse you rode in on. George W. Bush, shame on you for trying to use Tillman as your poster boy for the army. Fuck you. Fuck all of you. The lie didn't originate with you, but you used it to the best of your limited ability.

Infinities of love to the Tillman Family,

Lola

KINDERTRANSPORT

Gentle Readers,

I recommend an excellent documentary: Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport.

During 1938 and '39, the Kindertransport allowed 10,000 Jewish children from Germany and Nazi-occupied countries to travel by train to England, where they lived -- sometimes in camps and youth hostels, occasionally to be used as servants -- but mostly with foster parents. Organizers accompanied the children on the trains, but if the organizers had not returned, the Kindertransport would have been stopped. Additionally, children were not allowed to take anything of value with them.

The aging children of the transport tell their stories themselves -- how their parents said, Don't worry, we'll join you soon; how some children were given the daunting task of finding employment for their parents as domestics (the only way for adults to get to England), and some kids actually managed to get their parents to safety; how many of the children cried themselves to sleep for years in a time when people didn't understand the emotional damage caused by separation and no grief counselors were standing by to help; how few of the children were reunited with their parents when the war ended because they had no parents. The majority of the children lost their families in the Holocaust.

I am ashamed that the United States accepted no additional refugees. Many countries reduced the number of Jews allowed to emigrate during the days leading up to the war and after the war began. Anti-Semitism ran rampant all over the world. England and England alone took in these children and would have taken more if the transport hadn't been ended by the beginning of the war between Germany and Great Britain.

Deborah Oppenheimer produced this outstanding film. Her mother was a Kindertransport survivor who was unable to tell her daughter what she had been through. Oppenheimer learned more about her own family through making the film. Listening to the DVD commentary on Into the Arms of Strangers is well worth your time as Oppenheimer and director Mark Jonathan Harris add their insights into the story and discuss the research conducted to make this 2000 Academy Award Winner for Best Documentary.

A story that stood out for me was that of Lory Cahn, who was a 14 year old on the train headed for England when her father could not bear to let her go and actually pulled her out of the moving train's window as he ran alongside on his crippled legs, the result of injuries incurred during World War I, when he fought for Germany. Young Lory was deported after a time -- but not to England. She went from concentration camp to concentration camp to concentration camp, until at last, her liberation. She weighed 58 pounds. Her mother had been killed, but her father survived. She seemed to bear him no ill will.

Oppenheimer and Harris ask toward the end of their commentary: Would you be able to let your children go? And would you take in a child if asked?

Taking in a child would be much easier for me than letting my children go. As much as I would want my children to be safe, I do not know if I could send them away into the unknown. And so many of us would probably be afraid but we would think: Things will get better. This will not last. Someone will stop this madness.

But of course, no one stopped the madness, not until Hitler and Germany were defeated.

And the war was not fought to save Europe's Jews.

What about you? Would you let your children go? Would you take in a child?

Something to ponder.

Infinities of love,

Lola

MOB RULE

A is for Abu Ghraib.
B is for Glenn Beck.
C is for Lt. William Calley.
D is for Dachau.
E is for Execution.
F is for Scut Farkas.
G is for Guns.
H is for Adolf Hitler.
I is for Iran.
J is for Steve Jobs.
K is for the Ku Klux Klan.
L is for Rush Limbaugh.
M is for Dr. Phil McGraw.
N is for Nazis.
O is for Bill O'Reilly.
P is for Sarah Palin.
Q is for Queer-Haters.
R is for Rush to Judgment.
S is for Martha Stewart.
T is for Tianenman Square.
U is for You who love extremism.
V is for Michael Vick.
W is for Wal-Mart.
X is for American History X.
Z is for Zeus.

VOICES OF MY LAI: PART III

When The Killing Was Over

The cover-up of My Lai began immediately. Captain Medina called Headquarters and said 123 people had been killed.

Squad Leader: Captain Medina told us, Do not answer questions from anybody about this last mission.

Team Leader: We all thought we were going to get in big trouble so we didn't talk much about it. We were ordered to move onward but Captain Medina said, Don't go past the wire. There's a Korean bunker there and it's heavily mined. So as soon as we got to the wire, Calley said, You, you, and you. Come with me. We're going up. And almost right away Meadlo stepped on a mine and blew his foot off. As they MEDIVACed him out Meadlo yelled back at Calley, God got me and he'll get you for what we did.

Squad Leader: Following the My Lai incident, Charlie Company was sent out in the jungle for two months straight. It was almost like they put us there so we wouldn't talk to anybody.

Helicopter Gunner: It was either the same day or the next, I was still in my fatigues that were covered in blood, that Mr. Thompson took me with him to see Colonel Douglas. He went in and came out and just motioned toward the door. I went in and told Colonel Douglas there had been unnecessary killing of civilians. He made a few notes on a legal pad and dismissed me. We got outside and Mr. Thompson smashed his helmet and tore off his wings and said he'd never fly again. But they kept sending him out on missions alone in dangerous places. He crashed four or five helicopters in a few months. He thought somebody wanted to get rid of him. 

Squad Leader: Fifty-four days. Fifty-four days we were without hardly a change of clothing. We were all sick. We got dysentery. It stuck in my mind, Why are they doing this? Why are they sending us out at night? To get rid of us? The company changed after. Nobody cared anymore. It had all been a game and the game was over. 

Aspiring Journalist Who Later Befriended Members of Charlie Company: We traded war stories. One day one of them said, Hey, did you hear what happened at Pinkville? I said, No, what happened? He said, We were ordered to kill everybody there. I got as much information as I could and when I got home I wrote a letter that said it needed to be investigated. I made 30 copies. Then the photographer sold the pictures to a newspaper. They became ubiquitous -- a symbol of violence. 

Machine Gunner: An unmarked limousine came to our houses and picked us up and took us to the Pentagon and we went down and down and down into a War Room and sat at the end of a table in front of a microphone, feeling very small.

The Charges

Colonel Henderson

Dereliction of duty

Failure to report a war crime

False swearing

Major McKnight:

False swearing

Major Calhoun:

Dereliction of duty

Failure to report a war crime

Captain Kotouc:

Maiming

Colonel Parson:

Dereliction of duty

Failure to obey lawful regulation

Captain Medina:

Assault with a deadly weapon

Premeditated murder

Lieutenant Calley:

Premeditated murder

Machine Gunner: People say you shouldn't obey an illegal order, but trust me, during war there's no such thing as an illegal order. You disobey an order and they put you up against a wall and shoot you.

President Nixon intervened. Calley served four months of his life sentence at Leavenworth.

Army Prosecutor: Calley got away with it and that made it clear that everyone would get away with it. The other charges were dismissed or resulted in acquittals.

Five hundred seven people were murdered at My Lai.

Squad Leader: It hurts me now, thinking about the innocent people dying. It hurts me now more than it did then. Because then we were thinking about not dying.

My Lai Villager #4: It's been a while. Now I can sleep at night, but sometimes I dream about my dad. How my sister died. How they died next to me. I remember all the time.

Squad Leader: I remember what went on, all the sleepless nights we had. My Lai. All the people we killed. I thought I could make it easier by drinking but every night I lay down and whether I drank, it didn't make it easier. It's still the same thing. The memories kept comin' back, kept comin' back.

My Lai Villager #1: I will never forget. When I am reminded, I suddenly feel the pain. A chapter in the book opens. There is no way I will ever forget. I will never forget.

VOICES OF MY LAI: PART II

March 16, 1968

Squad Leader: The morning started early on the 16th. This was going to be an all-out war, shades of Iwo Jima.


Machine Gunner: We began hearing radio chatter that the helicopter's were being fired on. We hit the ground and almost immediately began firing into the village area.


Team Leader #1: I remember somebody yelling, There's people moving in the village. So we all opened up.


Grenadier: We went in further and people started coming out of their houses. We went, What is this? They're not supposed to be in here. A crazy guy says, They must be VC. Some of the guys started shooting 'em. 


Radio Operator: Once the first civilian was killed, it was too late.


My Lai Villager #3: Around 8:30 three American soldiers came to my house. They pushed six of us down into the shelter and threw a hand grenade in behind us and then they used their machine guns to shoot us down. My entire family was blown into pieces. The only person left alive was me.


My Lai Villager #1:  My brother younger than me, only three years old, one shot blasted his head onto the floor.


Squad Leader: We were a unit that was full of anger and frustration. We wanted to fight the enemy and we were told we were doing it.


Team Leader #1: I am a soldier and I receive and obey the orders that are issued to me by my superiors. Their order was to kill or destroy everything in the village. The children happened to be there. The people of that village were Viet Cong or Viet Cong sympathizers. Maybe some see it differently. That's the way I see it.


U.S. Army Photographer: I was the only photographer on the operation that day. I just photographed everything I came upon. I was coming up to a group of people and they had some American GIs surrounding them. One soldier spoke up, Hey, here's a person with a camera. And sure enough the soldiers backed off and I moved up and I took a photograph of these people. You can see the fear in their faces, especially the older woman trying to protect the daughter. Then all of a sudden automatic fire. I saw them all drop to the ground.


Helicopter Gunner #1: The morning of My Lai it was crystal clear. We came in and strafed the ground in case anyone jumped up and offered resistance. We were never fired upon. It was Saturday morning. We thought, Good, people are going to market. When we came back 10 or 15 minutes later those same people were dead or dying along the road. At some point during the day we started seeing bodies accumulate in the village, women and kids. I'd never seen anything like that. It was bad. 


Helicopter Gunner #2: We lingered by one of the bodies. It was a young woman with a chest wound but still alive. Mr. Thompson decided to move back and hover and watch. Then we saw a captain walk up and kick her and then step back and blow her away. Later we learned it was Captain Medina, Captain Ernest Medina. 


Squad Leader: As we got into the village orders changed. We were to stop firing. We were moving people we found and pushing them into the center of the village and they were being picked up by Calley's platoon more or less and moved onward.


My Lai Villager #4: I directed my kids to go with me, but they still hit us and kicked us.


Helicopter Gunner #1: We saw the people, about 150 of them, old men, women, and children gathered at a drainage ditch. Mr. Thompson landed his little scout helicopter and said, We gotta help these people. A soldier said, Yeah. We'll help them out of their misery.

Suddenly Calley gave the order to begin firing.

Meadlo: So we just pushed 'em off and began firing.

Squad Leader: Paul Meadlo had a strong sense of duty. I like to think if I'd been in his place, I would have said, You've got to be kidding me and walked away and taken my chances that Calley wouldn't have shot me.

Team Leader #2: Calley yelled at me to come help him and I just walked on like I hadn't heard him. That was disobeying an order and he could have done anything to me he wanted, but I didn't care. I wasn't going to help him kill people in a ditch. To this day I always think to myself, What could I have done to stop it? And I don't know the answer to that. 

My Lai Villager #5: To survive I lay under my mother's stomach as the ditch filled with blood.

My Lai Villager #4: To protect my daughter I covered her mouth with my breast. I saw my dad walking around and I wanted to call out, Lie down Dad, or you will be shot. But I didn't dare say anything and they shot him. Half his head blew away.

Helicopter Gunner #1: Mr. Thompson was just beside himself. He got on the radio and just said, There's people down here killing civilians. That's when he decided to intervene. He said, We've got to stop this. Are you with me? And we said, Yes. We saw a group of people running toward a bunker. Mr. Thompson calculated they had less than 30 seconds to live. He said, I'm going to go get those people out myself  and if these American soldiers fire on me or the people while I'm getting them out of the bunker, shoot 'em. I remember thinking, How did we get into this?

Squad Leader: I saw these helicopter gunners and they were pointing their guns right at me, and I thought, Oh my God, what are they gonna do?

Helicopter Gunner #1: Three people came out, six people came out, 11 or 12 people came out and Mr. Thompson got on the radio and called his friend, a gunship pilot, and said, Danny, I need a favor.

Gunship Pilot: We landed and picked up those people and we never landed in the boonies like that. I don't know why we did it other than those people needed to be out of there. 

Helicopter Gunner #1: We went back to the ditch and I saw some motion down in the ditch. I saw this child move.

My Lai Villager #5: I lifted my head up and saw a helicopter landing at the rice fields. I was really scared. Wasn't sure if they would shoot again. But when I lifted my head, I saw three American soldiers approach. I pretended to be dead. But the Americans, the three of them came down into the ditch and they came and pulled me out. 

Helicopter Gunner #1: We left the boy with a nun at a hospital. We told her, He probably doesn't have any family.

Squad Leader: After a while the order came: Cease fire! Cease fire! You'd hear a couple guns still going off and then they'd stop. And then it was quiet. 

My Lai Villager #3: They left my village in blood and fire.

VOICES OF MY LAI: PART I

The Beginnings of Charlie Company

Army Prosecutor: Who did it? Who killed these people?


Radio Operator: There was nothing special about us.


Squad Leader: I didn't go over there to be a hero or nothin. I went over to do my job.


Investigator: Calley was always trying to do things to show that he was a real officer.


My Lai Villager #1: When I was young I saw American soldiers. Whenever they came they'd gather up everyone. They'd bring cake and candy for the children. Everyone would have some and then they would let us go home. 


My Lai Villager #2: I never would have imagined, never would have thought Americans would kill us. Americans don't kill. 


My Lai Villager #3: When I was eight years old, I realized the war had come. There were many times when the American soldiers would set up operations around this area and raid and shoot. So my mother brought me and my siblings together and taught us to flee. Every night we had to crawl into the shelter to sleep. We had to avoid the American bombs and shootings. That was our misery -- war from the Americans. 


Radio Operator: We started pulling regular patrols end of January, beginning of February. Once we started down to the Pinkville area we started to lose people. They were being picked off one by one. This is when we got our initiation into the realities of Vietnam with booby traps, mines, snipers. Weber was the first member we lost. It was like losing a member of your family.


Soldier: Pinkville took on associations for us far beyond a color chart. Pinkville meant death.


Radio Operator: Your attitude toward the villagers now: Everybody's an enemy.


Squad Leader: You begin to hate, and the hatred is very intense and very real. Finally you just throw the rule book away.


Machine Gunner: We were told the innocents had been warned out. If they're there, you gotta assume they're enemy. There are no civilians. They're all Viet Cong.

HOLOCAUST DAY

Gentle Readers,

I just realized today is Holocaust Rememberance Day. I can't let the sun go down without remembering the millions who died, and the millions more who somehow escaped death but suffered so horribly.

I once wrote a newspaper article about a woman from Ukraine who told me how the Nazis came to her village when she was a teenager. She said that overnight the Jewish families in the village disappeared. Then she and the other young people who were not Jewish were ordered to come to the village square.

She was afraid to go. Her grandmother told her to do whatever she was told to do and she would be all right.

And so she did. She obeyed every order as quickly as she could, no matter how hungry, exhausted, sick, or humiliated she was.

She was sent to Germany as slave labor. She survived the war and met a handsome young GI when the Americans finally arrived in Germany. They married and she became an American. By the time I met her, her hair was white, her handsome GI had been gone for many years, and she was so lonely.

She visited high schools and spoke to the students about how important it is not to use drugs. She said she would have given anything to have a crust of bread when she was their age, so they certainly had no excuse to use drugs.

I took my daughter along when I interviewed her. My daughter was 14, I believe. She sat across from this woman, who stroked my daughter's beautiful long hair and looked at her so lovingly. She talked and talked and told us stories. I could tell she was desperate to keep us there, to have some company, but eventually we had to go.

A story closer to the Holocaust that I've told before in my message center and will no doubt tell again is about the day my daughter, my husband, and I visited the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. I didn't want to go. We were in D.C. for a Van Gogh exhibit and we couldn't get in. My daughter wanted to go to the Holocaust Museum and I didn't because I already knew so much and had seen so many pictures and it was just too much.

But that day I encountered a real face from the Holocaust, not just a photograph. We were in a room with bunks from Auschwitz, these horrible wood frames with slats that people were crowded into. A woman was patting the wood frame and crying.

A young woman who worked at the museum asked her not to touch them. She said with a heavy accent, "You don't understand. I slept in these."

And there was the Holocaust right in front of me.

Outstanding books about the Holocaust abound and there's no better place for a young person to start than The Diary Of A Young Girl. It was the first book I read that taught me something about the true faces of the Holocaust.

I saw a documentary some years ago on PBS about what happened to Anne Frank after she and her family were taken from their hiding place. Anne and her sister Margot survived for a time in a concentration camp. A woman who was in the same barracks said that Anne and Margot became ill. They slept near the door and when someone opened the door, Anne and Margot would cry out "Shut the Door!" because it was cold.

But then their cries became weaker and weaker until finally Anne cried out alone and then no one was left to cry out. She died two weeks before the camp was liberated.

Lord, I ask you, let her be remembered forever.

Love always,

Lola