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The Orders
-The objective of the operation as remembered by Pfc. Charles Groover from the third platoon
“On March 15, 1968, members of the 23rd Infantry Division’s Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry, were briefed by their commanding officer, Captain Ernest Medina, ahead of an operation in an area they knew as ‘Pinkville.’”
By this time, Charlie Company had sustained 28 casualties, including five dead, without ever catching sight of the enemy.
Two days before, Charlie Company had already begun to take out their rage about the
casualties they were sustaining on civilians.
They began acting as if all Vietnamese people were working with the Viet Cong and therefore the enemy. They assaulted a man on a bicycle until he managed to get away.
An unarmed woman working in a field was shot, robbed, kicked repeatedly and then
shot in the head after one of the soldiers had shouted out that she was armed.
As unit member Harry Stanley
recalled, Medina “ordered us to ‘kill everything in the village.” …What stuck
in artillery forward observer James Flynn’s mind was a question one of the other soldiers asked: “Are we supposed to kill women and children?”
And Medina’s reply: