Seymour Hersh:

Civilian defense attorney George Latimer speaks to his client Army Lieutenant William Calley as they leave a court-martial hearing.

At 6 am or so, Calley told me that his much admired company captain, a guy named Ernest Medina, who was known to his troops, I would later learn, as “Mad Dog Medina,” was also at Fort Benning awaiting legal proceedings. Medina would tell me, Calley said, that all he had done at My Lai came pursuant to Medina’s direct orders. He dialed a number, and Medina—about whom I knew nothing—picked up immediately. Calley explained that a reporter from Washington was on the phone with him.“Please, Captain,” Calley said, “tell him what I did was under your orders.”

“I don’t know what you are talking about,” Medina said, and he hung up. Calley was stricken.

It was clear that he’d just figured out that he would be the sacrificial lamb. The bad apple. It would all be on him. The generals and colonels and captains who planned the slaughter—to get a high body count in the war and make the generals in Saigon and Washington happy—were going to ride into the sunset.

I was totally exhausted. I told him I had to leave. Calley, in a panic, said: “Let’s go bowling.”

It couldn’t happen. I left, got to the airport, took a plane to Washington, and, exhausted as I was, I began writing the first of what would be five stories over the next months about what happened at My Lai.