The retired Army investigator told me that Powell was questioned in the Donaldson case. But the investigator said Powell volunteered little knowledge about the atrocities.
Nevertheless, the investigator claimed, "we had him [Donaldson] dead to rights," with the testimony of two helicopter pilots who had flown Donaldson on his shooting expeditions. Still, the investigation collapsed after the two pilot-witnesses were transferred to another Army base and apparently came under pressure from military superiors.
The two pilots withdrew their testimony, and the Army dropped all charges against Donaldson. "John Donaldson was a cover-up specialist," the old investigator growled.
In his memoir, Powell justified other acts of brutality against Vietnamese civilians, including burning down their homes and destroying their villages. As a U.S. military adviser to a Vietnamese Army unit during his first tour in 1963, Powell oversaw this practice.
"We burned down the thatched huts, starting the blaze with Ronson and Zippo lighters," Powell recalled. "Why were we torching houses and destroying crops? Ho Chi Minh had said the people were like the sea in which his guerrillas swam. ...
"We tried to solve the problem by making the whole sea uninhabitable. In the hard logic of war, what difference did it make if you shot your enemy or starved him to death?"
For nearly six months, Powell and his Vietnamese Army unit slogged through the jungles, searching for Viet Cong and systematically destroying the food and villages of the region's Montagnards. Old women would cry hysterically as their ancestral homes and worldly possessions were consumed by fire.
My Lai Cover-up
In his second Vietnam tour as a young, up-and-coming Army major, Powell sank even deeper into the bloody morass of Vietnam. He was made an executive officer with the Americal Division and was stationed at an outpost at Duc Pho on July 27, 1968.
The "drain-the-sea" strategy that Powell had practiced years earlier had led American forces into even harsher treatment of Vietnamese civilians. Though it was still a secret when Powell arrived, Americal troops had committed an act that would stain forever the reputation of the U.S. Army.
On March 16, 1968, a bloodied unit of the Americal Division stormed into a hamlet known as My Lai 4. With military helicopters circling overhead, revenge-seeking American soldiers rousted Vietnamese civilians -- mostly old men, women and children -- from their thatched huts and herded them into the village's irrigation ditches.
As the round-up continued, some Americans raped the girls. Then, under orders from junior officers on the ground, soldiers began emptying their M-16s into the terrified peasants. Some parents used their bodies futilely to shield their children from the bullets. Soldiers stepped among the corpses to finish off the wounded.
The slaughter raged for four hours. A total of 347 Vietnamese, including babies, died in the carnage. But there also were American heroes that day in My Lai. Some soldiers refused to obey the direct orders to kill and some risked their lives to save civilians from the murderous fire.
A pilot named Hugh Clowers Thompson Jr. from Stone Mountain, Georgia, was furious at the killings he saw happening on the ground. He landed his helicopter between one group of fleeing civilians and American soldiers in pursuit.
Thompson ordered his helicopter door gunner to shoot the Americans if they tried to harm the Vietnamese. After a tense confrontation, the soldiers backed off. Later, two of Thompson's men climbed into one ditch filled with corpses and pulled out a three-year-old boy whom they flew to safety.
Several months later, the Americal's brutality would become a moral test for Major Powell, too.
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