Finally, the attitude that underlines all those is another man who was part of the cover-up—a man named Donaldson, who lied, it seems clear here, about his role in covering up the incident. Later in 1970 they discovered that this man had been gook hunting, riding in his helicopter, as a number of officers did, hunting Vietnamese civilians with his .50 caliber machine gun. He was charged with the murder of six Vietnamese civilians, assault with intent to kill two more. It was investigated and he was exonerated of all charges in a closed hearing.Now that story brought back a very vivid memory to me, a memory that came back to trip me up very much. When I learned more about the nature of the origins of the war and when, as I say, any sense of legitimacy of the war was deprived of me later on, and that was a day when I had been…I wanted to see what the war looked like at that point in the air in Vietnam, and I went with an observer who was a spotter for air strikes and other things in a light plane. This guy was a captain. He was famously brave and reckless. He flew very low all the time. His plane was always getting shot up. In fact, the very next week it took so much fire, his plane, that it was forbidden ever to carry passengers again. His superior was drilled upwards in the plane, so this would be the last chance to go with this guy, though I didn’t know that at the time.He flew, we flew all over, we did a variety of things during the day, but at one point we flew over a region called the Plain of Reeds—the kind you can see, you know, a very definite, marshy region which is crisscrossed with little groundcover but nothing very high. And suddenly as we were flying over fairly low he said, “There’s a VC down there.” I’d been in the country about six months at that point; I’d never seen a VC—which isn’t uncommon. As the vets here know, you can go a year, depending on where you are, you can go your two-year tour and never see a VC, so that was very striking. And at that point he wheeled the plane down to go down very low to the ground at this point. Well, I saw two men down there in black pajamas, as most of the peasants wore in the countryside. I said, “They don’t seem to have weapons.” They were running along the ground. He said, “They left their weapons in their boat.” I said, “How do you know they’re VC?” He said, “There’s nothing but VC in the Plain of Reeds.” Well, I heard later that there were perhaps 15,000 fishermen in the Plain of Reeds to fish. In any case, he went into this dive, he pulled up again and he pulled out his M16, opened the window of this little light plane, which was like a Piper Cub, and he went into a dive again, down, with the M16 thrust out the window and as he went by these men, fired at them, and we pulled away as they fell down. They were flattened to the ground and they were almost invisible against these reeds—dry reeds against the ground. But as the plane would pull up very sharply again, against gravity, they would get up, thinking apparently that they couldn’t be seen, but as we looked back in the plane, you could see them get up, and then you’d spot them again and they would run, again. So he would wheel his plane around figure eights, sort of sickening type curves, and he would fire the weapon at them. And he did this for about 15 to 20 minutes, firing several magazines.And it reminded me, partly physically because of this pull of gravity, of an occasion when I spent a summer on a ranch in Wyoming—a very large ranch, 200,000 acres, where men would drive around and cowboys were driving pickup trucks from one part of the ranch to another, and if they’d see horses or cattle out loose where they weren’t supposed to be they would herd them with the pickup truck. This is the new West. Like it or not, this is the automated ranch. And he’d herd these cattle then in this machine and would have this same feeling pretty much like a cow pony of pulling around, almost as though he were wheeling the pickup truck back on its hind wheels and pulling it around like that. And I had this same feeling of hunting men now, herding men in this flying machine. I asked him if he did this often and he said yes. And I said, "Do you ever hit anyone with an M16 like this?" He said not very often, “but it scares the shit out of them. They’ll be scared VC tonight,” he said as we flew off.Well, I was thinking, maybe not. It must have been very frightening to be herded like that. On the other hand, they survived like a lot of other Vietnamese, and that night they had won that encounter with an American machine, so maybe they weren’t as scared as they were proud in the kind of pride that has kept them fighting for 25 years, and which will of course lead them to win in the end.But that, in turn, finally, came back to me while I was speaking to a senator, Senator McGovern as a matter of fact. I’ve never identified him couple of times I’ve heard this anecdote, but he was telling me that he had gone to President Johnson early in 1965 to tell him that he thought there was just no chance that the kind of bombing they were doing would have the effects that the administration claimed that it would do. I knew at the time—I was in the Pentagon—that there was no real thought, as the Pentagon Papers showed, that it would succeed in stopping supplies. Rather, it was a way of coercing Hanoi, of “changing the minds of Hanoi leaders to do our bidding,” do what we wanted by killing some of their people, by causing pain to their population. That would move their leaders. In other words, it was a form of torture. But in any case, McGovern had the impression that they meant what they said, that they were going to stop those supplies. And he went and told the press that, as an experienced flyer and bombardier in World War II, that this really couldn’t happen and that he thought the bombing was totally wrong and, in any case, inhumane.