ustxtxb_obs_1983_08_05_50_00008-00000_000.pdf

THEY CALLED THEM GREASERS Anglo Attitudes toward Mexicans in Texas, 1821-1900 Arnoldo De Leon “A splendid book that illuminates our present by shedding light on a dark corner of the Texas past.” David J. Weber Southern Methodist University For some, this book will make disturbing reading. Among its disquieting arguments is De Leon’s contention that such Texas luminaries as Walter Prescott Webb and Eugene C. Barker wrote of Anglo-Mexican relations with evident bias and defi ciencies of research, describing without censure a society that permitted traditional violence against its ethnic minorities as a means of keeping them “in their place.” $19.95 $8.95 Paperback At bookstores. University of Texas Press Box 7819 Austin, Texas 78712 8 AUGUST 5, 1983 drafted, cause a boy’s got to grow some on his own . . . without constant influence to drive him to do certain things. I was always told what to do, and then when I joined the service, I did what I was told. “I know that I’m not ever gonna go fight a war for whenever I come home, everybody puts you down, or prosecutes you. We were fighting a war for no purpose .. . there was no purpose whatsoever. “A war, before it gets started, should be made straight With everybody. Plus, if you do send men over there, don’t let ’em come home and be prosecuted for what everybody did. “Whenever that CIA investigator started asking me about My Lai, he had to talk to me for three or four hours before I could even remember. I had blanked it out of my mind. I was a human being again and then the CIA man brought it all back and ruined everything.” \(When I asked Hutto if he didn’t mean the CID, Criminal Investigation Division of the Army, he said, “No, I mean “He kept me there near all day long and I wanted to go home and he kept on and on and said I should go ahead and talk ’cause it was all gonna come out anyway . . . so I told him what happened. I was gonna get out in a month’s time anyway . . . I thought.” \(Hutto was charged, on November 17, 1969, shortly after he talked to the investigator, with murder, assault, rape and false swearing. He was exonerated of the rape and false swearing charges, tried and acquitted of murder and assault. The trial extended his time in the Army until THE FOLLOWING is an excerpt from Hutto’s 1969 statement, introduced as evidence at his trial: “I remember the unit’s combat assault on My Lai 4 . . . the night before the mission, we had a briefing held by Captain Medina . . he said everything in the village was Communist. [It] was a search-and-destroy mission . . . the first of the unit . . . I remember Capt. Medina said we would have our chance to get even with the VC for some of the casualties the company had had \(onefourth of Charlie Company’s men had impression I got was that we was to shoot everyone in the village. Then on the outskirts of the village . . . an order came down to destroy all of the food, kill all the animals, and kill all the people .. . [then] the village was burned. When we entered the village, I saw people running for cover . . . the whole company opened up on the villagers and begun to kill them. It was murder. We continued through the village and shot at everything . . . we didn’t collect any people and we didn’t try to capture anyone . . . I didn’t agree with the killings, but we were ordered to do it. We shot men, women, and children. We were there most of the morning . . . I remember we had lunch on the wood line at [its] edge. . . ” The investigator asked Hutto about a rape that other eyewitnesses had already testified to. He at first denied seeing a rape, but the next day, he gave the following account: “Sometime during the middle of the village . . . I came upon a but and went to the doorway to see what was going on. There was a Vietnamese girl in the but and she was laying on the bed and [a soldier] was having sexual intercourse with her . . . she was crying and resisting . . . [another soldier] was holding her hands . . . after the one finished, the other one took out his penis “I mean how did we get these boys to this state of mind and why?” Jim Lane and got on top of the girl . . . [she] was still crying and fighting . . . at that time I left. I didn’t hear about the girl getting killed until you told me yesterday. She was about 20 years old. . . .” \(Hutto’s statements were confirmed by at least twenty other enlisted men. All would remember Medina’s orders were to “kill everything in the village.” Hutto still believes that, “Medina was the best company commander anybody ever had. I think the orders for My Lai came from higher above Medina, from the Brigade Commander is what I heard. “Before this operation, we’d lost about twenty of our men killed for no ‘reason whatsoever. It’s different to be out there in a firefight, but just to get killed from something somebody’s planted out there, to get your legs blowed off, the bottom half of your body blowed off, see your buddies get their heads blowed off. After seeing so much stuff like that, you just build up a hardness inside you . . . you blank out love . . . you just have a nonfeeling about everything . . . you do what you have to do to stay alive. . . .