In the early spring of 1969 I was an Army colonel recently assigned to the office of the inspector general in Washington, and I was not particularlyl happy albout it; I have always disliked living in Washington, and I think that most infantry officers would rather serve with troops than investigate allegations about irregularities in procurement, which was most of what the IG’s D.C. office did. Our job was to look into complaints sent to us from the Executive Branch or the Congress, and seven or eight fresh ones circulated in each morning’s Read File. When the file came around one morning in March, it contained a lengthy letter from an ex-serviceman named Ron Ridenhour; he had sent copies to the President, twentythree members of Congress, the Secretaries of State and Defense, the Secretary of the Army, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Gen. William Westmoreland had forwarded a copy to our office with orders to investigate. Ridenhour’s letter began:

“It was late in April 1968 that I first heard of ‘Pinkville’ and what allegedly happened there. I received that first report with some skepticism, but in the following months I was to hear stories from such a wide variety of people that it became impossible for me to disbelieve that something rather dark and bloody did indeed occur sometime in March 1968 in a village called ‘Pinkville’ in the Republic of Vietnam.

Full Story >>