I find it odd to research massacres and abuse. It doesn't make me despair of humanity or even hate Americans because I always find decent people already trying their best to end it, prevent it, prosecute it or just struggling to publicise it.
The HRW worker smeared by the papers yesterday, risking her life, today used her rebuttal in the Guardian to focus on the Afghan victims. She mentions this one photograph which isn't included in the online edition, so I tracked it down.

"Why did journalists from the Sun, the Times and the Mail write this as a story focusing on the MoD's entirely bogus suggestion that I had some kind of "relationship" with McNally? Why is it that my photograph was published? Why have journalists not been asking questions about why the MoD has been encouraging them to publish a vicious, false slur about me in order stop me from doing my job for Human Rights Watch in asking for information from the Nato official in charge of monitoring civilian casualties?
The worst civilian casualty incident of last year took place in Azizabad, in a district called Shindand in the west of Afghanistan. In August 2008 the US launched a "kill/capture" operation, targeting a mid-ranking Taliban commander. The Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission says that at least 76 civilians were killed, 59 of whom were children. The UN put the civilian death toll above 90. Among the many photographs of the dead, one in particular has always stuck in my mind. It is of a young girl who looks as though she could be sleeping. But beneath the long lashes of her closed eyes is a line of shrapnel wounds. She was five years old, and she was called Kubra. And in that photograph you can glimpse how the last moments of Kubra's life must have passed.
If the military would hold its people to account for these terrible mistakes then human rights organisations would leave them alone. In the meantime, they should remember that this has nothing to do with individuals like me, and everything to do with little girls like Kubra."

 http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/feb/06/defence-afghanistan-rachel-reid-military

The photo I presume is Kubra is from:
 http://www.rawa.org/temp/runews/rawanews.php?id=734

Which I found from this excellent site:
The Afghan Victim Memorial
 http://pubpages.unh.edu/~mwherold/listing.htm

As we were flying back around the civilian people, there was one lady on the side of the road, and we knew something was going wrong by then. Larry Colburn, my gunner, just motioned for her to stay down; she was kneeling on the side of the road. We just ordered her to stay down; we hovered around everywhere, looking, couldn't understand what was going on. We flew back over her a few minutes later and most of you all have probably seen that picture; she's got a coolie hat laying next to her. If you look real close, some odd object laying right next to her--- that's her brains. It's not pretty

We saw another lady that was wounded. We got on the radio and called for some help and marked her with smoke. A few minutes later up walks a captain, steps up to her, nudges her with his foot, steps back and blows her away.

We came across a ditch that had, I don't know, a lot of bodies in it, a lot of movement in it. I landed, asked a sergeant there if he could help them out, these wounded people down there. He said he'd help them out, help them out of their misery, I believe. I was . . . shocked, I guess, I don't know. I thought he was joking; I took it as a joke, I guess. We took off and broke away from them and my gunner, I guess it was, said, "My God, he's firing into the ditch." We'd asked for help twice, both times--- well actually, three times by then, I guess--- every time that people had been killed. We'd "help these people out" by asking for help.

Sometime later, we saw some people huddle in a bunker and the only thing I could see at that particular time was a woman, an old man, and a couple of kids standing next to it. We look over here and see them and look over there and see the friendly forces, so I landed the helicopter again. I didn't want there to be any confusion or something; I really don't know what was going on in my mind then.

I walked over to the ground units and said, "Hey, there's some civilians over here in this bunker. Can you get them out?" They said, "Well, we're gonna get them out with a hand grenade." I said, "Just hold your people right here please, I think I can do better." So I went over to the bunker and motioned for them to come out, everything was OK. At that time I didn't know what I was going to do, because there was more than three or four there, more like nine or ten or something like that. So I walked back over to the aircraft and kind of kept them around me and called the pilot that was flying the low gunship and said, "Hey, I got these people here down on the ground, and you all land and get them out of here." So he agreed to do that, which I think was the first time a gunship's ever been used for that. There's enough of them there that he had to make two trips and he picked them up and took them about ten miles or so behind the lines and dropped them off.

A short while later we went back to the ditch. There was still some movement in there. We got out of the aircraft and Androtta, my crew chief, walked down into the ditch. A few minutes later he came back up carrying a little kid. We didn't know what we were gonna do with this one either, but we all get back in the aircraft and figure we'd get him back to the orphanage or hospital back over at Quang Ngai. In examining him in the aircraft that day, the kid wasn't even wounded, or we didn't see any wounds, I'll put it that way. He was covered with blood, and the thought was going through my mind and my crew's mind, "How did these people get in that ditch?"

After coming up with about three scenarios, one of them being an artillery round hit them, you wipe that out of your mind 'cause every house in Vietnam, I think, has a bunker underneath it. If artillery was coming there, they would go to the bunker; they wouldn't go outside in the open area. Then I said, well, when artillery was coming, they were trying to leave and a round caught them in the ditch while they were going for cover. I threw that one out of my mind. Then something just sunk into me that these people were marched into that ditch and murdered. That was the only explanation that I could come up with.

Taking the child to the hospital was a day I'll never forget. It was a very sad day, very mad day, very frustrated and everything.

I believe too, as everybody says, there was a cover-up and everybody's talked about that the cover-up started on the ground. In my mind, I'm not real sure that's where the cover-up started. I would not be the least bit surprised if this cover-up started "up" and worked its way all the way back down.

After a minute or two he says, "Hey man did you hear what we did at Pinkville?" I knew Pinkville, which was My Lai 4, because we had done some missions up there and there had been---it's known as a hot area. 'So what'd you do at Pinkville?" He said, "Oh, man, we massacred this whole village." I said, "What?" He said, "Yeah, we massacred this whole village. We just lined them up and killed them" I said, "What do you mean?' He said, "Men, women and kids, everybody, we killed them all." I said, 'Well, how many was that?" He said, "Oh, I don't know, three or four hundred I guess, at least. A lot, everybody we could find. We didn't leave anybody alive, at least we didn't intend to."

It's hard for me to really describe exactly what my reaction was, because it's difficult to, the language doesn't quite, at least I haven't found a way to capture it, but it was I guess you would say, an epiphany. It was an instantaneous recognition and collateral determination that this was something too horrible, almost, to comprehend and that I wasn't gonna be a part of it. Just simply having the knowledge, I felt, made me complicit, unless I acted on it.

So I started to act on it, and I spent the remainder of my time in Vietnam trying to locate people who had been there and of course part of it was easy because I was going straight to the divisional LRRP company. Four or five people who had been my friends in Hawaii and had gone to Charlie company had transferred into the divisional LRRP company within a week or ten days after the massacre. So I was able to go in and talk with them and two of them were very good friends.

One of them and I had been drafted on the same day. -

"Hey, Mike, what happened at Pinkville? Tell me what happened at Pinkville." And he tells me this terrible story of going in with Lieutenant Calley, and sweeping through the village and watching these murders and the rapes and everything that was going on and seeing what was happening, what happened at the ditch. About eleven o'clock Mike and Billy sat down within fifteen or twenty feet of the ditch to have their lunch. They took out their C-rations and opened their food and started eating but they couldn't really finish it, because there was too much noise coming from the ditch. People who are mortally wounded but not yet dead make a lot of noise. People die hard; they don't want to give up life. The people in this ditch were laying there. Those who were still alive were groaning and crying out and some of their limbs were flopping spasmodically, which happens to people who are mortally wounded.

There must've been a terrible God-awful racket, a horrifying sound, I'm sure. They couldn't eat, so they stood up, two of them and they walked over to the ditch and they divided up the survivors and they walked down the ditch, one on each side, finishing off all the survivors. "There's one, you take him". "OK". Pow, pow "There's one, you get him". "OK". Pow, pow. Up and down the ditch once. When they returned to their food, the ditch was quiet.

When the first guy, whose name was Butch Gruber, told me this story, he told me about the ditch and about what Mike and Billy had done. But I needed to hear it from them. When I asked them about it, they said, "Yeah, yeah, it's all true". Mike told me the story and it was really a cloudless night and there were a zillion stars out there. After he finished we just lay there for a couple of minutes and finally I said "Mike, my God, Mike ... don't you know that was wrong?" And he said, "I don't know, man, I don't know, it was just one of them things."