Next year will mark the fiftieth anniversary of the massacre at My Lai. U.S. troops led by Lieutenant William L. Calley in 1968 burned the village in central Vietnam and murdered nearly 500 unarmed residents, mostly women, children and elderly. The Pentagon tried mightily to suppress the story, but a year-and-half later Seymour Hersh reported the story. My Lai was headline news for weeks. Lt. Calley became the face of everything wrong about the endless war in Vietnam that was killing 1,500 American soldiers every month. He was the only one convicted of any wrongdoing. The Vietnam misadventure sank the U.S. into a general moroseness for more than a decade. It took Ronald Reagan’s heroic invasion of and stirring victory over archenemy Grenada to make us feel good about ourselves again.
Seymour Hersh returned to Vietnam in 2015. Take some time to read his follow-up story more than four decades after the original.
