The Forgotten Hero Of My Lai

The story of the U.S. Army helicopter pilot who risked his life to rescue South Vietnamese civilians and to put a stop to the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam War in 1968. Revised Edition shows President Nixon and some of his political allies in the House of Representatives interfered in the judicial process to try to prevent any U.S. soldier from being convicted of war crimes.

Recounts the efforts of Hugh Thompson and his crew to save nine unarmed civilians caught in the crossfire of the 1968 massacre in which U.S. ground troops killed five hundred men, women, and children in the Vietnam villageof My Lai.

During the summer of 1971, in the midst of protests and demonstrations in the United States against the Vietnam War, it became evident that something horrific had happened in the remote South Vietnamese hamlet of My Lai. Three years previously, in March 1968, a unit of American soldiersengaged in seemingly indiscriminate violence against unarmed civilians, killing over 500 people, including women and children. News filtered slowly through the system, but was initially suppressed, dismissed or downplayed by military authorities. By late 1969, however journalists had pursued therumors, when New York Times reporter Seymour Hirsch published an expose on the massacre, the story became a national outrage.Howard Jones places the events of My Lai and the aftermath in a wider historical context. As a result of the reporting of Hirsch and others, the U.S. army conducted a special inquiry, which charged Lieutenant William Calley and nearly 30 other officers with war crimes. A court martial followed, butafter four months Calley alone was found guilty of premeditated murder. He served four and a half months in prison before President Nixon pardoned him and ordered his release.Jones' compelling narrative details the events in Vietnam, as well as the mixed public response to Calley's sentence and to his defense that he had merely been following orders. Jones shows how pivotal the My Lai massacre was in galvanizing opposition to the Vietnam War, playing a part nearly assignificant as that of the Tet Offensive and the Cambodian bombing. For many, it undermined any pretense of American moral superiority, calling into question not only the conduct of the war but the justification for U.S. involvement.Jones also reveals how the effects of My Lai were felt within the American military itself, forcing authorities to focus on failures within the chain of command and to review training methods as well as to confront the issue of civilian casualties - what, in later years, came to be known as"collateral damage."A trenchant and sober reassessment, My Lai delves into questions raised by the massacre that have never been properly answered: questions about America's leaders in the field and in Washington; the seeming breakdown of the U.S. army in Vietnam; the cover-up and ultimate public exposure; and thetrial itself, which drew comparisons to Nuremberg. Based on extensive archival research, this is the best account to date of one of the defining moments of the Vietnam War.

Allison tells the story of a terrible moment in American history and explores how to deal with the aftermath. On March 16, 1968, American soldiers killed as many as five hundred Vietnamese men, women, and children in a village near the South China Sea. In My Lai William Thomas Allison explores and evaluates the significance of this horrific event. How could such a thing have happened? Who (or what) should be held accountable? How do we remember this atrocity and try to apply its lessons, if any? My Lai has fixed the attention of Americans of various political stripes for more than forty years. The breadth of writing on the massacre, from news reports to scholarly accounts, highlights the difficulty of establishing fact and motive in an incident during which confusion, prejudice, and self-preservation overwhelmed the troops. Son of a Marine veteran of the Vietnam War—and aware that the generation who lived through the incident is aging—Allison seeks to ensure that our collective memory of this shameful episode does not fade. Well written and accessible, Allison’s book provides a clear narrative of this historic moment and offers suggestions for how to come to terms with its aftermath.

Uncovering the secrets behind the 1968 My Lai massacre in Vietnam, this is "a brutal, cautionary tale that serves as a painful reminder of the worst that can happen in war."—Chicago Tribune.

But these questions are asked again in the hope that they might lead to a better understanding of what My Lai means for us now.

An account of the My Lai incident based on interviews with the men of Charlie Company and on a limited number of transcripts from the Army's investigation.

Consists of the report first issued in 1974 under title : Report of the Department of the Army review of the preliminary investigations into the My Lai incident : volume I, The report of the investigation. Vols. 2 and 4 of the original report were not released and v. 3 was not reproduced.