On March 16, 1968, roughly 100 American GIs entered Mỹ Lai and massacred unarmed civilians, including women, children, and the elderly. Large groups were machine-gunned, others executed while praying; several women were tortured and gang-raped; livestock were killed. The U.S. Army initially reported 128 Viet Cong killed, and that account was accepted by the American media for 18 months during the deadliest stretch of the Vietnam War. In November 1969 a freelance journalist's investigation exposed the massacre and the government's deception. The events are placed within a broader pattern of American malfeasance and the importance of investigative efforts to reveal moral violations.
On the morning of March 16, 1968, roughly 100 American GIs helicoptered into the poor hamlet of Mỹ Lai expecting to encounter a well-armed battalion of Viet Cong soldiers. Instead, they found an unarmed and terrified collection of women, children, and old men. For reasons that are no longer relevant to the dead, or to the unflinching new Laura Poitras documentary that begins with their murders, the Americans began to exterminate the entire population.
The story of America is rife with such difficult realities, of course, and Poitras (" Citizenfour," "All the Beauty and the Bloodshed"), like Hersh, has made a career of unpacking the kind of civil violations and moral atrocities that would have been committed with impunity if not for a dedicated effort to bring the truth to light. In Hersh, whose ongoing body of work represents a chronology of American malfeasance that spans from the Vietnam War to the Gaza genocide,
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