On the morning of March 16, 1968, members of Charlie Company of the 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry Regiment, 11th Brigade of the 23rd Americal Infantry Division of the U.S. Army entered the Vietnamese village of Son My—including the hamlet called My Lai 4. Their search-and-destroy mission was intended to root out Viet Cong soldiers from what was thought to be an enemy stronghold. Finding no Viet Cong present, they nonetheless proceeded to murder some five hundred noncombatants. Over several hours, they burned huts to the ground, slaughtered livestock, gang-raped women, mowed down defenseless civilians, and even killed some fifty infants and toddlers, three years old or younger.
Army higher-ups, though informed of the war crimes, covered them up. But a few soldiers could not keep quiet. One man from another brigade who heard the horrific tales alerted politicians and Pentagon brass. Internal Army investigations in time verified many of the accounts. Journalists brought the story to the attention of the American public, who recoiled in horror.
Howard Jones’s My Lai: Vietnam, 1968, and the Descent into Darkness recreates this infamous episode and reveals its significance in American history. Assembled with diligence from nearly five decades’ worth of journalistic accounts, interviews, Army reports, trial transcripts, and government documents, Jones’s gripping narrative takes the reader from the encampment where Charlie Company nervously awaited the start of its mission to the chaos of the blood-dimmed hamlet where the carnage occurred—then to the courtrooms where Lt. William Calley and others later stood trial, and ultimately to the White House, where President Richard Nixon and National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger discussed devising a “game plan” for maximum political advantage. History from below is fused to history at the top, revealing how the story of My Lai is inextricably linked to the broader story of the Vietnam War itself.
Far from a philippic, My Lai recovers the feelings of fear, confusion, and desire for revenge that turned the anxious young men into brutes during an increasingly chaotic war. Just after the Tet Offensive—the failed North Vietnamese military campaign that nonetheless made many Americans despair of ever conclusively winning the war—U.S. commanders moved on “Pinkville,” a Viet Cong redoubt along the South China Sea that included My Lai. In the weeks between Tet and the fateful day of the massacre, the American soldiers saw comrades injured and killed by land mines, encountered children carrying out military work, and heard the nighttime shrieks of a G.I. being tortured and skinned alive.
The morning hours of March 16 are reconstructed and told in riveting—albeit excruciating—detail. The reader, facing one atrocity after another, cannot help considering the questions that the whole country would soon be debating: Did the soldiers act on orders, or were they out of control? Was Lt. Calley, the only one of the men to serve time for his crimes, a ringleader or a scapegoat or both? Was this sadistic behavior inevitable in wartime, an expression of man’s inner beast, or a specific failing of specific individuals under specific circumstances—in particular amid a war that had become not only a military but also a moral quagmire?
The aimlessness and uncertain purpose of the Vietnam War may have made it easier for Charlie Company’s men to sink into depravity. But not everyone did. Even in a morally disorienting situation, principled choice was possible. Hugh Thompson, a helicopter pilot who flew in support of the mission, recoiled when he came upon the mass slaughter in progress; he not only tried to save a handful of civilians but reported what he saw up the chain of command. Others, like Sergeant Jay Buchanon, resisted the urge to shoot indiscriminately and kept faith with their training not to kill the unarmed.
Beyond the exhaustive, harrowing account of the bloodbath, My Lai recounts the tortuous sequence of events that would inscribe it enduringly in the national consciousness and in history books. We see senior military officials choosing to ignore reports of the soldiers’ savagery and authorize a whitewashed account of their mission. We see the unraveling of the cover-up, triggered by a helicopter gunner named Ronald Ridenhour, who heard about the massacre from a friend in Charlie Company, got confirmation from others in the ensuing months, and blew the whistle. We see the young investigative reporter Seymour Hersh chasing down the story, getting CBS’s 60 Minutes to air an interview with one of the perpetrators who remained tormented by his own role in the killing. We see the trials that followed, as prosecutors struggled in vain to build an ironclad case against others besides Calley—their acquittals amounting to yet more proof that nothing about the Vietnam War seemed to go right.
The My Lai massacre was a decisive event in the trajectory of the Vietnam War and what it came to symbolize. The disclosure of the atrocities not only moved public opinion further against an already unpopular war; at a time when Americans were doubting long-treasured notions of national virtue, it raised fundamental and unsettling questions about who were the good guys and bad guys in Vietnam, and why we were there at all. For the G.I.s, it deprived them of the hero’s welcome that had greeted their predecessors. Lurking behind these immediate concerns were even deeper ones about America’s professed role as the leader of the free world. The cover-up, too, mattered: It exacerbated a gnawing public distrust in the military and the government, feeding what would in time become a debilitating lack of faith in official institutions. Yet as dark deeds often do, the actions of Charlie Company also led eventually to stronger and clearer rules of conduct for American soldiers in wartime and a resolve within the military to resist the pressures toward cruelty that war inevitably brings.
Nearly a half century later, some wounds of the Vietnam War remain unhealed. And the capacity of men, no matter their nation of their birth or the cause for which they fought, to descend into barbarism still hasn’t lost its power to shock.
David Greenberg