My Lai 4: A Report on the Massacre and Its Aftermath - Erstausgabe

On March 16, 1968, a company of American fighting men entered My Lai 4, a small hamlet in South Vietnam, and systematically murdered its inhabitants. Eighteen months later the Army charged a young lieutenant with the murder of 102 of those civilians. The story of that atrocity - and the subsequent charging of Lieutenant William L. Calley, Jr. - was first told to the world by Seymour M. Hersh in a series of newspaper stories published in November 1969 for which he received the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. Traveling more than 50,000 miles around the United States, Hersh managed to find and interview nearly fifty members of Charlie Company. Now, from these eye witnesses' accounts, he has reconstructed no only what happened on that tragic day but, most importantly, why it happened. MY LAI 4 is more than the investigations of an appalling atrocity. It is the story of Charlie Company itself, its men and its officers, from their arrival in Vietnam until that day in March. It is also the story of who knew about the tragic event and what they did - or did not do - with that knowledge. The massacre at My Lai 4 was not an isolated instance in Vietnam, except for the number of people murdered - but its significance and importance cannot be properly evaluated unless the full story of what happened, as well as why it happened, is known.