Four Hours in My Lai

New York, N.Y.: Viking, 1992. First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. xii, [4], 430, [2] pages. DJ is in a plastic sleeve. Includes Acknowledgments, List of Illustrations (39 black and white illustrations between pages 240 and 241), Maps (3 black and white full-page maps between pages XII and page 1). Also includes Chronology, Notes on Sources, Notes on the Text, Bibliography, and Index. Chapters include Introduction; The War; The Company; My Li, March 16, 1968: AM; My Lai, March 16, 1968: PM 142; Aftermath; Investigation; Fallout; Vietnam Revisited; The Judgment of Peers; ...And Justice for All; and Final Chapter. Michael Bilton has spent 40 years working as a British investigative journalist, working for the London Sunday Times and Yorkshire Television. Along the way he has picked up several major awards in both media - being jointly named Reporter of the Year and winning an International Emmy as producer of "Four Hours in My Lai" - about the infamous massacre in the Vietnam War. Kevin Sim is a British documentary filmmaker whose credits include Once Upon a Time in Iran, The Secret Life of the Berlin Wall, and Four Hours in My Lai, which won an International Emmy Award for Best Documentary. This book is the fullest account ever published of the most infamous war crime in American military history. Throughout American and Vietnam, the authors tacked down and interviewed survivors of the massacre, perpetrators, and victims, to describe the culture of a war that turned the young men of Charlie Company, after only three months in Vietnam, into the brutal killers of My Lai. Of the background to My Lai, Michael Bilton and Kevin Sim reveal intelligence blunders, official complacency, and spiraling indifference to endangering civilian lives. Of the massacre itself, there are harrowing and appalling revelations. Of the aftermath, the authors provide an astonishing account of how this defining event of the Vietnam War was sanitized and marginalized. Derived from a Kirkus review: Brilliantly realized study of the infamous Vietnam War atrocity in which US soldiers burned a Vietnamese village to the ground, shot the livestock, raped the women, and drove 400 men, women, and children into a ditch to slaughter them with machine- gun fire. Bilton and Sim (Women at War, 1982)-who co-produced an Emmy-winning TV-documentary on My Lai-begin by speaking with Varnardo Simpson, gunner with Charlie Company, 1969; for 20 years he has imprisoned himself in a tiny shack, tortured by memories. Through extraordinary research, the authors go on to discover the sad fates of several of Simpson's fellow vets; talk with Vietnamese survivors of the bloodbath; reveal facts cloaked by the Army's court-martial system; expose White House machinations to obscure ``a grave breach'' of the 1949 Geneva Convention; and document a coverup involving dozens of officers right up to the rank of major general. Only one soldier was court-martialed for the massacre: Lt. William Calley. And, as the authors explain, initial public outrage gave way, apparently as the result of manipulations by Richard Nixon, to the sentiment that Calley was a martyr: When the soldier was convicted of premeditated murder, Nixon ordered him released from Leavenworth. By the authors' account, there was only one hero at My Lai: young helicopter pilot Hugh Thompson. Seeing Charlie Company driving children to the killing ditch, Thompson landed in front of troops, trained his machine guns on them, and rescued the children. In a supreme irony, he was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross: his sound judgment ``had greatly enhanced Vietnamese-American relations in the operational area.'' Thompson threw the decoration away. Savagery, the authors declare, has been endemic to every American conflict: in 1902, US troops in the Philippines slaughtered ``goo-goos'' indiscriminately; in WW II, soldiers sent their girlfriends Japanese skulls. But why is it continually repeated? ``Massacre has a short shelf life,'' say Bilton and Sim. Essential for the war scholar's bookshelf; for the generalist, a profoundly moving human document.