Four Hours in MY LAI : A War Crime and its Aftermath by M. Bilton K. Sim VIETNAM

Description: FOUR HOURS IN MY LAI A WAR CRIME AND ITS AFTERMATH by Michael Bilton and Kevin Sim Vintage Illustrated Hardcover Book with Dust Jacket 1992 First Edition Very Good Condition Early on the morning of 16 March 1968, a company of around 120 American infantrymen, later to be described as a normal cross-section of American youth', entered a village on the central coastal plain of South Vietnam and in cold blood killed hundreds of unarmed and unresisting women, old men and children. Later the same day another group of American soldiers massacred nearly a hundred more defenceless civilians in another village less than two miles away. Together, these two related actions became known as the My Lai Massacre. Four Hours in My Lai is the fullest account ever published of the most infamous war crime in American military history. Throughout America and Vietnam, the authors have tracked down and interviewed survivors of the massacre, perpetrators and victims, to describe the culture of a war which turned the young men of Charlie Company, after only three months in Vietnam, into the brutal killers of My Lai. Based on the massive archives of the American Army's own investigations, with complete access to the statements and confessions given by the soldiers and officers involved, the book places the massacre for the first time within the wider context of the Vietnam War. Of the background to My Lai, it reveals intelligence blunders, official complacency and spiralling indifference to civilian life. Of the massacre itself, there are brutal, harrowing and appalling revelations. Of the aftermath, an astonishing account of how this defining event of the Vietnam War was sanitized, marginalized and finally drained of meaning; how President Nixon's pledge to bring the perpetrators to justice ended in the conviction of just one man, Lieutenant William Calley, who spent only a few months in jail. It is a story of unsparing horror and surprising heroism. Of institutional callousness and enduring conscience. Of memory and forgetting. An account that should be read for its relevance not just to Vietnam, but to the dangers of any future situation in which raw young men are sent off to face the horror of war. For as the distinguished American journalist Jonathan Schell wrote at the time: 'The massacre calls for self-examination and for action, but if we deny the call and try to go on as before, as though nothing had happened, our knowledge, which can never leave us once we have acquired it, will bring about an unnoticed but crucial alteration in us, numbing our most precious faculites and withering our souls, For if we learn to accept this, there is nothing we will not accept! "If we learn to accept this, there is nothing we will not accept' - Jonathan Schell, 1969 "During the period 16-19 March 1968, US Army troops of Task Force Barker 11th Brigade, Americal Division, massacred a large number of non-combatants in two hamlets of Son My Lai Village, Quang Ngai Province, Republic of Vietnam. The precise number of Vietnamese killed cannot be determined but was at least 175 and may exceed 400' - Peers Commission Report, 1970 'Keep in mind that war is war and it is not at all unusual for innocent civilians to be numbered among its victims. It has been so throughout recorded history. It was so when Joshua took Jericho in ancient biblical times: "And they utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old ... with the edge of the sword" (Joshua 6:21). Now Joshua did not have charges brought against him for the slaughter of the civilian population of Jericho. But then "the Lord was with Joshua" we are told' - Judge Robert Elliott, upholding William Calley's writ of habeas corpus in 1974 'By God, we've kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all' - George Bush, March 1991

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