Overview

On the early morning of March 16, 1968, American soldiers from three platoons of Charlie Company, entered a group of hamlets located in the Son Tinh district of South Vietnam, located near the Demilitarized Zone and known as Pinkville because of the high level of Vietcong infiltration. The soldiers, many still teenagers who had been in the country for three months, were on a search and destroy mission. Three hours after the GIs entered the hamlets, more than five hundred unarmed villagers lay dead, killed in cold blood. The atrocity took its name from one of the hamlets, known by the Americans as My Lai 4. Military authorities attempted to suppress the news of My Lai, until some who had been there, in particular a helicopter pilot named Hugh Thompson and a door gunner named Lawrence Colburn, spoke up about what they had seen. The official line was that the villagers had been killed by artillery and gunship fire rather than by small arms. That line soon began to fray. Lieutenant William Calley, one of the platoon leaders, admitted to shooting the villagers but insisted that he had acted upon orders. An exposé of the massacre and cover-up by journalist Seymour Hersh, followed by graphic photographs, incited international outrage, and Congressional and U.S. Army inquiries began.

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9781665262552

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Reviews

"Jones succeeds on all counts in a book that, due to its subject matter, is not pleasant to read but is powerful and important.-- ""Kirkus Starred Review"" ""A powerful and discerning account of one of the darkest days in American military history. Judicious and unsparing, My Lai chronicles anew the 'Descent into Darkness, ' and considers how we should think about the massacre today, half a century later."" -- ""Fredrik Logevall, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam"" ""A scrupulous history...Jones succeeds on all counts in a book that, due to its subject matter, is not pleasant to read but is powerful and important."" -- ""Kirkus Reviews (starred review)"" [A]n exhaustively researched and well-written narrative and analysis of the My Lai Massacre...[Jones] has produced a thorough and, as he says, 'balanced and accurate' analysis of the massacre itself, along with the event's controversial and convoluted legal and political aftermath."" -- ""Vietnam Veterans of America"""

Jones succeeds on all counts in a book that, due to its subject matter, is not pleasant to read but is powerful and important.-- Kirkus Starred Review A powerful and discerning account of one of the darkest days in American military history. Judicious and unsparing, My Lai chronicles anew the 'Descent into Darkness, ' and considers how we should think about the massacre today, half a century later. -- Fredrik Logevall, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam A scrupulous history...Jones succeeds on all counts in a book that, due to its subject matter, is not pleasant to read but is powerful and important. -- Kirkus Reviews (starred review) [A]n exhaustively researched and well-written narrative and analysis of the My Lai Massacre...[Jones] has produced a thorough and, as he says, 'balanced and accurate' analysis of the massacre itself, along with the event's controversial and convoluted legal and political aftermath. -- Vietnam Veterans of America

Author Information

Howard Jones is University Research Professor of History Emeritus at the University of Alabama, where he taught for thirty-nine years. He is the New York Times bestselling author of Mutiny on the Amistad, as well as The Bay of Pigs, Death of a Generation, and To the Webster-Ashburton Treaty. He lives with his wife, Mary Ann, in Northport, Alabama. James Patrick Cronin began his audiobook career at twelve years of age opposite Christopher Lloyd in The Pagemaster. An Earphones Award-winning narrator, he has recorded over one hundred audiobooks across an extensive range of genres. A classically trained stage actor with an MFA from the University of Louisville and a degree in philosophy, he has spent his years since college performing as an actor and a comedian on stages all over the world. He has performed everything from the classics to original material in Ireland, Scotland, Serbia, and Israel, as well as all across the United States.

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