When Dr. Marshall Poe “endeavored to find a good new book on My Lai” and could not find one, he explains in his book The Reality of the My Lai Massacre and the Myth of the Vietnam War:

I decided to take a closer look at the operation at My Lai. I am trained as an historian, so the first thing I did was try to see what sources were available and discovered something incredible: The My Lai massacre, that is, the operation itself, is perhaps the best documented battalion-level action in the annals of military history. The sources are copious and unusually revealing. The reason is simple: after Hersh broke the story, the press corps, politicians, and the US Army poured resources into finding out exactly what happened. Reporters interviewed many of the My Lai perpetrators. Representatives held congressional hearings about My Lai. And, most importantly, the US Army brass launched both a judicial and ad hoc investigation. The former, run by the US Army’s Criminal Investigation Division (CID), was aimed at bringing charges against the perpetrators. To this end, many of the witnesses were interrogated. The latter came to be known as the Peers Commission, and it was like no investigation the US Army has conducted before or since. The Peers Commission was given carte blanche to question anyone it wanted in the US, Vietnam, or anywhere else it saw fit. All archives anywhere were open to the commission. The Peers Commission investigators took full advantage of this remarkable license.

Having learned about these sources, it was clear that one could know a lot more about the My Lai operation than what Hersh had written. He had worked primarily with perpetrator testimony that he gathered himself, so I was pretty sure that his account—while accurate in general—could be improved upon by reading the sources carefully. What I did not know at that time was that one of my colleagues, fellow historian Howard Jones, was also reading these documents (and many others) as part of a more general book about My Lai. Jones’s book is quite different from my treatment. Jones offers a view of My Lai in the round. He places the massacre in the more general context of the war, describes the massacre itself (in much the same terms Hersh did), and then moves on to the cover-up, the breaking of the story, and the political fallout of the revelation. I was interested only in one of these things: the massacre itself. I wanted to write a microhistory, much as Browning had done in the Holocaust context.

There was a wealth of material available to write this microhistory, most of which had never been given its due by any journalist or historian. The Peers Commission interviewed hundreds of perpetrators and victims. If someone was even remotely related to the My Lai operation, the Peers Commission questioned them, no matter where they were in the chain of command. Thus, there are generals discussing their involvement as well ordinary soldiers. They were interviewed at length. The archive of transcripts runs a remarkable 18,000 pages. In addition, the Peers Commission gathered every document that concerned the formation and operations of Task Force Barker (the unit that committed the massacre) in both the US and Vietnam. The commission formed teams of researchers to scour for records related to Task Force Barker and the massacre. In the end, they compiled 5,000 pages of documents.

I carefully read all these primary sources and produced a very detailed, minute-by-minute microhistorical account of the planning of the My Lai operation and its execution. That account is in part one of this book (“Reality”).

[…]

Finally, we often find the idea that somehow the troops in My Lai went “berserk” or were caught up in a frenzy of revenge-seeking “blood lust.” Again, sometimes this opinion is fancy (they were suffering from “psychic numbing”) and sometimes it is plain (“They just went crazy”). It is fair, of course, to say that the troops were under great stress, full of fear, perhaps vengeful, and therefore likely not to have been clearheaded. As far as I could tell, however, they generally acted in a rather methodical manner, and they certainly responded to orders given by their officers. Our intuitions might suggest that only someone out of his right mind would kill unarmed civilians, but here our intuitions would be wrong.

These considerations—anomalies, really—led me to take a deeper look at “the literature” or, more specifically, at how these myths about My Lai gained currency. The results of that investigation are found in part two of this book (“Myth”). Here I believe I can claim to have uncovered something that, while not completely unknown, is new and significant. Essentially, I argue that the way we think about My Lai is not anchored in a good understanding of what went on there but rather a peculiar combination of partisan politics, partisan “science,” and a need for Americans to find an understanding of My Lai that is politically and psychologically acceptable.

The Reality of the My Lai Massacre and the Myth of the Vietnam War by Marshall Poe is available in print and digital formats.

Marshall Poe (PhD, University of California, Berkeley) is the founder and editor of the New Books Network. Dr. Poe taught history over several decades at Harvard University, New York University, Columbia University, and the University of Iowa. He also served as an editor and writer at The Atlantic magazine. Dr. Poe’s previous publications include ‘A People Born to Slavery’: Russia in Early Modern European Ethnography, 1476–1748, The Russian Moment in World History, The Russian Elite in the Seventeenth Century, A History of Communications, and How to Read a History Book.