Seymour M. Hersh, Coverup-I: The Army’s Investigation of the Son My Massacres of South Vietnamese Civilians by U.S. Troops on March 16, 1968. The New Yorker, 22 January 1972. “This is the first of two articles on the Army’s investigation of the Son My massacres.” “Early on March 16, 1968, a company of soldiers in the United States Army’s Americal Division were dropped in by helicopter for an assault against a hamlet known as My Lai 4, in the bitterly contested province of Quang Ngai, on the northeastern coast of South Vietnam. A hundred G.I.s and officers stormed the hamlet in military-textbook style, advancing by platoons; the troops expected to engage the Vietcong Local Force 48th Battalion—one of the enemy’s most successful units—but instead they found women, children, and old men, many of them still cooking their breakfast rice over outdoor fires. During the next few hours, the civilians were murdered. Many were rounded up in small groups and shot, others were flung into a drainage ditch at one edge of the hamlet and shot, and many more were shot at random in or near their homes. Some of the younger women and girls were raped and then murdered. After the shootings, the G.I.s systematically burned each home, destroyed the livestock and food, and fouled the area’s drinking supplies. None of this was officially told by Charlie Company to its task-force headquarters; instead, a claim that a hundred and twenty-eight Vietcong were killed and three weapons were captured eventually emerged from the task force and worked its way up to the highest American headquarters, in Saigon. There it was reported to the world’s press as a significant victory.”
The My Lai Massacre in Vietnam on 16 March 1968
Seymour Hersh, The My Lai Massacre: An Atrocity Is Uncovered: November 1969. St. Louis Post-Dispatch (via pierretristam.com), 13 November 1969. “The Army is completing an investigation [November 1969] of charges that [William Calley] deliberately murdered at least 109 Vietnamese civilians in a search-and- destroy mission in March 1968 in a Viet Cong stronghold known as “Pinkville.” Calley has formally been charged with six specifications of mass murder. Each specification cites a number of dead, adding up to the 109 total, and charges that Calley did ‘with premeditation murder… Oriental human beings, whose names and sex are unknown, by shooting them with a rifle.'”Hersh’s stories were published in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch on 13, 20 and 25 November 1969, and he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1970 for International Reporting “for his exclusive disclosure of the Vietnam War tragedy at the hamlet of My Lai.”