Short Synopsis
Compelling, comprehensive, and haunting, based on both exhaustive archival research and extensive interviews, Howard Jones's My Lai will stand as the definitive book on one of the most devastating events in American military history.

Full Synopsis
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.

"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

"Exhaustively researched and well-written . . . [an] authoritative account of a dark moment in American history." ---Publishers Weekly

"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

"In My Lai: Vietnam, 1968, and the Descent into Darkness, Howard Jones gives a decisive account of this pivotal trauma in the Vietnam War." ---Shelf Awareness

Kirkus Bestseller

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