Building on earlier reporting, Seymour Hersh's dispatches carried in newspapers nationwide on this date detailed soldier accounts of the March 1968 massacre of several hundred unarmed Vietnamese civilians by U.S. Army troops in the hamlet of My Lai. The revelations, including graphic photographs, shocked American public opinion, deepened opposition to the Vietnam War, and led to the court-martial of Lieutenant William Calley.
For more than a year, the U.S. Army had managed to keep the My Lai massacre largely out of public view, despite internal investigations. It took a former soldier, Ronald Ridenhour, writing letters to Congress and the Pentagon, and then freelance journalist Seymour Hersh tracking down soldiers who had been present, to force the story into the open. Hersh's reporting, syndicated nationwide, described soldiers systematically shooting unarmed women, children, and elderly villagers into ditches over several hours.
Photographs taken by Army combat photographer Ronald Haeberle, published alongside Hersh's accounts, showed piles of bodies in a way words alone hadn't managed to convey, and the combination proved impossible for the public to ignore. The fallout was immense: Lieutenant William Calley was eventually convicted of murdering 22 civilians, though he served only three and a half years under house arrest after intervention from President Nixon. The scandal became a defining symbol of the war's moral costs and fueled the antiwar movement's argument that the conflict was corroding American values as much as Vietnamese lives.