Seymour Hersh's My Lai

Journalists played a seminal role during the Vietnam War by disseminating information that ultimately helped shift public opinion against the conflict. Journalists such as Seymour Hersh, Neil Sheehan, David Halberstram and Michael Herr produced a large body of work chronicling the conflict in southeast Asia.

Some of the most notable works of reporting from this era are Seymour Hersh’s three articles, originally published in the St. Louis Dispatch, concerning the My Lai Massacre.

As informative as Hersh’s pieces are, they seem to barely scratch the surface of the event.

An inordinate amount of time is devoted to William Calley throughout the three articles. Though Calley played a large role in the killings, Hersh makes several fleeting references to more senior officials. Calley appears to be little more than a scapegoat in the event.

There is also a lack of clear chronology in the second article that pieces together the conflicting accounts of the incident. The reader understands how many soldiers partook in the massacre, how they did it and why, but it is not until the final article when Paul Meadlo describes Calley's actions on that day that the reader begins to understand what transpired. Until that point, readers have a vague notion of what happened and are forced to piece together the events themselves. Hersh' s use of Rashomon storytelling would have been fine if each of the accounts helped create one clear picture.