The massacre of civilian villagers in My Lai, Vietnam, on March 16, 1968, became to a growing minority of Americans a symbol of the moral morass of the Vietnam War. Elderly men, women, children, toddlers, and family animals, were slaughtered by rampaging US soldiers of Charlie Company, First Battalion, Eleventh Infantry. The intrepid Seymour Hersh first broke the story for the Dispatch News Service, hardly a major news outlet.
That incident was by no means the only murder of civilians in that war; our South Korean allies and Vietnamese North and South were especially brutal. If anything positive emerged it was that a few American soldiers dared to denounce the assassins and their military and civilian defenders.
One of them is in William Thomas Allison’s first-rate My Lai — An American Atrocity in the Vietnam War (Johns Hopkins University Press). Captain Aubrey Daniel was an army lawyer who successfully prosecuted Lieutenant William Calley, the only defendant convicted. Daniel became enraged when President Nixon released Calley from prison pending his appeal.
[Rest of content follows with proper paragraph breaks and formatting…]