Four Hours in my Lai: A War Crime And Its Aftermath - Softcover

BILTON

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140177094 ISBN 13: 9780140177091

Publisher: Penguin, 1992

Synopsis

Early in the morning of 16 March 1968, a company of around 120 US infantrymen, later to be described as a "normal cross-section of American youth", entered a village on the central coastal plain of South Vietnam and killed hundreds of unarmed and unresisting women, old men and children. Later the same day, another party of US soldiers massacred nearly 100 more defenceless citizens in another village less than two miles away. Together, these two related actions became known as the My Lai Massacre. This is an account of this war crime. Throughout the US and Vietnam, the authors have tracked down and interviewed survivors of the massacre, perpetrators and bystanders, to describe the culture of a war which turned the young men of Charlie Company, after only three months in Vietnam, into the brutal killers of My Lai.

About this title

From the Author:

America honours My Lai Heroes 30 years on. It's in the book
Last March 7, 1998, America's military finally came to terms with My Lai and recognised the bravery of Hugh Thompson and Larry Colburn, the members of a helicopter crew who rescued unarmed civilians who were at My Lai in the middle of the massacre. As they did so they trained their machine guns on American troops and threatened to open fire if any more innocent people were killed. The story was first told in my book Four Hours in My Lai. As a direct result, Prof. David Egan, an expert in architecture at a university in South Carolina began a letter writing campaign to try and win some official recognition for the bravery of Thompson and Colburn. It took nearly six years, met with all kinds of resistence from The Pentagon and the Clinton White House, until by sheer force of numbers the Government and Top Brass had to give way. However...America has still only grasped a fraction of the reality of My Lai and more importantly the Vietnam War as a whole. We tried in this book to show what war can do to young men. We believe it is as relevent today as it was when we wrote it. Ten years ago we hadn't heard of massacres in Bosnia, Ruwanda, Sudan and Kosovo.

About the Author:

Michael Bilton is a veteran British investigative journalist who has worked for the London Sunday Times and Yorkshire Television, a documentary film company. His documetary film Four Hours in My Lai garnered an International Emmy Award for Best Documentary. Bilton has also taught journalism at universities in Great Britain, the United States, and Denmark. Kevin Sim is a British documentary filmmaker whose credits include Once Upon a Time in Iran, The Secret Life of the Berlin Wall, and Four Hours in My Lai, which won an International Emmy Award for Best Documentary.

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin
• Publication date: 1992
• ISBN 10: 0140177094
• ISBN 13: 9780140177091
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 448