Son Thang: An American War Crime - Softcover

Solis, G.D.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0553579770 ISBN 13: 9780553579772

Publisher: Bantam USA, 1998

Synopsis

A former Marine judge advocate and Vietnam veteran recreates one of the least known American war crimes of the Vietnam War, the massacre of a village of Vietnamese civilians called Son Thang-4, and the trial of five Marines for it. Reprint.

About this title

From the Author

Son Thang wins Marine Historical Foundation best book award
In November, Son Thang, by Gary Solis, a West Point law professor and retired Marine, won the Marine Corps Historical Foundation's annual Greene Award, as the best nonfiction Marine Corps-related book of 1997. The book is also on the U.S. Military Academy's professional reading list, and is nominated for the Army's professional reading list. Son Thang has not been reviewed or advertised in the Marine Corps Gazette, the Marine officer's professional journal, because the publisher of the Gazette feels that Solis has not shown the proper respect and deference to a Marine Corps three-star general depicted in the book. Nevertheless, word-of-mouth sales have been impressive for this "select audience" book. The Pentagon book store has twice sold out its copies. Check it out.

From the Inside Flap

ossing true courtroom drama, Gary D. Solis, a former Marine combat officer who teaches law at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, draws on his considerable experience to describe the Marine Corps' worst known war crime in Vietnam. Although overshadowed by the infamous My Lai massacre, the murder of sixteen women and children by five Marines at Son Thang-4 raised serious questions for the Corps and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Were the five Marines of the self-styled killer team sent to Son Thang-4 on 19 February 1970 carrying out orders to punish the hamlet or reacting to snipers when they opened fire on noncombatant civilians at point-blank range? Were their actions simply a consequence of weeks of unrelenting combat in which fellow Marines were killed by the invisible Viet Cong and their boobytraps? Using trial records and extensive interviews, Solis brings to life the host of military and civilian attorneys, judges, and juries who wrestled with these and other thorny questions in the

About this edition

• Publisher: Bantam USA
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0553579770
• ISBN 13: 9780553579772
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• Number of pages: 416