The New Nation - Internet Edition

BBC Online

Forty years on, and "My Lai" is synonymous with "massacre". 504 people were killed by US soldiers in the My Lai massacre.

The killing of Iraqi civilians at Haditha has often been referred to as a modern-day My Lai. The name is shorthand for slaughter of the defenceless, the benchmark of American wartime atrocity.

The murders of 504 men, women, children and babies happened in a northerly province of South Vietnam on 16 March 1968.

It proved to be a turning point for public opinion about the Vietnam War.

Yet, most of what we know about the event comes from a single, widely publicised court martial in 1970-71.

A young Lieutenant - William Calley - in Charlie Company was tried and convicted of murdering 22 "oriental human beings" in My Lai on that sunny morning in 1968.

Media attention on Lt Calley's trial was extensive and the glare of publicity so bright it hid the wider, more awful truth.

Before that trial got under way, the United States army had, behind closed doors, completed an investigation of its own into the events at My Lai, and specifically into the possibility that those in authority had deliberately covered up a massacre.

In just 14 weeks, the Peers Inquiry conducted a comprehensive investigation into the events of 16 March known on My Lai massacre.

More than 400 witnesses were interviewed, and their testimony was tape-recorded. When the inquiry concluded on 15 March 1970, those recordings were boxed-up, stored and forgotten.

That day it was just a massacre. Just plain right out, wiping out people.