Listen—I know you don’t want to hear this story. Hell, I don’t
particularly want to tell it. But some stories, they’re like splinters working
their way up through your skin from the inside. You can ignore them for a
while, maybe even convince yourself they’re gone, but sooner or later they push
through and start bleeding again.
That’s what happened in 2025 when Laura Poitras and Mark
Obenhaus sat down with Seymour Hersh—eighty-eight years old now, with all those
decades of secrets and horrors stacked up behind his eyes like cordwood—and
made a documentary called Cover-Up.
Hersh was one of those reporters who reminded you of a
junkyard dog: stubborn, fearless, wouldn’t let go once he got his teeth into
something. But in the film, you see something else. You see the cost. The
weight of it. His wife holding him up when the nightmares from other people’s
lives started bleeding into his own.
The thing that put Hersh’s name on the map—really scorched
it there, impossible to erase—happened in 1969, when he broke the story about
My Lai. And Jesus Christ, My Lai.
You want to know about evil? Real evil, not the
monster-under-the-bed kind that us horror writers peddle? Let me tell you about
a morning in March 1968, in a little hamlet called My Lai.
---
Early ‘68 in South Vietnam, and the shit had already hit the
fan. The Tet Offensive had kicked the American military right in the teeth,
left everyone jumpy and paranoid as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking
chairs.
There was this unit—Barker Task Force, under Lt. Col. Frank
Barker—and underneath him, Charlie Company, led by a man named Ernest Medina.
They’d been getting picked apart by mines and booby traps for weeks. Never saw
the enemy face-to-face, just watched their buddies step on something that went click
and then… well. You can imagine. Or maybe you can’t. Maybe that’s a mercy.
“We suffered a lot of casualties,” Harry F. Hobscheid would
tell the suits at the Pentagon later, in February 1970. “But most of them came
from mines and booby traps.”
Fear and frustration—they’re a bad combination. Mix them
together long enough in the pressure cooker of war, and something’s going to
blow.
The night before March 16, Captain Medina gathered his men
for a briefing. Intelligence said the 48th Viet Cong Battalion was holed up in
Son My Village. The civilians, they figured, would all be at the market come
morning. The soldiers even had a cute nickname for the place: “Pinkville,”
colored pink on their maps like some kind of carnival prize.
This was their chance, Medina told them. Payback time.
Now here’s where it gets dark—and I mean dark dark,
the kind that doesn’t wash off. When one of the infantrymen, Salvatore
LaMartina, asked if the order to destroy everything included women and
children, Medina’s response was colder than a well-digger’s belt buckle in
January. According to Nick Turse’s book Kill Anything That Moves, Medina
told them to “kill everything that breathes” or “kill everything that moves.”
Everything that breathes.
Let that sit with you a minute.
---
Morning came to My Lai the way morning always comes to
little villages like that—quietly, with cooking fires being lit and mothers
preparing to head out to the rice paddies. Nobody had the slightest idea that
death was dropping out of the sky.
The artillery started first, pounding the landing zones. You
can imagine the terror—the sudden thunder, the earth jumping under your feet,
children screaming. People running, trying to find cover, trying to understand
what the hell was happening.
When Charlie Company’s helicopters touched down, the
soldiers didn’t find battle-ready Viet Cong fighters. They found terrified old
farmers, women clutching babies, kids with eyes wide as saucers.
There was no incoming fire. No ambush. Nothing.
They killed them anyway.
House to house they went, torching thatched roofs and
shooting anyone who tried to run. The violence snowballed, picking up speed and
mass like some awful avalanche of human cruelty. They herded villagers—dozens
of them—into an irrigation ditch.
Lt. William Calley—they called him “Rusty”—gave the order.
“More than seventy people—men, women, and children—were
executed in that ditch,” Army Chief Prosecutor Aubrey M. Daniel would later
explain, his words preserved in The Post from November 18, 1970.
One soldier, Paul Meadlo, testified later that he broke down
crying while he reloaded his rifle. Then he kept shooting. Kept shooting into
the pile of bodies in that ditch. Crying and shooting. Shooting and crying.
If that doesn’t give you nightmares, you’re not paying
attention.
---
Here’s where a hero enters the story—and thank God for that,
because otherwise this is just darkness all the way down.
Hugh Thompson Jr., a helicopter reconnaissance pilot, was
circling overhead when he spotted the bodies. He knew immediately something had
gone wrong. Something had gone hideously wrong.
Thompson landed his bird between the American troops and a
group of civilians hiding in a bunker. Then—and you have to understand the kind
of courage this took—he ordered his door gunners to aim their weapons at their
fellow Americans. If those soldiers tried to kill the civilians, Thompson’s
crew was to fire on them.
Americans pointing guns at Americans to save Vietnamese
civilians.
Thompson and his crew managed to pull some people out of
that nightmare. Including a little boy, still alive somehow, buried in that
ditch full of corpses.
---
Afterward, the military lied through their teeth. Called it
a victory. Claimed they’d killed 128 enemy combatants. They tried to bury it,
sweep it under the rug, make it disappear like a bad dream.
But you can’t bury something like that forever. Blood has a
way of seeping through.
A year later, whispers started circulating in Washington. A
former soldier named Ronald Ridenhour had heard the stories from his
buddies—the “horror stories,” he called them. He wrote letters to President
Nixon, to Defense Secretary Melvin Laird, to members of Congress.
“In short, justice,” he said later to The New York Times.
“It was a simple call for justice. I was younger and dumber back then.”
This is where our junkyard dog reporter enters the picture.
---
Seymour Hersh got a tip from lawyer Geoffrey Cowan about an
officer being held at Fort Benning for killing civilians. Hersh didn’t need to
be told twice. He went hunting.
“Cowan didn’t need to explain why a story like that, if
true, mattered,” Hersh wrote later, “but he refused to discuss his sources.”
Hersh tracked down George Latimer, another lawyer, who got
him on a flight to the base to find this William Calley character. The military
stonewalled him at every turn, but Hersh was persistent as a bloodhound. He
called the base operator, checked phone directories, kept digging.
Finally found Calley—not in a cell, but in an officers’
apartment.
They talked over beers. Calley looked like death warmed
over, stressed to the breaking point. At one point during the interview, he
went into the bathroom and vomited blood.
Hersh wrote it all down. Every horrible detail.
Then he tried to sell the story. Life magazine
passed. So did Look. Too unpatriotic, they said. Too unbelievable.
In his book My Lai 4, Hersh documented even worse
horrors—accounts of soldiers raping a thirteen-year-old girl, attempting to
assault other women. But few sources would talk about the sexual violence. Some
things are too shameful even for monsters to admit.
Finally, Hersh released the story through a tiny outfit
called Dispatch News Service, run by David Obst.
“I told him he could have the damn story,” Hersh recalled, “and
that he’d better not screw it up.”
The story exploded. Went worldwide. Hersh reported that at
least 567 people had died in the massacre.
---
Here’s the kicker, though—the part that’ll really make you
lose faith in humanity: A lot of Americans rallied around William Calley. Saw
him as a scapegoat instead of a war criminal. Some country singer named Terry
Nelson even recorded “The Battle Hymn of Lt. Calley.” Sold millions of copies.
Millions.
Calley got convicted of premeditated murder in 1971. Life
sentence. But Nixon commuted it to house arrest faster than you can say “cover-up.”
Calley served three and a half years. Died in April 2024 at age eighty,
probably in his own bed.
Captain Medina—the one who’d given the orders? Acquitted.
Not enough evidence of “direct orders,” they said.
General Samuel Koster, who’d helped cover the whole thing
up? Lost some medals and got demoted. That was it.
Justice? There wasn’t any. Not for the victims, anyway.
---
Pham Thanh Cong survived because he was buried under his
family’s bodies. Eleven years old, hiding in that underground shelter with his
mother and four siblings when the grenade came rolling in. Killed everyone but
him. He lost his left eye.
“After four hours, they killed the entire village and
withdrew,” he told Smithsonian Magazine, “leaving our village full of
blood and fire.”
Now he maintains the memorial site in Vietnam. Someone’s got
to remember. Someone’s got to bear witness.
---
The documentary Cover-Up reminds us why stories like
this matter. Why we need people like Seymour Hersh, stubborn old dogs who won’t
let go of the truth even when it tears them up inside. Why we need a free press
to hold power accountable.
Because here’s the thing about monsters: They don’t always
hide under beds or lurk in sewers. Sometimes they wear uniforms. Sometimes they
follow orders. Sometimes they’re us.
And that, friends and neighbors, is the scariest story I
know.
If you want the full picture, track down Michael Bilton and
Kevin Sim’s book Four Hours in My Lai. It’ll keep you up at night. But
some things should keep us up at night.
Some things we shouldn’t be allowed to forget.
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