Reviews

• Published in: Journal of American studies 2013-08, Vol.47 (3), p.862
• Main Author: OLIVER, KENDRICK
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Calley, William
• ISSN: 0021-8758; 1469-5154
• DOI: 10.1017/S0021875813000893

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.) Reviews The revelations about the massacre of Vietnamese civilians committed by American soldiers in the village of Son My broke in November 1969, twenty months after the massacre had occurred. For Americans, if not for the bereaved inhabitants of Son My, the massacre passed into history, and it was left to historians, therefore, to work away at the sources and assess the meaning of what had happened - for understandings of how the Vietnam War had been fought, for the training and operational practices of the modern US military, for the conduct of military justice, for concepts of American moral exceptionalism, and - not least - for those Vietnamese seeking to rebuild their lives and families out of the desolation that Americans soldiers had made of their village. [...]quite recently, not many American historians elected to undertake this task. Military investigators gathered hundreds of firsthand accounts - from perpetrators, bystanders and victims - but constructing an authoritative narrative of events in the village from this archive of partial, sometimes self-interested and often contradictory testimony represents a different order of challenge.