The humble title of Seymour Hersh’s memoir is somewhat at odds with the tone of the book. He says the celebrated New York Times Vietnam War correspondent David Halberstam once wrote to him saying: ‘You are, my friend, a national treasure. Bless you.’
Another New York Times star, Harrison Salisbury, is quoted in reference to the Watergate scandal:
It was as though Sy Hersh had been born for this moment. At long last the great investigative story and the great investigative reporter had been linked.
To be fair, Hersh has much to be immodest about. He is best known for exposing what happened in the village of My Lai, Vietnam, where First Lieutenant William L. Calley Jnr was accused by the US army of directing the killing of 109 ‘oriental’ men, women and children. ‘Did the army mean to suggest that one oriental life was somehow worth less than that of a white American?’ Hersh asks. The answer is yes. After being sentenced to life in prison with hard labour for the premeditated murder of 22 Vietnamese civilians on 31 March 1971, Calley spent a mere three months and 13 days behind bars.
How could a bunch of American kids end up doing what Calley and his colleagues did, wonders Hersh. One of his sources describes his shock on arriving in Vietnam and seeing ‘an American troop carrier drive by with about 20 human ears tied to the antenna’.
Gunship pilots on their way back to base would sometimes dive towards farmers, trying to decapitate them with the rotor blades, an army source admits to Hersh. The chopper pilot and crew would later pay local Vietnamese to wash the blood off the rotors. Hersh won a Pulitzer prize for the My Lai story and five George Polk awards for his reports about civil rights, the Pentagon, Watergate, Intelligence abuses and other topics.
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