This poignant selection of artifacts-and their stories-from September 11 provides an official, lasting record of that day's experience. In both text and photography, the story of September 11 is told through a selection of powerfully moving artifacts from the 9/11 museum's collection that serve as touchstones to the day and its aftermath. From crushed FDNY trucks to the steel that was pierced as planes struck the Twin Towers, from victims' property pulled from the wreckage and returned to families (who later donated the property to the museum) to spontaneous memorials collected from around Ground Zero, the array of objects tell complex and often surprising stories. Poignant artifacts as monumental as the Vesey Street staircase-which offered an escape for thousands fleeing the towers-and as intimate as a loved one's wedding band or last recorded phone message are selected to illuminate people's experiences during and after September 11, 2001, and February 26, 199...
On the early morning of March 16, 1968, American soldiers from three platoons of Charlie Company (1st Battalion, 20th Infantry Regiment, 11th Brigade, 23rd Infantry Division), entered a group of hamlets located in the Son Tinh district of South Vietnam, located near the Demilitarized Zone and known as "Pinkville" because of the high level of Vietcong infiltration. The soldiers, many still teenagers who had been in the country for three months, were on a "search and
destroy" mission. The Tet Offensive had occurred only weeks earlier and in the same area and had made them jittery; so had mounting losses from booby traps and a seemingly invisible enemy. Three hours after the GIs entered the hamlets, more than five hundred unarmed villagers lay dead, killed in cold
blood. The atrocity took its name from one of the hamlets, known by the Americans as My Lai 4.
Military authorities attempted to suppress the news of My Lai, until some who had been there, in particular a helicopter pilot named Hugh Thompson and a door gunner named Lawrence Colburn, spoke up about what they had seen. The official line was that the villagers had been killed by artillery and gunship fire rather than by small arms. That line soon began to fray. Lieutenant William Calley, one of the platoon leaders, admitted to shooting the villagers but insisted that he had acted upon
orders. An expose of the massacre and cover-up by journalist Seymour Hersh, followed by graphic photographs, incited international outrage, and Congressional and U.S. Army inquiries began. Calley and nearly thirty other officers were charged with war crimes, though Calley alone was convicted and would
serve three and a half years under house arrest before being paroled in 1974.
My Lai polarized American sentiment. Many saw Calley as a scapegoat, the victim of a doomed strategy in an unwinnable war. Others saw a war criminal. President Nixon was poised to offer a presidential pardon. The atrocity intensified opposition to the war, devastating any pretense of American moral superiority. Its effect on military morale and policy was profound and enduring. The Army implemented reforms and began enforcing adherence to the Hague and Geneva conventions. Before launching an
offensive during Desert Storm in 1991, one general warned his brigade commanders, "No My Lais in this division-do you hear me?"
Compelling, comprehensive, and haunting, based on both exhaustive archival research and extensive interviews, Howard Jones's My Lai will stand as the definitive book on one of the most devastating events in American military history.
Product details
- Paperback | 504 pages
- 146 x 225 x 33mm | 646g
- 10 Oct 2019
- Oxford University Press Inc
- New York, United States
- English
- Reprint
- 25 b&w illustrations
- 0190056703
- 9780190056704
- 1,395,878
Download My Lai : Vietnam, 1968, and the Descent into Darkness (9780190056704).pdf, available at ebookdownloadfree.co for free.
Komentar
Posting Komentar