The Memory of My Lai

“Returning to the scene of the crime is the stuff of cliché for reporters of a certain age, but I could not resist,” Seymour M. Hersh writes in his story in this week’s magazine about visiting the village of My Lai for the first time, forty-six years after he exposed American soldiers’ massacre of civilians there during the height of the Vietnam War. The photojournalist Katie Orlinsky accompanied Hersh on his journey. Her images show the long ditch where the American lieutenant William L. Calley ordered dozens killed, the memorials and mass grave that mark the site of the slaughter, and survivors like Pham Thanh Cong, the museum’s director, who was eleven years old when his mother and four siblings were killed. Cong told Hersh of living with the memory of the massacre, “I will never forget the pain.”