8 Pageant also includes a confusing image of an American punching a
Vietnamese, probably to keep him off a helicopter evacuating South Vietnam.
9 Hagopian specifically refers to the naked napalmed girl and the My Lai
massacre victims and cites another student of photojournalism who adds the
monk’s immolation and the police chief’s shooting of the Vietcong suspect. See
“Vietnam Veterans and the Right to the Past” (Baltimore: American Studies
Association, 1991), 14.
10 Michael Delli Carpini, “Vietnam and the Press,” 125-56, in D. Michael
Shafer, ed., The Legacy (Boston: Beacon, 1990), 142.
11 “The Massacre at Mylai,” Life, December 5, 1969, 36-42; Kammen, Mystic
Chords of Memory, 647; James Davidson and Mark Lytle, After the Fact
(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1992), 2: 379-82.
12 Gen. William C. Westmoreland, quoted in Murray Kempton, “Heart of
Darkness,” New York Review of Books, 11/24/1988, 26.
13 Holt does show GIs retreating from a Cambodian village that is in flames,
but the photo does not indicate who burned the village.
14 John Kerry, “Winter Soldier Investigation,” testimony to U.S. Senate
Foreign Relations Committee, 4/1971, reprinted in Williams et al., eds.,
America in Vietnam, 295. In 2006, news stories confirmed that My Lai stood
for a class of crimes. See “Declassified Papers Show U.S. Atrocities in
Vietnam Went Far Beyond My Lai,” Los Angeles Times, (8/6/06), at History
News Network, hnn.us/roundup/entries/28956.html.
15 Davidson and Lytle, After the Fact, 2:356-83, quote from 2:371.
16 Davidson continues to churn out American histories, with and without Lytle.
His most recent effort, The American Nation, appeared in 2005; I do not
review it here because it is marketed primarily to middle schools. It continues
his policy of never mentioning My Lai or anything like it. After the Fact thus
stands as its own rebuke of the level of scholarly responsibility in the new
book.
17 We Americans does supply two other sentences by King that mention the
sacrifices black soldiers were making in Vietnam while they could not enjoy
equal rights at home.
18 One textbook, The Challenge of Freedom , does offer this rather pallid
paraphrase of the Ben Tre quote: “Other doves believed that the war was