Looking for Calley
How a young journalist untangled the riddle of My Lai

http://harpers.org/archive/2018/06/looking-for-calley/
Publisher:  Harper's Magazine
Year Published:  2018
Resource Type:  Article

Seymour M. Hersh looks back at the 1969 My Lai Massacre where hundreds of unarmed civilians were massacred by U.S. Army soldiers. As a young freelance journalist in Vietnam Hersh gained recognition for exposing the atrocity and its cover-up, and ultimately helped turn public opinion against the war.

Abstract: 
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Excerpt:

In the fall of 1969, I was a freelance journalist working out of a small, cheap office I had rented on the eighth floor of the National Press Building in downtown Washington. A few doors down was a young Ralph Nader, also a loner, whose expose of the safety failures in American automobiles had changed the industry. There was nothing in those days quite like a quick lunch at the downstairs coffee shop with Ralph. Once, he grabbed a spoonful of my tuna-fish salad, flattened it out on a plate, and pointed out small pieces of paper and even tinier pieces of mouse shit in it. He was marvelous, if a bit hard to digest.

The tip came on Wednesday, October 22. The caller was Geoffrey Cowan, a young lawyer new to town who had worked on the ­McCarthy campaign and had been writing critically about the Vietnam War for the Village Voice. There was a story he wanted me to know about. The Army, he told me, was in the process of court-martialing a GI at Fort Benning, in Georgia, for the killing of seventy-five civilians in South Vietnam.