Four Hours in My Lai.

• Author: Polner, Murray

Four Hours in My Lai. Michael Bilton, Kevin Sim. Viking, $25. Despite the fact that the Vietnam war was a moral morass, there emerged from it some principled men who were so horrified by what the writers call the "grotesque and horrible and shaming" truth about My Lai that they were not afraid to act upon their claims of conscience.

When one of those men, Captain Aubrey Daniel, the army lawyer who had successfully prosecuted Lieutenant William Calley for the murder of 22 people in the Vietnamese hamlet of My Lai, learned that President Nixon had released Calley from military confinement pending his appeal, he was outraged. Only a captain, he took on the president of the United States, writing to Nixon that the president had not only damaged the military's judicial process, but "helped enhance the image of Calley as a national hero" and thereby lent credence to those who believed that Calley and his troops were merely "killing the enemy." Daniel lectured Nixon in a tone of indignation rarely heard when a subordinate addresses the powerful: "I would expect that the president of the United States, a man who I believed should and would provide the moral leadership for this nation, would stand fully behind the law of this land on a moral issue about which there can be no compromise." (This was before it became patently ridiculous to include "moral leadership" and Richard Nixon in the same sentence.)

Like the massacre and Nixon's subsequent suppression of its atrocities, Daniels' letter has become a victim of our national amnesia. All the more reason to praise this methodical, forceful, and well-documented book. Bilton and Sim, two British journalists and documentary filmmakers, have laid out the complete story, from the raid to the coverup, in straightforward and often agonizing detail. My Lai was not just another "battle." Instead, 400 unarmed Vietnamese villagers were shot, raped, sodomized, mutilated, and executed, SS style. The authors draw especially on the Army's Crime Records Center, its Vietnam War Crimes Working Group and the papers of the Peers inquiry, interviews with Charlie Company troops and more than 100 survivors, as well as the pioneering work of journalist Seymour Hersh. The result is a devastating commentary on a war that continues to haunt us. Bilton and Sim take us into the events leading to the crime and into the various efforts by the Army, the White House, and some congressional hawks to discredit the men who later...