The massacre and attempt to cover it up was first reported by journalist Seymour Hersh and distributed by a small wire agency, Dispatch News Service, in the second week of November 1969. (Hersh won the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting for his work.) A week after Hersh’s article appeared in dozens of papers around the U.S., the Plain Dealer ran its own story — along with Haeberle’s photos to bolster the reports of a massacre.

It was March 16, 1968, 50 years ago. The American soldiers of Charlie Company, sent on what they were told was a mission to confront a crack outfit of their Vietcong enemies, met no resistance, but over three to four hours killed 504 unarmed civilians, mostly women, children and elderly men, in My Lai and a neighboring community. Vietnamese refer to the greater village where the killings occurred as Son My.

By the late morning of March 16, bodies were scattered everywhere in My Lai. Elsewhere, soldiers had herded dozens of villagers into a roadside ditch and shot them. A few children survived by hiding under corpses.

American soldiers “shoving Vietnamese into the ditch and methodically emptying their rifles again and again into the huge throng of elderly men, women, and children  clinging to each other below.” [Page 86]

Most of the bodies were women and children, and the “shallow water in the ditch appeared to be red with blood.”

The Time

APnews report