Someone really ought to write a book about this My Lai thing, huh?

Staring in Mark Twain...

A gentle reminder that when you use 'My Lai' simply as a shorthand for U.S. violence, you are not only obscuring the specificity of the historical event - and thus cheapening its significance - but you are most likely *not* saying anything meaningful about current events...

It’s publication day!

If you're anywhere near Cambridge on May 29th, come see Jamelle Bouie, Martha Jones, Heather Thompson & other starry speakers reflect on the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Tickets are *free* but nearly gone so hit the link below asap www.philanthropy.cam.ac.uk/story/the-un...

New acquisition: "The Lieutenant's Last Salute" about the My Lai Massacre - it defended mass murderer Calley, saying he followed orders and that there was a miscarriage of justice. B-side is anti-drugs, anti-Hippie culture

Preparing a talk for a ws in Zurich where I'll be restating the arguments from my OUP book: When genocidaires feel sick it is not proof they "deep down" feel bad about their actions. See also @waitmanwbeorn.com on this point and listen to our conversation in his @holocaustpod.bsky.social ⬇️

Fulfilling my parental obligations, I showed the kids 'The Wicker Man' last night. More than anything else, it was the nudity that horrified them...

Philip Caputo, author of 'A Rumor of War', passed away yesterday, and I thought I'd check out the history book for kids that he wrote about the Vietnam War. And...yeah, it's not good...

I've been reading a lot of work on hauntology lately, and having just done fieldwork in place teeming with ghosts - where interacting with the dead is a common and everyday practice - all I can say is that the 'spectral turn' is Eurocentric af. Not every ghost is uncanny...

Still not entirely comfortable with the 'military historian'-label, but had a great time chatting to Bill Allison and Brian Feltman on @mhptpodcast.bsky.social open.spotify.com/episode/431Z...

"All the people fell to the ground, and I then saw the little boy in the photograph being held by a woman try to get up. Someone of the group then fired into the boy and he did not move again. Transcribing eyewitness accounts from My Lai really gets to me sometimes. The boy's name was Do Hat, btw.

One of the most frustrating things about the history of the My Lai Massacre, is how much people get wrong. There were US soldiers who killed and raped without being ordered to do so, just as there were US soldiers who refused direct orders - and never suffered consequences. Atrocity is a choice.

Always a sure sign of academic rigour when the lead author likes to dress up as their subject... www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

This framing is so popular - and so incredibly frustrating. 'Balance' is *not* part of the historian's methodological tool-kit and trying to somehow acknowledge both 'good' and 'bad' things about a violent past only ever served to prevaricate and whitewash atrocities... www.cnn.com/2026/05/02/p...

America has a long and well-established history of covering up massacres. Just saying... edition.cnn.com/2026/05/02/p...

Herbert L. Carter, the only US 'casualty' at My Lai, was also one of the most loquacious witnesses to the My Lai Massacre and both Michael Bilton and Howard Jones treat him as a reliable source. I just realised that his narrative is full of inconsistencies and has to be completely discounted.

So I'm better than Ken, but not as good as Barbie...

These are two of Ron Haeberle's official photos from My Lai - showing Vietnamese interpreters, Sgt Minh and Sgt Phu, interrogating an old man Truong Chau with his who grandchildren Truong Phuc and Truong Thi Trinh. Miraculously, they all survived - and today I am friends with Phuc and Trinh.

Last month, Vietnam marked the 58th anniversary of the Mỹ Lai massacre, when US soldiers killed hundreds of defenseless civilians. US public memory largely ignores the history of atrocities like Mỹ Lai, making it easier to repeat them in the future.

In 1978, a German film-crew interviewed a Vietnamese woman at My Lai, who identified herself among the bodies in Ron Haeberle's photograph taken during the massacre on March 16, 1968. She pretended to be dead in order to survive. Today I found out that she's still alive and confirms the story...

I can't be the only one who automatically hears 'Coelocanth' by Shriekback when seeing this headline... #Manhunter

Only just realised that today I have been exchanging emails/messages with one survivor, one witness and one perpetrator from the My Lai Massacre. Researching atrocity can be intense...

It's so refreshing to read a book with a genuinely fresh and critical approach to the Vietnam War - strongly recommend Gina Marie Weaver's 'Ideologies of Forgetting - Rape in the Vietnam War', which hasn't received the attention it deserves. (h/t @susieprotschky.bsky.social)

Here's some 'just war' theory for y'all: 'The most ultimately righteous of all wars is a war with savages, though it is apt to be also the most terrible and inhuman.' - Theodore Roosevelt: The Winning of the West, 1894. 'The savage wars of peace' - Rudyard Kipling: The White Man's Burden, 1899.

Great observations on My Lai from @drchrisdeutsch.bsky.social

This week: US foreign policy and imperial violence in the Cold War. The discussion will be imformed by @kimatiwagner.bsky.social's critiques as well as that of other southeast and east Asian scholars. To be paired with @jasonhiggins.bsky.social's brilliant history.

We need a Robert Langdon to explain the figure in the middle...

Preparing a lecture on US empire for tomorrow and about half the slides are just going to be screenshots of tweets from within the last few months...

Your daily reminder that American exceptionalism requires a hefty dose of deliberate amnesia. #AmericanExceptionalism101

Just wrote up my interview with Trần Nam who was 6 years old in 1968 and saw his entire family killed at My Lai. Only those who were 10 or older at the time of the massacre are formally considered as survivors, since younger children are not presumed to remember much. But he remembers everything.

Kathryn Johnson interviewed Lieut. Calley in March of 1971, just before he was found guilty of the premeditated murder of 22 South Vietnamese civilians. This was the headline:

Four years ago, I finally managed to get to the Southern Philippines and climbed Bud Dajo where American troops killed 1000 men, women and children in 1906. Just like Leonard Wood's expeditionary force, I took the overnight boat from Zamboanga. Bud Dajo is in the distance, half-covered by clouds...

As someone with a deep suspicion of the legal framework for understanding/dealing with 'war-crimes', this is nevertheless very good news. (Historically, the law enables violence as much it restrains it and I believe we should be able to denounce atrocities regardless of their legal status)

From yesterday's trip to Canterbury

'Troops are neither helpless victims nor killing monsters.' - American exceptionalism, going strong since forever...

This is just ridiculous and - ironic given the message - deeply contradictory...

Your daily reminder that while the existence of photos from My Lai made the massacre more difficult to cover up, the existence of photographic evidence is in and of itself no guarantee that an atrocity will receive public attention or be recognised as such...

Belated birthday present from my Dad - an original and signed woodblock print by Hiroshi Yoshida: 'Kagurazaka Street at Night after Rain' (1929)

Staring in historian of imperialism... Don't get me wrong, I often agree with @adamserwer.bsky.social, but I simply don't think this is true.

Interesting to see so many references and comparisons to Wounded Knee, My Lai or Haditha atm - yet no-one talks about Bud Dajo in 1906, where more men, women and children were killed than all the other massacres combined. I'm not really convinced that Americans are serious about their own history.

I see the 'just following orders/disobeying illegal orders' discourse is still going strong when Americans talk about My Lai. Do they not realise that the legal context was but one small part of the massacre? US soldiers killed and raped irrespective of the orders they had been given...🤦🏼‍♂️

"Indeed, his book is a brilliant - illuminating, in the words of Du Bois - guide for how to analyze photographs out of the margins of historical accounts as more than mere illustrations" Very generous review of my last book by @susieprotschky.bsky.social in American Historical Review🙏🏻

Here's the clip of me speaking about my new @manchesterup.bsky.social book 'Make cheese not war' on @en.france24.com this morning: www.france24.com/en/tv-shows/...

'Operation Exterminate All The Brutes' was right there...😑 www.thecanary.co/global/world...

God I hate this AI slob...

Atrocity fact of the day: At the memorial for the My Lai Massacre, the site of the mass-shooting in the ditch that was carried out by Calley and Meadlo (and others) is off by approx 50 meters. The actual site is just outside the memorial and the ditch itself has long since been covered up.

@michaelgvann.bsky.social and I made it into Vietnamese TV during their coverage of the 58th anniversary of the My Lai Massacre last week. As far as 15 minutes of fame goes, I'll take it...