Thirty-one years after the Fall of Saigon, one would be forgiven for thinking that it might be difficult to say a great deal that hasn’t already been expressed about America’s War in Vietnam. However, while several of the broader issues that Kendrick Oliver addresses have been raised numerous times before, his exploration of the ethnocentricity which tends to dominate accounts of the Vietnam War is given new life through his focus on the My Lai massacre. That the American people have not been good at recognising the Vietnamese victims is much maligned amongst certain scholars of the Vietnam War, but Oliver’s account implies a much more subtle, albeit no less thorough, disregard of the Vietnamese who were killed both at My Lai and in the war more broadly. Oliver argues that, prompted by a desire to determine both the cause of the massacre and to identify those who were responsible for it, attention was shifted away from the details of what actually happened and, more importantly, from whom it happened to. Such a focus meant, Oliver argues, that not only were the victims sidelined in the way that the massacre was presented to the American public, but that, once William Calley’s trial ended in the early 1970s, the issue could be gradually forgotten as many wished the war itself would be.

This argument forms the basis for much of Oliver’s subsequent thinking about why the American media and the American military seem to have learned so little from the way that the war was fought and reported. Oliver’s methodology, which weaves together three main strands of historical investigation - the news media, the military perspective and, particularly in the later chapters, popular culture exemplified by a range of material from film, literature and music - is comprehensive, detailed and ultimately engaging. The social and political intricacies of the way in which the massacre was investigated and reported are explored in a convincing and thought-provoking way, and this book constitutes a significant contribution both to understanding America’s memory of the Vietnam War, and also to how that memory has shaped the U.S’s subsequent military encounters.