the Vietnam war and that won for the journalist the Pulitzer Prize for international reporting. Hersh told us how, as a then-obscure freelancer, he had gotten wind of the tragedy. Subsequently, he looked up Mylai in a newspaper’s library, not expecting to find anything. To his amazement, he discovered a clipping on an alleged mass killing at that village. This article was, if I remember correctly, a wire-service account just one or two paragraphs long. It understated the scale of the slaughter and was too incomplete to have attracted public attention. But the gist of Hersh’s eventual story was
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