- On 16 March 1968, in the Vietnamese village of My Lai, hundreds of unarmed men, women, children and babies were rounded up and shot dead, but when the Army reported the incident later they said they killed 128 members of the Viet Cong. kIt took another year for a skeptical young reporter to respond to a tip and begin unravelling the institutional lie, travelling up and down the country to record first-person testimonies from US Army soldiers who executed the massacre.
Cover-Up review – a film worthy of Seymour Hersh
Words by Sophie Monks Kaufman
Directed by Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus
Runtime 118m
Released 05 Dec 2025
Poitras and Obenhaus illustrate Hersh’s recollections with media coverage that blew up in the public domain to become part of our collective understanding of US atrocities during Vietnam, but also – grippingly – Hersh has granted them access to his own source materials, while ferociously protecting the sources themselves. We see a vertical print sourced from the army; it’s a black and white map of My Lai annotated with blue felt pen. Over one arrow it says, “30−40 bodies found in ditch,“; over another, “Had lunch“.
- As he reflects on why no one involved in the My Lai massacre reported it earlier, he gives two possible theories: one, that it felt so terrible as to be unspeakable; the other, more likely in his view, “Well, that’s just another day in Vietnam.”
These comments invoke a shiver because you could as easily say, “That’s another day in Abu Ghraib,” or, “That’s another day in Gaza”. The use of war crimes and their attendant cover-ups is presented as a matter of rionsense-repeat in US foreign policy as made irrefutable by Hersh’s diligent reporting.
For the film is a sprint through the stories he went on to cover, from Watergate to Iraq to Gaza today, amounting to an ironclad reason to mistrust the official US version of events.
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