The recent death of Lt. William Calley, who perpetrated the My Lai Massacre in 1968, is an apt reminder of what the almost forgotten Vietnam War was about.

If truth is the first casualty in war, memory may be the last. Lies about a mythical attack on an American ship in the Gulf of Tonkin, lies about how we were winning when we never were, lies about who we were bombing and where. Lies piled on one another like dead bodies.

Here is what happened at My Lai. Lieutenant Calley led his platoon of 24 men into a small inland hamlet (what we would call a tiny village) halfway up the east coast of South Vietnam. Calley’s orders from his superiors were ambiguous, but the idea was that anyone in the hamlet, including women and old men, children, even babies, might be Viet Cong, which meant Communists. When the platoon arrived, they saw that no one in My Lai was armed. No soldiers were there at all. American troops met no resistance.

The victims were herded into ditches, or the village center, and shot. GIs wrote back home to their parents that the entire hamlet was wiped out. Villagers who refused to come out of their huts were killed by hand grenades or bursts of gunfire, infants and children were bayoneted and shot. An unknown number of women and girls were raped and then killed. Corpses were mutilated.

An army photographer took pictures of this killing orgy, so there was visual evidence and no doubt about what went on. Within less than an hour, the Americans estimated that they had killed 347 people. A body count. Calley himself herded sobbing, cowering villagers into a ditch and shot them in bunches, ordering his troops to do the same thing. Witnesses said Calley shot a praying Buddhist monk. When Calley saw a young boy crawl out of a ditch, he threw the child back in and shot him. We’ve forgotten; the Vietnamese haven’t. Their memorial at the site of My Lai today lists the names of 504 victims, ranging in age from 1 to 82.

Lieutenant Calley, when questioned about what happened, said he was only following the orders of his superior officer, Capt. Ernest Medina, who had told him everyone in My Lai was “the enemy.” Medina denied this and said his order was to kill only enemy soldiers. Calley said Medina gave the order to destroy anything that was “walking, crawling or growling.” The atrocity was covered up in military reports, which called what happened a successful search-and-destroy mission. The chain of command ignored what had gone on, though two generals did know about it. Gen. William C. Westmoreland, commander of all American forces in Vietnam, may never even have been told what happened, though one account said he praised American forces at My Lai for dealing “a heavy blow” to the Viet Cong.

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The kind of person Calley himself was helps explain what he could and couldn’t do. He was caught cheating in school and made to repeat the seventh grade. A Floridian, he enrolled in Palm Beach Junior College but dropped out after a semester with failing grades. He found a job as a switchman on the Florida East Coast Railroad, but was arrested on charges of allowing a train to block five downtown intersections in Fort Lauderdale during rush hour. He went west and enlisted in the Army in 1966. After basic training, he was accepted into Officers Candidate School. Despite low aptitude-test scores and poor command presence and his graduating near the bottom of his class, he was somehow commissioned as a second lieutenant and sent to Vietnam as a platoon leader. Scraping the bottom of the barrel, the Army knew what they had, but they needed bodies. He was scorned by his fellow officers as an insecure leader who could hardly read a map or a compass. His own troops didn’t respect him, but he was their leader, and they followed him.

The massacre was covered up.

The cover-up might have succeeded, the slaughter may never have become known to the American public except for the efforts of one of the most significant whistleblowers in American history. A helicopter gunman named Ronald Ridenhour who was not at the scene but heard of the killings weeks later began to do his own probing. Ridenhour interviewed soldiers who had been there. When he returned to the United States nearly a year after the massacre, he wrote letters to President Nixon, Defense Secretary Melvin Laird, and a number of members of Congress. This sparked the investigation, and, backed with photographs and witness testimony that Ridenhour provided, the Army charged Calley with premeditated murder days before his scheduled discharge.

The investigative journalist Seymour Hersh then tracked down Calley where he was being held, interviewed him, and wrote extensively about the massacre. This made the whole country aware of My Lai. Hersh won a Pulitzer Prize for his reports.

The Nation gives a prize every year in Ridenhour’s name.

Captain Medina and a dozen others were indicted, but the other cases unraveled before trial or ended with not guilty verdicts. Only Calley was convicted. He expressed no remorse at his trial and said he followed orders. He was sentenced to life in prison. The commanding general at Fort Benning in Georgia reduced the sentence to 20 years. The Secretary of the Army cut it to 10 years. A federal judge in Georgia overturned the conviction, saying Calley was denied a fair trial because of prejudicial publicity. Calley was confined to his barracks for three months, then released on bail and never returned to custody.

We are much further from the Vietnam War now than World War II was from World War I. We persist in believing we are the indispensable nation, the cop on every beat in the world. So we continue to fight: Iraq, Afghanistan, and who’s next? We seem to be on an endless quest to erase the mistake and failure of Vietnam. In 2003 when I reported on the war in Iraq for The Nation, a major thoroughfare in Sadr City, Baghdad’s huge Shiite slum, had been renamed Vietnam Street. It seemed that the American war against Iraq was going to be won by a noncombatant, Iran, today by far the most powerful country in the region.

In 1972, four years after My Lai, I was in Vietnam when I was invited to a cocktail party in Danang. A fervently anti-Communist philosophy professor, whose husband headed the local branch of Texaco, told me the United States’ biggest mistake had been to withdraw support from Ngo Dinh Diem, the president of South Vietnam who had been assassinated in 1963 when Americans looked favorably on the coup to overthrow him. Diem, she insisted, was a brilliant statesman as well as the second-greatest patriot in the entire 5,000-year history of Vietnam. I bit: Who then was the first greatest patriot? “Ho Chi Minh” (the leader of Communist North Vietnam), said this staunch anti-Communist without hesitation. That was when it was pretty clear we didn’t know what we were doing.

In 1973, when I interviewed General Westmoreland, he was retired, a comfortable patrician considering a run for governor in South Carolina. We were on the banks of a river a few miles outside Charleston, where he lived. He spoke about his career, his time in Vietnam, the war itself. Complained about how we were withdrawing troops too fast, still thought we might have won it. As for the Vietnamese people themselves, here is the most important thing he told me: “The Oriental doesn’t put the same high price on life as does the Westerner. Life is plentiful, life is cheap in the Orient, and as the philosophy of the Orient expresses it, life is not important.”

In Latin they abbreviate that as QED. The English translation is, That says it all.