Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- A village of southern Vietnam where more than 300 unarmed civilians, including women and children, were massacred by US troops (March 1968) during the Vietnam War.
Etymologies
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Examples
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Much of the killing was in one hamlet called My Lai, but the action took place throughout the area.
1968 the Year that Rocked the World Kurlansky, Mark 2004
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When soldiers in an army purposely kill the innocent, as American soldiers did in a place in Vietnam called My Lai, that's an atrocity, and we put them on trial for it.
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In this place called My Lai, which once had been a town
AlterNet.org Main RSS Feed Nick Turse, Tomdispatch.com 2009
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As the journalist Jonathan Schell says all these years later, My Lai, in the end, was as much a question of “what is it doing to us?” as what we did to them.
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They were blown to pieces by artillery, blasted by bombs, and massacred in hamlets and villages like My Lai, Son Thang, Thanh Phong, and Le Bac, in huge swaths of the Mekong Delta, and in little unnamed enclaves like one in Quang Nam Province.
Nick Turse: What Sebastian Junger and Restrepo Won't Tell You About War 2010
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In an earlier era, in an earlier war, when My Lai was exposed, it shocked the conscience of a whole lot of people who hadn't been thinking very much about the war till then.
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In an earlier era, in an earlier war, when My Lai was exposed, it shocked the conscience of a whole lot of people who hadn't been thinking very much about the war till then.
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"Declassified papers show U.S. atrocities in Vietnam went far beyond My Lai," LA Times, 8-6-06.
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Also I believe he tried to cover up My Lai when he was an Army Major.
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Over the last decade, long suppressed horrors from Vietnam have been piling up, indicating not only that My Lai, horrific and iconic as it may have been, was no isolated incident, but that many American veterans have long lived with memories not unlike those of William Calley.
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