A View From Inside William Calley Trial

When the story broke that American troops had committed the massacre at My Lai on March 16, 1968, I was in Germany reporting for TIME on the student movement. Even there, the Vietnam War was a focus. At that time the great symbol of everything that was wrong with the war was the Eddie Adams photograph of the police chief executing the Viet Cong operative on the streets of Saigon, and in Germany that remained the iconic image. But when the My Lai photographs were first published in the Cleveland Plain Dealer and then in LIFE Magazine, they rocked America and re-energized the U.S. anti-war movement.