in Cover Up. On pages 97-98 the following
passage appears:
There was no conspiracy to destroy the village of My Lai 4;
what took place there had happened before and would happen
again in Quang Ngai province-although with less drastic
results. The desire of Lieutenant Colonel Barker to mount
another successful, high enemy body-count operation in the
area; the desire of Ramsdell to demonstrate the
effectiveness of his operations; the belief shared by all
the principals that everyone living in Son My was staying
there by choice because of Communists...and the basic
incompetence of many intelligence personnel in the Army-all
these factors combined to enable a group of ambitious men to
mount an unnecessary mission against a nonexistent enemy
force, and somehow to find the evidence to justify it all.

I won't go into all the things that must be true for Hersh to be
correct. I will add that in the definitive book of the subject,
The Phoenix Program, My Lai is described as part of the
Colby/Shackley operation.

After My Lai, the New York Times assigned Hersh to the Watergate
beat. The paper was getting scooped by