The landscape doesn't change much. For days and days you
see just about nothing. It's unfamiliar--always unfamiliar.
Even when you go back to the same place, it's unfamiliar. And
it makes you feel as though, well, there's nothing left in the
world but this. . . . You have the illusion of going great dis-
tances and traveling, like hundreds of miles . . . and you end
up in the same place because you're only a couple of miles
away. . . . But you feel like it's not all real. It couldn't pos-
sibly be. We couldn't still be in this country. We've been walk-
ing for days. . . . You're in Vietnam and they're using real
bullets. . . . Here in Vietnam they're actually shooting peo-
ple for no reason. . . . Any other time you think, It's such an
extreme. Here you can go ahead and shoot them for noth-
ing. . . . As a matter of fact it's even . . . smiled upon, you
know. Good for you. Everything is backwards. That's part of
the kind of unreality of the thing. To the "grunt" [infantry-
man] this isn't backwards. He doesn't understand. . . . But
something [at My Lai 4] was missing. Something you thought
was real that would accompany this. It wasn't there. . . .
There was something missing in the whole business that made
it seem like it really wasn't happening. . . .

American GI's recollections of
My Lai (personal interview)

Robert Jay Lifton, M.D.

When asked to speak at a number of recent occasions, I have
announced my title as "On Living in Atrocity." To be sure,
neither I nor anyone else lives there all or even most of the
time. But at this moment, in mid-1970, an American investiga-
tor of atrocity finds himself dealing with something that has
become, for his countrymen in general, a terrible subterranean
image that can be neither fully faced nor wished away. There
is virtue in bringing that image to the surface.

In one sense, no matter what happens in the external world,
personal atrocity, for everyone, begins at birth. It can also be
said that some of us have a special nose for atrocity. Yet I can
remember very well, during the early stirrings of the academic

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