Stephen Hinshaw's "Another Kind of Madness"

Stephen Hinshaw grew up in Columbus, Ohio and attended Harvard and UCLA. A professor of Psychology (UC Berkeley) and Psychiatry (UC San Francisco), he is an international presence in clinical psychology/mental health, with over 320 articles/chapters and 12 books. He received a Distinguished Teaching Award in 2001; his Teaching Company (‘Great Lecture’) series, “Origins of the Human Mind,” appeared in 2010. He has been recognized by the Distinguished Scientist Award from the Society for a Science of Clinical Psychology (2015), the James McKeen Cattell Award from the Association for Psychological Science (2016) for a lifetime of outstanding contributions to applied psychological research, and the Distinguished Scientific Contributions to Child Development Award (2017) from the Society for Research in Child Development. He lives in Berkeley, California, with his wife Kelly Campbell; they have three sons.

Hinshaw applied the “Page 99 Test” to his newest book, Another Kind of Madness: A Journey Through the Stigma and Hope of Mental Illness, and reported the following:

It turns out that page 99 of Another Kind of Madness marks the opening of Chapter 6. Here, I pull together what I’d learned about my father—a philosopher at Ohio State University—when his usual calm, studious demeanor would change radically during periodic episodes of madness:

When Dad was climbing through a manic episode, his judgment was horrendous and his behavior outrageous. He needed to save Western philosophy and made late-night calls to unsuspecting colleagues around the country with his wild plans. At the same time, he might become convinced that others were stealing his ideas. When in a frenzy about such supposed theft, he disrupted OSU faculty meetings. The looks he got from strangers, or the alignment of dates on manuscripts he was reading, signaled cataclysmic events that could shape world history, leading him to rush home and type up incomprehensible notes. Despite the usual, careful organization of his lectures, he might skip from idea to idea like a flitting hummingbird.

What’s noteworthy about these recollections is that I had to infer them from accounts made by my mother, university colleagues, or—late in his life—Dad himself, as I knew nothing of them when they occurred. Why? Because my father’s doctors were absolutely clear that if my sister and I were ever to learn of his psychosis and placement in brutal mental hospitals, we would be permanently destroyed. As a result, Mom and Dad were enjoined in a professionally ordered code of silence, revealing the utter shame and stigma surrounding mental illness during the 1950s and 1960s.

Would an oncologist ever tell parents to deny the existence of a parent’s cancer? It’s unthinkable. But stonewalling was the order of the day from the psychiatric profession. Only during my first spring break from college did Dad sit me down in his study and begin to discuss his life of achievement and madness. Finally, the silent hangar in which I’d lived began to fill with air. I now had a mission: to study psychology and solve the mysteries of mental illness. At the same time, I was terrified that I’d be next to lose my mind and end up in a torturous mental hospital.

From the age of 16—when he suddenly believed that he could fly, in order to send a message to the world’s leaders to stop the growing Nazi threat—my father’s life had been tumultuous. Following regular talks with him, I finally diagnosed him correctly with bipolar disorder and embarked on a career in clinical and developmental psychology. But it took years for me to open up myself, finally easing the burden of shame that had permeated our family from the beginning.

“Another kind of madness,” borrowed from a line in James Baldwin’s incomparable Giovanni’s Room, is stigma itself—worse in consequences than any form of mental disorder. Inside this deep-dive memoir, I remind readers of the tragic fact that mental illness stigma remains quite strong to this day, serving in many respects as the last frontier for human rights. The solution, I’m convinced, involves communication and humanization.

Visit Stephen Hinshaw's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Mark of Shame.

My Book, The Movie: Another Kind of Madness.

--Marshal Zeringue

Waldo Heinrichs and Marc Gallicchio's "Implacable Foes"

Waldo Heinrichs is Dwight E. Stanford Professor Emeritus at San Diego State University. He is the author of American Ambassador: Joseph C. Grew and the Development of the United States Diplomatic Tradition, which won the Allan Nevins Prize.

Marc Gallicchio is a Professor of History at Villanova University and was a Fulbright Visiting Lecturer in Japan, 1998 - 1999 and 2004 - 2005. He is the author of The African American Encounter with Japan and China: Black Internationalism in Asia, 1895 - 1945, which won the Society of Historians of American Foreign Relations Robert H. Ferrell book prize.

Gallicchio applied the “Page 99 Test” to their new book, Implacable Foes: War in the Pacific, 1944-1945, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Implacable Foes depicts the opening stage of the Battle of The Philippine Sea (June 19-20, 1944), the last of the great battles in which Japanese and American aircraft carriers sent planes against each other. The largest carrier battle in history, it ended with a decisive victory for the Americans and ended Japan’s ability to launch large-scale carrier operations. The battle was accompanied by the successful invasion of the Marianas (Saipan, Guam, and Tinian) and resulted in a shake-up of the Japanese cabinet.

Much of our book is devoted to the period after June 1944. Despite the impressive victory in the Philippine Sea, lengthy debilitating campaigns in the Philippines and Ryukyus lay ahead. Those campaigns strained American manpower and resources and led to widespread criticism of American strategy and war aims. By the summer of 1945, American strategy had become unhinged and plans for the invasion of Japan were in turmoil.

But let’s give Ford Madox Ford his due; the battle of the Philippine Sea was a pivotal action in the story we tell. Page 99 begins in mid-sentence in which we note that Admiral Raymond Spruance, the commander of the U.S. Fifth Fleet, was a traditional sailor, not an aviator. Indeed, he did not even have an aviator on his senior staff. Nonetheless, Spruance had at his disposal the Fast Carrier Group, a fleet of swift new attack vessels capable of immense striking power.

On June 18, Spruance learned that elements of a Japanese fleet were heading east towards Saipan. The admiral was torn between protecting the support ships used in invasion of Saipan and going all-out against oncoming enemy. Spruance sent elements of the surface fleet forward but ordered his carriers to remain close enough to protect the invasion force off Saipan. He was subsequently criticized by naval aviators who believed he was too cautious in tethering the fleet to the invasion force off Saipan.

Although Spruance’s forces failed to sink all of the Japanese carriers, pilots from the American carriers inflicted heavy losses on Japan’s carrier-based planes. The Japanese could not make up for the loss of trained pilots after that and turned instead to suicide missions flown by young, barely-trained, pilots. As we note, the Japanese no longer had a conventional navy, but they still had a dangerous one. The war would continue for more than a year after the story begun on page 99 ended.

Learn more about Implacable Foes at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

David E. James's "Rock ‘N’ Film"

David E. James is Professor of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California. He is the author of Written Within and Without: A Study of Blake's Milton, Allegories of Cinema: American Film in the Sixties, Power Misses: Essays Across (Un)Popular Culture, The Most Typical Avant-Garde: History and Geography of Minor Cinemas in Los Angeles, and more.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Rock 'N' Film: Cinema's Dance With Popular Music, and reported the following:

From page 99:

exciting music and dance and other unique talents revitalize it, attracting the admiration of the community, especially its females, which may occasion the jealousy of a villainous male. He is set a task and, aided by an inferior (usually comic) sidekick, he displays remarkable physical prowess in completing and defeating his rivals. He is rewarded with the chosen, manifestly fertile, female, and the community celebrates their union and its own renewal. The only major variations are whether the narrative is motivated by his musical or by other skills and occupations, and whether a father figure aids or hinders him. All the films provide the opportunity not only to see and hear the King sing, but also to admire his face, his body (until he gains weight), his physical accomplishments, and the elaboration of a romantic triangle, and to celebrate his triumph over impediments as he brings the narrative to resolution.

Elvis was the most productive and the most dependable film star of the decade, and the genre’s stability and endurance over so many retellings suggest that the myth responded to some strong social desire centered on the core narrative transactions. Fundamental to them is a myth of exogamic community renewal, a motif whose ubiquity in folk stories and genre films alike suggests that the Elvis movie is anchored in some deep-seated, perhaps transhistorical and transcultural, satisfactions. The positions offered to both men and women for fantasy identification are deeply reassuring, providing universally learned, if not innate, gratifications. Buoyantly enacted as comedy rather than tragedy, the specific narrative elaborations of the core myth are always amusing and never disturbing or disheartening, and the inevitable happy ending symbolically introduces the spectators into the represented community while smoothing their return to the real world. Sung to his new bride as the finale to It Happened at the World’s Fair (Norman Taurog, 1963), the song “Happy Ending” articulates the trite but overwhelmingly reassuring conclusion that is axiomatic in the film musical generally: “Give me a story with a happy ending/When boy meets girl and then they never part again/But live forever happily, like you and me.”

Such a generic stability recurs in many Hollywood star oeuvres, but the quality that kept Elvis’s appeal alive is particularly illuminated by contrast with one of the other most successful pop cultural franchises of the sixties, the James Bond films. The series of almost annual movies from Dr. No (Terence Young, 1962) to You Only Live Twice (Lewis Gilbert, 1967) starring Sean Connery contain recurrent plot elements resembling those of Elvis’s films of the same period. Like the King, Bond is a loner, without parents, family, friends, or other social connections, apart from those he makes while fulfilling the tasks that each movie gives him. Their respective projects take both to exotic locations separate from ordinary life and replete with touristic appeal, where they compete with other males, invariably successfully since both are spontaneous masters of whatever skills appear necessary, but

This is the text of page 99 of my book Rock ‘N’ Film: Cinema’s Dance With Popular Music, which is a history of films about rock 'n' roll from the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s. It argues that classic rock 'n' roll was fundamentally a biracial project and that it and the films about it anticipated, reflected, and participated in the utopian cultural developments of the time, especially the civil rights movement and other youth insurgencies. From the jukebox musicals and Elvis’s films, through Woodstock and the other counter-culture documentaries, to the Rolling Stones and David Bowie’s films, the rock 'n' roll film has a structured and coherent history evolution that passes through many modes of film production: Hollywood genres, independent documentaries and avant-garde subversion. This history revolves around the two social implications of music generally that had previously informed the structure and themes of the classic musical: the ideals of romance and of community. That is, the rock 'n' roll film both ended the classic musical, but also renewed it and reconstructed it for the music of a new era.

The page is from the second of the two chapters on the Elvis film, which argues that in the 1960s Hollywood sacrificed the radical potential of one of the most important artists of his time to the capitalist film industry’s own financial priorities. It did so by imprisoning him in an exceptionally stable subgenre that caricatured the fifties’ icon of rebellion and forced him into saccharine musical irrelevance. Despising these films, Elvis nevertheless found a place in all of them to affirm his genius.

Learn more about Rock 'N' Film at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Alice Weinreb's "Modern Hungers"

Alice Weinreb is an associate professor of history at Loyola University Chicago.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Modern Hungers: Food and Power in Twentieth-Century Germany, and reported the following:

From page 99:

Allied rationing programs in occupied Germany had much in common with the rationing programs of the First World War because they reinforced existing societal divisions along gender, occupational, class, and regional lines. As had been the case during World War I, hungry city dwellers claimed that the rural regions were overflowing with food as the cities starved, a belief that seemed confirmed by city- dwellers’ desperate trips to farms to acquire extra provisions. While urbanites accused farmers of hoarding food in anticipation of future profits, farmers perceived themselves as the main victims, complaining not only about the authorities’ unrealistic demands, but also the waves of German expellees from Eastern Europe whom they were frequently compelled to house and feed.

There were many German food producers who exploited the widespread hunger for their own profit. Adulterating food was a popular way of stretching resources and increasing returns. It was quite common, for example, to sell flour that had been “mixed with portions of sand, plaster and other substances.” In Thuringia, several local companies were turning vegetables that had frozen due to improper storage into prepackaged salads “by first cooking them in order to make them edible,” forcing the local Nutrition Board to “prohibit all production of vegetable salads” due to serious health concerns. Inspectors in Saxony discovered that a shipment of more than 600,000 kilo­grams of butter had been inadequately refrigerated for over a year and was subsequently covered in mold; nonetheless, it was still marked for consumption. Hungry civilians also frequently accused shopkeepers, like farmers, of hoarding foodstuffs. An anonymous letter from Cologne, for example, singled out a grocery store where pickled carrots “without onions and scarcely any vinegar” were being sold for “one hears and gasps— 1 RM.” The shop owner, a Ms. Vinken, was described as “an overfed red- haired woman” and accused of being “more power-hungry than Adolf Hitler” in her “dictatorial” pricing schemes, profiting from the hunger of her desperate customers. Of course, German consumers themselves used a variety of extralegal means to obtain more and better food. Everyday efforts to acquire food expanded to include illicit activities ranging from participation in the black market to acts of prostitution and theft and even to the murder of milkmen. The occupation years thus saw a dramatic rise in illegal or semi- legal activities connected to food acquisition and distribution. These so- called crimes of scarcity shaped immediate postwar life for the majority of German civilians and were part of their larger experiences of collective hunger.

Public opinion across all four zones singled out the Allies as cruel masters indifferent to German suffering. Rationing programs that punished former Nazis or that reduced “normal consumer” allotments enforced the perception of many German civilians that they were being stigmatized and mistreated.

My book explores the relationship between the industrial food system and the modern war economy over the twentieth century. Page 99 is located in the middle of the book, in the chapter describing the transition from World War II to the Cold War. This transition is known in Germany as the “Hunger Years” of 1945 to 1949. While Page 99 does not capture the chronological and thematic scope of the book, it does highlight two crucial methodological aspects of my study of the modern food economy.

First, page 99 captures the fact that my study of the “politics of food” highlights not only state policy but the politics of the ordinary and the everyday. Although historians have traditionally described these years as a time of “pure and simple” hunger, this page details a remarkably complex food economy wherein food was constantly being modified in elaborate negotiations between individuals and state authorities. This is important because, in the immediate aftermath of the Third Reich, German civilians frequently compared their caloric intake to that of concentration camp inmates, a comparison that they successfully used to leverage for increased American food aid. The food economy described on page 99, however, exposes a food economy defined by remarkable levels of individual agency, something entirely different from Nazi camps.

Page 99 concludes by invoking another major thread of my book: detailing a nuanced approach to hunger as a topic of historical analysis. While we often imagine hunger as simply the consequence of an absence of food, hunger is rarely straight-forward or uncontested. In the case of Germany’s many and quite varied modern hunger claims, questions of interpretation and perception were crucial. People often claimed that they “felt” hungry even if they did not “look” hungry, for example. Individual and collective emotions, memories, and fantasies played crucial roles in determining how hungry and how satiated Germans were.

Ultimately, while my book focuses on Germany, Modern Hungers is really about the development of a transnational food system that links military power to control over food production and distribution. By turning discussions of hunger away from the Third World and to Germany, the wealthiest nation in Europe, my book complicates standard narratives of modernization, while historicizing contemporary struggles to control the world’s natural resources and to optimize peoples’ eating habits.

Learn more about Modern Hungers at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Tristan Donovan's "It's All a Game"

Tristan Donovan is a British author and journalist. His books include Replay: The History of Video Games and Fizz: How Soda Shook Up the World. His writing has appeared in BBC News Online, The Atlantic, The Times of London, Stuff, Wired, The Guardian, Eurogamer, and Kotaku, among other publications.

Donovan applied the “Page 99 Test” to his newest book, It's All a Game: The History of Board Games from Monopoly to Settlers of Catan, and reported the following:

So open page 99 of It’s All a Game and where do you find yourself? Slap bang in the middle of the chapter "From Kriegsspiel to Risk."

That chapter charts the history of war games — from their origins in Prussia as tabletop military planning tools to their influence on well-known games like Risk and Dungeons & Dragons.

And while page 99 is a strange place to start reading the book, it does capture the essence of that chapter and the way It’s All a Game looks at board game history.

The page opens part-way through a paragraph about how imperial-era Germany used tabletop war games to develop the Schlieffen Plan — a strategy for dealing with a simultaneous threat of invasion from Russia and France that aimed to neutralize the French as quickly as possible.

On paper the plan, developed through playing hundreds of war games, should have delivered a swift German victory when war broke out. Of course that didn’t happen, as the page explains:

But for all their planning, when Germany put the Schlieffen Plan into action at the start of the First World War, the real world refused to conform to the tabletop version of events…. On the tabletop the Schlieffen Plan promised victory in six weeks. In reality it delivered a stalemate and four horrific years of trench warfare.

So page 99 tells us of a time when tabletop war gaming backfired but elsewhere in the chapter I look at the times games provided insights that militaries used successfully. Not least how imperial Japan employed war games to plan the Pearl Harbor attack.

And despite page 99 failing to mention any board games most of us will ever play, it does show how It’s All a Game looks not only at the history of the games themselves but at how board games connect with history as a whole.

So on page 99 it’s military war games influencing actual wars. Elsewhere it’s Twister getting a boost from the sexual revolution of the 1960s, how air raids and the Golden Age of Detective Fiction spawned Clue, and the story of how contemporary board games are bucking the trend towards an all-digital lifestyle.

Visit Tristan Donovan's website.

Writers Read: Tristan Donovan.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kenda Mutongi's "Matatu: A History of Popular Transportation in Nairobi"

Kenda Mutongi is professor of history at Williams College and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Visiting Professor at MIT. She is the author of Worries of the Heart: Widows, Family, and Community in Kenya.

Mutongi applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Matatu: A History of Popular Transportation in Nairobi, and reported the following:

From page 99:

While passengers may have been doing their best to adjust to the precipitous increase in the number of matatus, as well as the rowdy workers and dangerous travel conditions, the owners were not doing nearly as well. Many of the owners had become so unprincipled and antagonistic that they had managed to jeopardize their own chances of survival.

The current state of affairs was unsustainable, and it was becoming clear that some sort of backlash was looming, from the government if not from the passengers themselves. The more thoughtful owners were even reconsidering the need for government regulation in the industry. It made sense, given the explosion in the numbers of matatus and the unregulated competition, along with the antisocial behavior of their own workers. “Lack of regulation was not a good thing for business,” recalled Innocent Kamau, a matatu owner in the 1970s. “See, not all the people in the industry were good people and sometimes tried to cheat you, so you needed the government to help out, but they were not doing so; they left us just like that,” and he waved his fingers sideways, shook his head, and pressed his lips together in disgust.

Kamau was not alone. Many of the people who had bought matatus in the 1970s felt that the industry needed to be controlled— though, it must be granted that they were saying so in hindsight. By and large, matatu owners who had vehicles in good mechanical condition wanted defective vehicles off the roads (no doubt for safety reasons and also because they wanted to expand their business and increase their profits). They also wanted some controls placed upon the touts’ aggressive and rude conduct, and death- defying stunts of their drivers, so that passengers might become more trusting and less combative. It was gradually becoming apparent to the more responsible owners that good vehicles and good behavior were better for business.

What is the best way to regulate the matatu industry? This is the main question in Matutu. And one of the main contradictions in the government’s attempt at regulation occurs on page 99.

Until 1973, matatu business was considered illegal by the government. However in June of that year, Jomo Kenyatta, the then president of Kenya passed a decree legalizing the businesses. The ruling was a surprise. Even more surprising was the fact that Kenyatta had declined to prescribe any restrictions, or require any form of licensing, on the matatus. It may have been a simple oversight. But by foregoing the chance to regulate the industry he gave the matatu owners de facto permission to explore the limits
of laissez-faire capitalism. Suddenly everybody wanted in on the action. Unfit vehicles in all states of disrepair began roaming the streets; even more dangerous was the recklessness with which drivers began to operate their rickety rattletraps— bouncing through potholed streets, reeling around corners, the drivers raced through the streets as fast as they could to get first crack at passengers who they then packed in so tightly that arms, legs, and backsides were left hanging out of doors and windows.

The indifference to safety, along with the government’s regulatory neglect, led to a predictable increase in accidents. The passages on page 99 occur at this crucial moment in the book when matatu owners become extremely frustrated by Kenyatta’s decree.

Learn more about Matatu: A History of Popular Transportation in Nairobi at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Samuel C. Heilman's "Who Will Lead Us?"

Samuel C. Heilman is Proshansky Chair in Jewish Studies at the Graduate Center and Distinguished Professor of Sociology at Queens College CUNY. His many books include (with Menachem Friedman), The Rebbe: The Life and Afterlife of Menachem Mendel Schneerson, winner of the National Jewish Book Award.

Heilman applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, Who Will Lead Us?: The Story of Five Hasidic Dynasties in America, and reported the following:

Page 99 discusses how the Bobover Rebbe managed to transform his followers or hasidim during the early twentieth century when he was becoming a larger than life figure. I think it's interesting but not necessarily representative of the whole book which, after all, details many leaders and the stories of their dynasties.

Learn more about Who Will Lead Us? at the University of California Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jean R. Freedman's "Peggy Seeger"

Jean R. Freedman is a folklorist and author whose work has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Journal of American Folklore, and the Fast Folk Musical Magazine, among other publications. Her first book, Whistling in the Dark: Memory and Culture in Wartime London, analyzes popular culture and political ideology in London during World War II. She teaches at Montgomery College and George Washington University and lives in the Washington, DC area with her family.

Freedman applied the “Page 99 Test” to her recent biography, Peggy Seeger: A Life of Music, Love, and Politics, and reported the following:

Page 99 of my biography, Peggy Seeger: A Life of Music, Love, and Politics, finds Peggy in Moscow as part of the American delegation to the 1957 World Youth Festival. At the age of 22, she was in the early, stormy portion of her relationship with Ewan MacColl, then married to Jean Newlove, who had accompanied him to Moscow. Peggy was a musical success at the festival, where she and Guy Carawan led the American delegation in a concert of American folk music at the Bolshoi Theater. But her youthful naïveté ran afoul of Ewan’s Marxist politics when she and Guy gave a concert of gospel music to a group of left-wing writers who believed that religion is the opiate of the masses. Ewan was so angry that he threatened to break off the relationship – a threat he could not keep – and he and Jean returned to their home in London. Peggy and the other members of the American delegation were then invited to visit China. This was a momentous decision. On page 99, I write:

Traveling behind the Iron Curtain during the height of the Cold War was an unpopular choice for Americans; Life magazine reported that the festival participants “went despite State Department warning that the festival was a propaganda gimmick.” The State Department could not forbid them to go to the Soviet Union, but China was a different matter: the United States had no diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China, and an American passport forbade travel there. According to Time magazine, a letter from Acting Secretary of State Christian Herter was delivered to the American delegates, advising them, “By traveling to Communist China at this time you will, in the considered view of your government, be acting as a willing tool of Communist propaganda intended, wherever possible, to subvert the foreign policy and the best interests of the U.S.”

The letter went on to warn of possible consequences that the Americans would face when they returned home from China: loss of passport, fines, even prison. Most of the Americans heeded the State Department’s warning and declined the invitation.

Peggy, on the other hand, chose to go to China. This decision was a turning point in her life, though she did not yet know it and the reader does not yet realize it on page 99. Afterward, she did not return home, fearing the loss of her passport, a consequence that would keep her in the United States and effectively end her relationship with Ewan MacColl. So she continued traveling and giving concerts of American music – in Russia, in Poland, in France, until finally, in 1959, she settled in London with Ewan, her musical and personal partner until his death in 1989. American folk music remained the backbone of her career, while her politics underwent a rigorous and willing transformation under Ewan’s tutelage; a gentle American progressive became a staunch British leftist. The decisions she made on page 99 altered, irrevocably, the course of her life. But she never returned to China.

Visit Jean R. Freedman’s website.

My Book, The Movie: Peggy Seeger.

--Marshal Zeringue

Howard Jones's "My Lai"

Howard Jones is University Research Professor of History Emeritus at the University of Alabama.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, My Lai: Vietnam, 1968, and the Descent into Darkness, and reported the following:

From page 99:

[PFC Michael Bernhardt] from the 2nd Platoon had not entered My Lai 4 along with his company commander; [Captain Ernest] Medina ordered him to inspect a suspicious-looking wood box just outside the subhamlet to determine whether it was a booby trap. After finding it harmless, Bernhardt caught up with the command group inside My Lai 4 and was shocked to see the 3rd Platoon setting the huts afire and shooting their inhabitants as they ran outside, or breaking into them and shooting everyone inside. Other GIs assembled the villagers in small groups outside their homes and shot them on the spot. "The whole thing was so deliberate,” he told [reporter Seymour] Hersh. “It was point-blank murder and I was standing there watching it. It's kind of made me wonder if I could trust people anymore."

The 3rd Platoon, led by Lieutenant Jeffrey LaCross, began the final phase of the operation before the other two platoons had made it through the village, but its so-called “mop-up mission” quickly became a euphemism for killing anyone still alive. Photographer and Sergeant Ronald Haeberle took picture after picture of civilians scattered everywhere, some already dead and the others now slain by the 3rd Platoon. No doubt out of concern for his own safety, he decided against photographing soldiers shooting villagers, but his camera recorded a great number of bodies spread out or together, depending on where the victims had been when they were murdered. It also showed bunkers, sometimes filled with villagers, ripped apart by grenades; domestic structures damaged or destroyed by what he at first assumed was errant artillery fire; hooches burned to the ground by Zippo squads; pigs and water buffaloes killed; wells contaminated by animal remains.

“I knew it was something that shouldn’t be happening but yet I was part of it,” Haeberle recounted in an interview years later. “I think I was in a kind of daze from seeing all these shootings and not seeing any return fire. Yet the killing kept going on.” Several soldiers rounded up the civilians and shot them, while others killed them individually or in small groups on the spot. Everyone in Haeberle’s mind bore responsibility, including Major General [Samuel] Koster and Lieutenant Colonel [Frank] Barker for failing to monitor and control their troops. All refused to take prisoners. “It was completely different to my concept of what war is all about.”

Numerous soldiers’ accounts confirmed the continuing slaughter. In the CID Report, Sergeant [Charles] West admitted that they had killed women and children. PFC Richard Pendleton and his men shot a half dozen men and women running from the village, killing three of them. Fred Dustin watched his fellow grunts kill a group of Vietnamese that included children. Stephen Glimpse saw a soldier behind him shoot a wounded youth.

I was amazed that so many themes of my book ran through page 99.

Not everyone killed with impunity. Even in the absence of return fire, the GIs were at first convinced the enemy was there and more than a few of them sought to survive by following orders to kill everyone, whether man, woman, or child—or baby. Bernhardt refused to kill non-resisting villagers and was appalled and sickened by what he witnessed. Yet he felt powerless to stop the killing. His commander, Captain Medina, later warned him not to tell his congressman what he saw. And from his vantage point, Bernhardt saw a microcosm of the whole: Vietnamese villagers rounded up and shot in groups or one by one; grenades tossed into bunkers and homes with the survivors running outside only to be shot, while others remained inside, perhaps injured and also shot; wanton and illegal destruction of property, including homes, buildings, and contamination of wells, along with the slaughter of water buffaloes, pigs, and other animals.

The mass killings and widespread destruction were purposeful and could not be attributable to so-called inadvertent collateral damage. Despite U.S. intelligence warnings to the contrary, no Viet Cong forces were in My Lai 4, which meant that the infantry had gunned down unarmed civilians erroneously believed to be the enemy—including those killed after it was clear that there was no enemy in the village. No superiors were in charge after the first few moments of the operation. The Americal Division commander, Major General Koster, was not monitoring the situation; Lieutenant Colonel Barker was in a helicopter hovering over the village and lacked firsthand information on what was going on below; and Medina quickly lost control of his three platoons of about a hundred troops in Charlie Company, allowing 2nd Lieutenant William Calley and others to follow their orders as they perceived them to be.

In the meantime, army photographer Ronald Haeberle took pictures of the victims, providing evidence of a massacre that he at first kept hidden and thereby became part of a cover-up. And he was not alone. Most soldiers, whether or not they participated in the killings, maintained their silence about what had happened—doubtless for fear of death at the hands of the perpetrators. Some GIs told their story to members of the army’s Criminal Investigation Division; but as time passed, most of them either changed their accounts or asserted that they could no longer remember what happened in those four hours that day. Yet Haeberle and every other soldier in My Lai that morning realized they were part of this massacre and would carry the memory of these events with them for the rest of their lives.

Learn more about My Lai: Vietnam, 1968, and the Descent into Darkness at the Oxford University Press website.

My Book, The Movie: My Lai: Vietnam, 1968, and the Descent into Darkness.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jack Ewing's "Faster, Higher, Farther"

Jack Ewing is European economics correspondent for The New York Times and author of Faster, Higher, Farther: The Volkswagen Scandal. He lives in Frankfurt.

Ewing applied the “Page 99 Test” to Faster, Higher, Farther and reported the following:

Bad luck! Page 99 in Faster, Higher, Farther: The Volkswagen Scandal is the end of a chapter and about one-third white space. Nevertheless, the page is not a bad place to judge the book. It marks a turning point in the story, which can be summed up as follows: how a company that began as a Nazi propaganda project became the largest car company in the world--only to be exposed as emissions cheaters by a handful of university researchers working with a $70,000 grant.

The chapter that ends on Page 99 describes the last days of Ferdinand Piëch’s reign as chief executive of Volkswagen. Piëch, grandson of legendary car designer Ferdinand Porsche, has just driven an experimental “one-liter auto”—so-called because it could travel 100 kilometers, or about 60 miles, on a single liter of diesel fuel—to the Volkswagen annual meeting in Hamburg. There Piëch received a standing ovation from shareholders grateful that he saved Volkswagen from near bankruptcy and made it the largest car company in Europe.

But, as I argue in the book, Piëch had already created a climate where the emissions scandal could breed. A brilliant engineer, he was also an authoritarian known for dismissing or exiling subordinates who failed to meet the ambitious goals he set for them. And Piëch was not really giving up power. He continued to dominate Volkswagen from his position as chairman of the company’s supervisory board. Piëch’s hand-picked successor, Bernd Pischetsrieder, quickly fell out of favor when he tried to remake Volkswagen’s corporate culture to be less dictatorial. Pischetsrieder was replaced by Martin Winterkorn, a long-term Piëch protégé known for his unwavering loyalty to his mentor.

Under Piëch and Winterkorn, failure was not an option. When Volkswagen engineers realized in 2006 that a new diesel engine could not meet pollution standards in the United States, they devised emissions-cloaking software to fool regulators. When the deception was discovered almost a decade later, Volkswagen was forced to pay more than $22 billion in fines and legal settlements in the United States.

Page 99 hints at the main themes of the book—how the ambition and ruthlessness of top managers can turn ordinary employees into criminals, and ultimately endanger the jobs of thousands of innocent employees.

Follow Jack Ewing on Twitter and Facebook, and read more about Faster, Higher, Farther at the W.W. Norton website.

--Marshal Zeringue