Why revisit the My Lai Massacre?

“Why should my life be interrupted by this? 

“Why should I take on this suffering on behalf of these victims?

“The massacre calls for self-examination and for action, but if we deny the call and try to go on as before, as though nothing had happened, our knowledge, which can never leave us once we have acquired it, will bring about an unnoticed but crucial alteration in us, numbing our most precious faculties and withering our souls. 

For if we learn to accept this, there is nothing we will not accept.”

– Jonathan Schell, Investigative Journalist in Vietnam in a commentary in The New Yorker shortly after the My Lai Massacre photos came out in LIFE magazine.