Special report · 1969
My Lai : l'Amérique découvre un massacre
(My Lai: America discovers a massacre)
November 1969: the American press reveals the My Lai massacre. Newly arrived in television after three years of the Vietnam war, I told the story on the evening news.
I had just left Agence France-Presse. I had spent three years in Vietnam as a war correspondent, and I was starting out in television, in the brand-new newsroom of the second channel. That was when the war caught up with me.
In mid-November 1969 the American press revealed what the army had kept quiet for twenty months. On 16 March 1968, in the hamlet of My Lai, in the village of Song My, an American company had killed several hundred civilians: women, children, old men. The Saigon government denied it. America, meanwhile, was discovering the photographs.
Two evenings in November
On 22 November I questioned the American reporter Jonathan Randal for the news about these revelations. On the 25th I presented the testimony of one of the soldiers of the company. He is asked how many people he killed. He replies that he had been given orders.
Those two reports are my oldest television archives held by the INA. They say where I came from. I was not a presenter talking about Vietnam: I was a Vietnam reporter who had been handed a television microphone. I like to say that in my generation there are two kinds of journalist: those who went to Vietnam, and the others.
Key facts
- Two reports broadcast on 22 and 25 November 1969.
- With the American journalist Jonathan Randal.
- My earliest television reports held by the INA.
- I had covered the Vietnam war for three years for AFP.