How This Old Brit Sees It ...

With bayonet fixed, the young platoon leader instructed his men to round up everyone, regardless of their age or sex, and herd them into a partially filled, 5ft-deep irrigation ditch. "Take care of these people!" he barked.

Those five words lit the fuse for a massacre. If there was any ambiguity in their meaning, the platoon leader removed it by bludgeoning an old man into the ditch with his rifle-butt, then machine-gunning him and at least 21 others as they cowered beside him.

Over the next five hours babies were bayonetted, teenage girls were raped or forced to their knees to perform sex acts before being mutilated and killed - and their watching parents and grandparents were summarily shot as they begged for mercy.

... a day that far overshadows the brutality at Abu Ghraib prison and the killing of 24 civilians by U.S. Marines in Haditha in western Iraq.

Of course, many Americans would prefer not to remember My Lai at all. They want to draw a veil over this most shocking episode in the humiliating, decade-long fiasco that was the Vietnam War.

Their collective amnesia was never stronger than it is today, when young servicemen are once again dying on foreign soil, for a similarly ill-defined - and seemingly unwinnable - cause.

But arch-liberal film-maker Oliver Stone is determined that the savagery to which some American soldiers lowered themselves in Vietnam must never be forgotten -- [See Pinkville].

He believes that now, more than ever, the White House hawks need to learn from the past.