We Have Been Here Before
On the morning of March 16, 1968, United States Army soldiers entered the South Vietnamese hamlet of My Lai and killed between 347 and 504 unarmed civilians. Among the dead were 173 children, including 56 infants. The soldiers encountered no enemy fire. They found no weapons. They executed women, elderly men, and children at close range, and then they filed a report of enemy killed and called the operation a success.
The Army covered up the massacre for more than a year. When Seymour Hersh finally published his investigation in November 1969, the President called it an aberration. A failure of individual soldiers, not of the Army. Lieutenant William Calley was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison. He served three and a half years under house arrest.
The government declared the matter closed. It called My Lai a wound, a lesson, a verdict. It was none of those things. It was a rehearsal.
On February 28, 2026, a Tomahawk cruise missile struck the Shajareh Tayyebeh Girls’ School in Minab, a small city in southern Iran, during the first wave of American and Israeli airstrikes. The school was a two-story building painted with pink flowers and green leaves. At the moment of impact, classes had just changed periods. At least 175 children were killed when the roof collapsed. Ninety-six more were wounded.
The Pentagon said it was looking into it. For eleven days, that was the government’s answer.
On March 11, 2026, The New York Times reported that a preliminary U.S. military investigation had determined American forces were likely responsible. The school had been struck because the Defense Intelligence Agency was using outdated target coordinates; its files still classified the building as part of an adjacent military compound from which the school had been separated for nearly a decade. By 2016, the separation was visible in satellite imagery: a perimeter fence, three public entrances, a soccer pitch painted on the asphalt, and walls decorated in blue and pink. By 2017, children could be seen playing in the courtyard. The Defense Intelligence Agency did not update its files.
The New York Times broke the My Lai story in 1969. The same newspaper broke Minab in 2026. That is not a tribute to American journalism. It is an indictment of a system in which the press functions not as accountability but as its permanent substitute.
Between My Lai and Minab, there are 58 years and 8,000 miles. In Vietnam, soldiers entered villages, counted the bodies, and called the dead “enemy.” In Iran, coordinates were fed into a targeting system, a Tomahawk missile was launched, and the incident was attributed to a data problem. The weapons may have changed, but the children’s fate did not.
At My Lai, Major Colin Powell investigated the incident. He reported that relations between American soldiers and the Vietnamese people were, in his words, “excellent.” At Minab, the Trump administration initially claimed Iran had bombed its own school. Both claims were lies. Both were issued not in panic but in the practiced calm of institutions that have learned that denial is the first line of defense, and that time is always on the side of the powerful.
At My Lai, 26 soldiers were charged. The senior officers who ordered the operation and covered up its results retained their careers. At Minab, the investigation is ongoing. The language of official inquiry already serves the same function it did in 1969: not to establish accountability, but to manage the interval between the event and the moment when the public stops asking about it.
The word “error” is a careful choice in the official account of Minab, just as the word “aberration” was in the official account of My Lai. Senator Elizabeth Warren called the Minab strike one of the most devastating military errors in decades. Kenneth Roth stated that a filing error does not explain 175 dead children. Both terms serve the same purpose: they blame an individual or a database rather than the American war machinery that produced them. In the name of freedom and democracy, the war itself is justified. Within that framework, regret is permitted, accountability is unnecessary, and the ledger is closed.
We have been here before. The next school already exists somewhere in a targeting database. Its coordinates have not been updated. Its walls may be painted with flowers. Children may be visible in its courtyard in satellite imagery that no one will check until after the missile lands. The machinery does not pause between wars. It waits.