American novelist Tim O'Brien (1946- ) served in the US army in Vietnam in 1969, a year after the infamous My Lai massacre. In his novel In the Lake of the Woods (1994), O'Brien employs the event as a means of exploring the moral complexity in which evil and good coexist within an individual and the destructive effects of failing to come to terms with their coexistence.

John Wade, a candidate for the Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate from Minnesota, appears to be a sure winner until the revelation that he was a member of Calley's platoon at My Lai. As the novel opens, he and his wife, Kathy, attempting to recover from a disastrous defeat at the polls, are vacationing at a remote Minnesota lakeside cottage. The My Lai revelation has not only destroyed his political career, it has also brought to the surface the hidden strains and flaws in their marriage. Shortly after their arrival at the cottage, Kathy disappears, presumably after having taken a boat out on the lake. While the search goes on, the novel flashes back to central events in Wade's life, including his experience of the massacre. At My Lai, Wade has killed an old man and a fellow soldier; his explanation in both cases is that firing his gun was a reflex action. Beyond that, his behavior is an inexplicable mystery, but a mystery that has left a haunting, deforming guilt. Wade assumes that he has successfully suppressed that guilt. But "the return of the repressed" has consequences almost as terrible as the incident that provoked it. The novel concludes with a variety of possible endings, which forces its readers to make the final choice as to what really happened.

In an interview about My Lai, Tim O'Brien made the following observation about In the Lake of the Woods: "When you're writing about any subject, fiction doesn't depend on what happened in the world. It depends upon what happens in the heart, in the gut, in the spirits of people. I hope that my passages of descriptive writing about My Lai gets to the heart and gets to the gut of readers through make-believe and through invention." O'Brien's distinction between "what happened in the world" and what happens to the reader exemplifies a critical difference between history and literature: Although the facts of My Lai are disturbing enough, the novel draws its readers into the inner life of a participant, where they must determine the degree of their identification with the protagonist--and the moral responsibility that identification implies.

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