My Lai the Great Massacre Essay

The Vietnamese believed that, “ Americans were evil and the Vietnamese simply were fighting merely defensively”. For several decades the Vietnamese fought boldly to win their freedom from the French. Many rebellious groups formed to win the freedom for Southern Vietnam. American troops could not identify were exactly the enemies were located in Vietnam. The United States used several tactics to gather information from sources and intelligences. In the film, Vietnamese peasants spoke intensely about the injustice surrounding the war. The local inhabitants of the villages spoke about the deadly tactics employed to kill innocent farmers and families. They spoke about how eight to nine hundred children were killed by the many toxics elements distributed by the planes and the several hundred tons of bombs dropped on a daily basis; to exterminate the Vietnam population. The villagers spoke about how their loved ones were killed right before their eyes and there was nothing they could do. The documentary shows soldiers entering villages, burning homes down, and killing civilians. They show the torture being inflicted by the soldiers.

Calley and Charlie Company, we find out that the truth was worse than the stories. From the facts from the trial, we learn that there were anywhere from 343 - 504 fatalities and. that "[t]he crimes visited on the inhabitants of Son My Village included individual and group acts of murder, rape, sodomy, maiming, assault on noncombatants and the mistreatment and killing of detainees," ( Col. Wilson as qtd in Vietnam 562). You might think that what happened in My Lai was the worst of it all, but O'Brien says that, "Wreckage was the rule. Brutality was S.O.P." (566). Because the war was so confusing and because the soldiers couldn't tell who the enemy was, many felt that, "the army had no solution but to kill people, uniformed or not, old or young, male or female, proven Viet Cong or not," (Fussell 654). To me this is how some tried to justify killing but still some just couldn't make themselves feel as if they were justified.

Shorting after the United States became involve in the Vietnam Conflict, many Americans began to realize the reasons behind the U.S. entering the Vietnam Conflict was based on falsified facts. One such falsification is the Gulf of Tonkin Incident. Many America’s begin to form Antiwar organization such as The Vietnam Day Committee and Vietnam Veterans Against the War, which severed to education the population on the Vietnam Conflict and the lie that lead to the U.S. involvement in conflict. In the Vietnam Day Committee’s pamphlet, I found it disturbing and unjustified that they would make a comment such as, “A growing number of GIs have already refused to fight in Vietnam and have been court-martialed. They have shown great courage.” The last

On 16 March 1968 between three hundred and five hundred Vietnamese children, women, and elderly citizens in the village of My Lai were raped, killed, and had their homes and livelihoods destroyed by Charlie Company because of the orders given by one man. Lieutenant William Laws Calley Junior. Calley grew up in a very conservative town where he eventually enlisted in the Army after several unsuccessful endeavors. Later he went through OCS and became a Platoon Leader for Charlie Company. His military career leading up to My Lai was relatively lackluster; he did not have the respect of his troops or his commander, Captain Ernest Medina. In Vietnam,

The Mỹ Lai Massacre was the Vietnam War mass killing of between 347 and 504 unarmed civilians in South Vietnam on March 16, 1968. Victims included men, women, children, and infants. The massacre, which was later called "the most shocking episode of the Vietnam War", took place in two hamlets of Sơn Mỹ village in Quảng Ngãi Province. These hamlets were marked on the U.S. Army topographic maps as My Lai and My Khe. The U.S. military codeword for the alleged Viet Cong stronghold in that area was Pinkville, and the carnage was initially referred to as the Pinkville Massacre. Later, when the U.S. Army started its investigation, the media changed it to the Massacre at Songmy. Currently, the event is referred to as the My Lai Massacre in the United States and called the Son My Massacre in Vietnam.

Consider the way that textbooks depict the My Lai Massacre, a standout amongst the most notorious occasions of the Vietnam War, amid which American soldiers killed unarmed Vietnamese ladies and kids. To the degree that textbooks say the slaughter, they regard it as a detached occurrence—notwithstanding the impressive confirmation that My Lai is demonstrative of "wrongdoings submitted on an everyday premise with the full attention to officers at all levels of command." Besides, course books never cite from the adversaries of Vietnamese mediation, including Martin Luther King, Jr.— without a doubt, the main individuals whom textbooks consistently cite on Vietnam are Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, two of the draftsmen of the war.

bloodbath in the village of My Lai on March 16th of 1968. Four Hundred to Five Hundred of the

The U.S. could not have been less prepared to face these sporadic attacks, for it was a completely different type of warfare than that for which they had trained (“Guerilla Tactics: An Overview”). Another brutal tactic of the Vietcong was using civilians, women, and children to help them fight the war. It was common for them to use these people as human shields, give them grenades, or even arm them with guns. In these cases, the American soldiers had no choice but to kill these civilians. Events like these caused enormous controversy back in the United States, many believing Americans were murdering civilians, and this ignited the anti-war movement even more.

Shortly after the Tet Offensive, the My Lai massacre struck when Charlie’s Company, a unit of the American Division's 11th Infantry Brigade arrived in My Lai on a search and destroy mission to root out 48th Viet Cong Battalion (“My Lai Massacre”). They did not find what they were looking for, but instead of clearing the area, the U.S. soldiers decided to execute 504 of the 700 My Lai inhabitants in gruesome manners. Vietnamese women were raped while other noncombatants were clubbed and stabbed. Some victims were ruthlessly mutilated with the signature "C Company" carved into their chest (“My Lai Massacre”). Unfortunately, this was not the end of their display of evil. The 11th Brigade made an effort to cover-up their war crimes by

As former president Richard M. Nixon once said, “No event in American history is more misunderstood than the Vietnam War. It was misreported then, and it is misremembered now.” The thought of the Vietnam War being entirely brutal comes from the misreported information given by people who were not in the first tier of the war. The soldiers were the first tier, they fought firsthand and saw everything that happened, from someone being killed, to traveling nightly to their next camping grounds. The second level, includes the reporters from America. These are the people who were close to where the action happened but not nearly close enough to experience the good things that came from the war. They saw the war through a window, seeing only the

“Shit, is it this late already? I’m going to get my ass handed to me if the sergeant finds out.” I quickly ran to prepare porridge, the quickest meal that I could prepare in fifteen minutes. The men were also starting to stir and in the distance, a slight whirr could be heard. It was almost like the sound of a helicopter. But a helicopter, this early in the morning, it couldn’t be. It wouldn’t be sensible. The pilots wouldn’t be able to see in the dusk. All helicopters flew to the base after 8am and it wouldn’t be reasonable to start changing the schedule now, especially at the peak of the war. But, the whirr was beginning to louden, sharpening into a deafening, chopping noise. It was, indeed, a helicopter. It surely resembled one, with the green exterior, riddled with rounds from our supposed enemy, the Vietnamese. In it, I could see a male, waving his arms at me. What was he doing? I could barely make out his gestures. And in the back I could see many more helicopters, following the lead helicopter. It was almost like if everyone was returning from Vietnam. It couldn’t be, what foolish thoughts. The war isn’t even close to

An approximate 15,000 Cambodian civilian deaths were caused by the U.S. bombing campaigns. This enormous amount of death America overtly caused made it so “the civilian population fears U.S. air attacks far more than they do Communist rocket attacks or scorched-earch tactics,” and instilled fear in Cambodia that is still prevalent

President Johnson ordered revenge air strikes against the patrol boat’s bases. After that, Congress had approved the resolution eighty eight to two and Johnson had been granted the powers to prosecute the war in Vietnam. Senator Wayne Morse or Oregon voted against it, reminding McNamara that “the North Vietnamese patrol boat attacks had been provoked by U.S. presence in Tonkin Bay” (Armstrong 52). It was apparent that the past of American policy in South Vietnam seemed to be leading America into war. The United States had affiliated themselves with a policy that was a form of American colonialism, of saving U.S. interests at the cost of the Vietnamese people. The Tonkin Resolution was evidence. Prior to the war President Franklin D. Roosevelt had stated that American policy should be changed, but no steps were taken to change it. In 1954, the U.S. refused to sign the Geneva Accord, so from then on America claimed that North Vietnam was violating the accord by sending help to the rebels against the South Vietnamese Government. But we decided not to go to the countries that signed the agreement and who were responsible for its enforcement. But, instead we violated by joining in the fighting. Every American person or item that was sent to South Vietnam was a violation. “In January 1965, five months after the Gulf of Tonkin incident, West Point graduate Richard Steinke refused to join a unit operating in Vietnam” (Schutts). Many knew that the decision to join the war was not a

In 1954, Northern and Southern Vietnam entered a war that led to the death of nearly 3 million people including civilians, Vietnamese troops, and ally soldiers. Though the number of lives lost during the war is atrocious, so are some of the other lasting effects of the “poor man’s fight”. Throughout this essay, I will explain my opinion regarding what I believe were the costs and the benefits of U.S interaction in the war in Vietnam.

The My Lai massacre was a very dramatic event affecting many livelihoods and destroying communities. The US Army was heavily involved in the massacre. It is believed that approximately 504 innocent Vietnamese men, women and children lost their lives to the massacre. Before the massacre Vietnam was still war-stricken with civil wars between the north and south Vietnamese people but after the US got involved many other countries came into the mix as well like Australia, China, Cambodia, North Korea and many others. The My Lai Massacre was the turning point for the public opinion about the Vietnam War. In order to establish the accuracy of this statement, this essay will discuss the causes and background of the massacre, the short term reaction in United States and the long term impact. (Wright 2015)