essay on my lai massacre

Pham Thanh Cong, the director of the My Lai Museum, was eleven at the time of the massacre. His mother and four siblings died. “We forgive, but we do not forget,” he said. Credit Photograph by Katie Orlinsky There is a long ditch in the village of My Lai. On the morning of March 16, 1968, it was crowded with the bodies of the dead—dozens of women, children, and old people, all gunned down by young American soldiers. Now, forty-seven years later, the ditch at My Lai seems wider than I remember from the news photographs of the slaughter: erosion and time doing their work. During the Vietnam War, there was a rice paddy nearby, but it has been paved over to make My Lai more accessible to the thousands of tourists who come each year to wander past the modest markers describing the terrible event. The My Lai massacre was a pivotal moment in that misbegotten war: an American contingent of about a hundred soldiers, known as Charlie Company, having received poor intelligence, and thinking that they would encounter Vietcong troops or sympathizers, discovered only a peaceful village at breakfast. Nevertheless, the soldiers of Charlie Company raped women, burned houses, and turned their M-16s on the unarmed civilians of My Lai. Among the leaders of the assault was Lieutenant William L. Calley, a junior-college dropout from Miami. By early 1969, most of the members of Charlie Company had completed their tours and returned home. I was then a thirty-two-year-old freelance reporter in Washington, D.C. Determined to understand how young men—boys, really—could have done this, I spent weeks pursuing them. In many cases, they talked openly and, for the most part, honestly with me, describing what they did at My Lai and how they planned to live with the memory of it. In testimony before an Army inquiry, some of the soldiers acknowledged being at the ditch but claimed that they had.
1. Should we apply legal rules to incidents arising out of warfare?  What is the purpose of developing and applying such rules?  Have such rules changed the nature of warfare, or prevented more or worse wartime atrocities from occurring? 2. What should the rules of warfare be with respect to treatment of civilians?  Who should be considered a civilian (or a non-combatant)?  Should there be special rules governing the treatment of women or children? 3. What is the defense of superior orders?  Why have such a defense?  When should the defense be available?  What should be done in the case of ambiguous orders or when oral commands contradict written directives?  Must the belief  that a superior order is lawful be reasonable?  Should different standards apply to privates than to persons higher up the chain of command?  What should a soldier do when he is given an order that he thinks is unlawful? 4. How do you explain what happened at My Lai?  What can be done to prevent such tragedies from happening again?  What does My Lai teach us about the nature of evil?  Was Calley evil, or was he a more-or-less “normal person in abnormal circumstances”?  Would Calley have acted differently had he received more training in the rules of warfare? 5. Was Calley simply following orders?  What had he been told?  What did he reasonably infer?  Did he believe that his superiors were aware of his orders?  Did he try to hide his actions from his superiors? 6. If Calley had been ordered to “waste” civilians, was he obligated to disobey such an order because it was clearly illegal? 7. When Medina said that he gave no order to kill the residents of My Lai, was he being completely truthful?  Was Medina aware of what was happening at My Lai when there was still time to do something about it?  Should sins of omission be treated the same as sins of commission? 8. Which was worse—the massacre or.
Official Army photographer Ron Haeberle traveled with Charlie Company into My Lai on March 16, 1968. The Company was told that dozens of Viet Cong troops were passing through the area, retreating from battle after the Tet Offensive. Captain Ernest Medina had told his men that all Vietnamese remaining in My Lai after their arrival would be Viet Cong members or sympathizers. Following the massacre, during which between 347 and 504 civilians were killed, the story remained largely out of the public eye until the media published Haeberle's photographs in November 1969. These photographs would became key evidence in the Army's five-month investigation led by General William R. Peers. The following gallery showcases a selection of Ron Haeberle's images from the My Lai Massacre as they were used in the Peers investigation. Many of the images are violent and graphic in nature. Haeberle was part of the second group of men dropped in the My Lai region, 17 minutes after the first group.|Getty Images; the Peers hearing, Haeberle testified that the soldiers walked in a Southern direction, away from the village, in order to cross a deep ditch before doubling back.|National Archives; landing, soldiers had.