My Lai Massacre Essay

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My Lai Massacre "The picture of the world's greatest superpower killing or seriously injuring 1,000 noncombatants a week while trying to pound a tiny backward nation into submission on an issue whose merits are hotly disputed, is not a pretty one."(Martin Luther King Jr.). In this short quote Martin Luther King Jr. perfectly described what happened at Vietnam and what many people thought of the war. As the war progressed many viewed it as a mistake and one of the reasons why was the alarming fact that many innocent people had died. What made things worse was that the government tried to hide this information from the people. One of the many appalling stories that made this war so gruesome was the My Lai Massacre. Many proclaim that the My …show more content…

The Vietnam soldiers were no exception. They were trained to follow orders that were given to them. The soldier had no right to question an order. If they did, strict consequences followed. William Calley explains this when he says during his trial, “all orders were to be assumed legal, that the soldier's job was to carry out any order given him to the best of his ability.” (Lt. William Calley). All of the orders were given because the leaders thought these commands would help the Americans defeat the enemy. Everyone at Vietnam was doing what they thought was expected of them. As Kendrick Oliver states when trying to explain why Charlie Company would kill civilians at My Lai “they had considered their conduct consistent with the attitudes and practices of their GI peers, with the policies of the military command, and with the conscience of the political nation at home.” (Oliver 252). People thought in order for America to win we just had to kill as many people as possible because that had worked in previous wars. John Kerry explains this situation when he says that in order for America to remain the superpower we “couldn’t lose”, “couldn't retreat”, no matter “how many American bodies were lost”. However, the soldiers also never knew who was or wasn’t the enemy. For that reason, if the civilian looked like the enemy, they must be involved with the enemy, therefore they were the enemy. As a result of this mindset the soldiers were convinced that they were killing the enemy. The My Lai Massacre was a consequence of American involvement in Vietnam because of the way the soldiers were

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