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At My Lai: The Photographer Who Captured the Massacre

230 points by user982 9y ago

Red_Tarsius 9y ago
I was surprised by how much war footage and gut-wrenching videos I could find online. More people should be exposed to those documents as a form of shock therapy. It gives weight and meaning to words so effortlessly spoken by our leaders. It might also help young people have a little more empathy for actual individuals, as opposed to abstract demographics. The article reminds me of War against War!. It's a 1924 anti-war photobook (180 images) designed by German pacifist Ernst Friedrich. It's a sobering read. http://craigritchie.co.uk/archives/2581 http://craigritchie.co.uk/archives/2581 [WARNING: 18+ NSFL] EDIT: I added a few quotes describing the War against War! photobook. > Outraged by the unprecedented barbarism and massive destruction of the First World War, Ernst Friedrich complied and published a collection of pictures and other visual material which attempted to illustrate not only the tragic human consequences of war, but also the lies and hypocrisy of the social, political, and economic forces that produced and promoted it. Aimed at an international audience with multi-lingual supporting text and captions, it was one of the first concerted photographic expressions of protest against the barbarism of modern warfare in all its tragic folly. > Friedrich’s strategy was to present shocking images of the atrocities of war and then juxtapose the official German patriotic and military propaganda and rhetoric of the time with graphic illustrations of what this discourse actually produced. > The horrific imagery builds gradually, commencing with illustrations of children’s toys and propaganda posters, followed by photographs of the soldier’s march to war, the privilege of the elites orchestrating the violence, the devastated and then forgotten battlefields [...] and the graveyards of the dead. > The most unbearable pages are in a section called ‘The Face of War’, twenty-four close-ups of military and non-military survivors with huge facial wounds. > Never before had the people there been subjected to such horrendous images of the savagery and the senseless destruction of the First World War. During WW1, most European governments forbade the publication of war photographs and few images of the war had appeared before the publication of Friedrich’s book.
- Swizec 9y ago
  I went to a First World War museum near the Italian Front as a kid. I will never forget this photo of soldiers who survived the war missing half their face. https://www.tripadvisor.ie/LocationPhotoDirectLink-g319788-d276481-i73732715-Kobarid_Museum_Kobariski_muzej-Kobarid_Slovenian_Littoral_Region.html https://www.tripadvisor.ie/LocationPhotoDirectLink-g319788-d...
- fractallyte 9y ago
  Most of the big wars were/are ultimately started (or allowed to start) by politicians. The word 'politician' can be thought of as a portmanteau: political technician. So the responsibility is on us to enforce this distinction: who among our political technicians is actually qualified to lead? Heinlein's Starship Troopers had the right idea. I wish just one nation in the world would implement it. Maybe it would lead to a cascade of rationality, and future wars would become impossible as a result.
  - afarrell 9y ago
    In a society where politicians rely on a broad coalition of supporters in order to stay in power, I think it is an error to place all of the blame for misleadership on those same politicians. I think you have to first look at what incentives those politicians operate under and then look at which ones swim with or against those incentives. As CGP Grey says, Take the throne to act, and the throne acts upon you. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs
  - afarrell 9y ago
    > Heinlein's Starship Troopers had the right idea. I'm pretty unconvinced that limiting voters to volunteer military veterans would prevent war. I think it would instead lead to a government which is more able to successfully pander to those with a value-system that leads them to volunteer for the military.
    - 7952 9y ago
      It is ironic how that is a mirror image of fascist beliefs about military virtue. They wanted to give power to veterans so that wars could be started and won! They wanted to suppress the influence of weak willed peacniks. It is ironic that this could be reversed to imply that rationality means peace. Heinlein had some pretty fascist ideas, and books like starship troopers project that in a comfortable form. It is easy to attach our own ideas of what is rational, but that is very subjective. To a fascist war is rational.
lopmotr 9y ago
How do people manage to condemn this type of thing but not the 100,000s murdered in Iraq because of the US invasion? I can't work out how Americans think being proud of their soldiers - both left and right wing people are. Is there something I don't know?
- Larrikin 9y ago
  My opinion has changed after you've marginalized a tragedy and treated it like an either or event in history. Thank you for showing that neither is important by what about ing.
  - lopmotr 9y ago
    I don't really understand you. I want to know why Americans on both political wings aggressively support their soldiers. I can understand if it's a country being attacked and their own soldiers defend it. But nobody is attacking America. What good did its soldiers do by fighting wars instead of just waiting to defend?
    - meowface 9y ago
      In the US, support for soldiers is often completely orthogonal to support for the government or war plans. Soldiers are effectively considered brave men and women selflessly serving their country, even if they're fighting an unjust war. The rationalization is usually that politicians and other elites are to blame for the wars, while the soldiers are mere pawns who bear no culpability (or at least that's the perception for the ones who aren't torturing people or committing Abu Ghraib-like atrocities; those individuals are seen as a tiny minority of soldiers). They're "just following orders". As for the actual justification behind that, it's highly up for debate. But regardless, you'll generally find the vast majority of the US left in the somewhat paradoxical position of unilateral praise for soldiers with simultaneous hatred towards the government's military decisions and actions.
    - indymike 9y ago
      Two reasons: they chose to take the job (which can result in your own death and being ordered to do very difficult things in service to your country) and they are our children, brothers and sisters. Once they chose to serve, they are subject to the orders of our civilian government and so we separate the decision to go to war made by politicians from the decision to potentially die in service to our country made by soldiers, sailors, marines and airmen. Finally, most wars the US gets involved with are sold to the people as defense. We we sold that Iraq was behind the attack on the World Trade center and the removal of Sadam Hussein would make our country safe.
rdtsc 9y ago
> Duc was eight years old in March 1968, and as Haeberle spoke with him, through an interpreter, he realized with a jolt that the woman he had photographed dead behind a rock 43 years earlier was Duc’s mother, Nguyen Thi Tau. It was hard not to cry reading that. It is terrifying to think about all the other massacres where a photographer wasn't there to document it or someone like the helicopter pilot Hugh Thompson to intervene.
chrischen 9y ago
Wow had no idea the Vietnam was this bad (bad as in how bad the Americans were). Almost makes the invasion of Iraq look noble. I went through the US educational system and while we know about the Vietnam war, the protesters, this is definitely not the picture of the war that we were given. It's basically propaganda and history rewriting what they are doing here, even though the US didn't even technically win the war. We were taught that the Vietnam war protesters were just pacifist hippies. No wonder why China is fiercely anti-American (in terms of influence, policy, etc).
- fractallyte 9y ago
  Every nation will try to hide the atrocities its own forces inflict on the 'enemy'. There's nothing unique about America in this regard; China is just as guilty.
  - chrischen 9y ago
    Except people only believe the other side hides these things.
  - squarefoot 9y ago
    "Every nation will try to hide the atrocities its own forces inflict on the 'enemy'." An the other way around, which could be even worse. From 1991 to 2009 US TV stations were barred from showing coffins returning from war zones, so that the public was disconnected from the atrocities of war, no matter who would commit them. On one side we (though I'm not an US citizen the principle applies globally) have action war movies where badass heroes save the world - those are characters finely crafted in a way every teen would like to impersonate in real life - and on the other side there can be regulations preventing media from showing what really war is (not to mention the growing use of drones). This is the worst kind of propaganda, the one that makes you want to kill or be killed and be also excited or even proud of it.
- contingencies 9y ago
  AFAIK it's significantly more nuanced. Actually China did support Vietnam in the war - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_War#People's_Republic_of_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_War#People's_Republic_... - but invaded Vietnam shortly thereafter, as China was annoyed Vietnam de-throned their darling regime the Khmer Rouge. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Vietnamese_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Vietnamese_War (Meanwhile, the US bombed the shit out of Laos, who barely had any literacy and were essentially bystanders). Vietnam kicked their ass (the Chinese made basically zero progress in taking land, though later declared themselves "victorious", having "taught the Vietnamese a lesson"), but at a cost: many deaths and a legacy of landmines along the remote and mountainous border. The border was only fully demarcated about ten years ago. These days it is better known for people smuggling (mostly young women from Vietnam to China) and drug smuggling (heroin and meth). Factories are moving from China to Vietnam to obtain cheaper labour, and Vietnam's infrastructure has developed substantially, though it is still behind China. In the 1940s the US and Nationalist China were allies - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hump https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hump ... later, the Nationalists fled and and AFAIK Communist China's only major military engagement with the US was in Korea, where US agents descended from McCarthyism tortured Communists on what is now conveniently remade as a holidaying destination. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_War#Chinese_POWs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_War#Chinese_POWs Then there's the French being kicked out, the fact that Ho Chi Minh was French educated himself, evolution in US-French relations and the US takeover of France's former most favoured foreign nation status in Thailand, which was used as a strategic regional base for US military supply. Possible conclusion: It's all a mess, things are never simple in war, humans are sick greedy bastards, and getting over old hatreds stemming from nationalism and past events could be the best thing for the world.
fractallyte 9y ago
So, just finished reading the article... I guess everyone should, just for the sense of thoughtfulness it should provoke. The thing is, the perpetrators started out as ordinary young American men. What tipped the balance, to turn them into stone-cold killers? It's not unique to this situation: this is what soldiers eventually tend to do. The ultimate modern example of pure, large scale monstrosity is the Red Army, at the close of WWII. But - make no mistake - many (most?) males are capable of such acts. Some serious psychological tools need to be thrown at this problem.
- Red_Tarsius 9y ago
  Anyone could turn into a monster. Even you, even I. It's like the old myth of the Sirens and Ulysses. We have to be vigilant and protect human rights beforehand, lest we are lured by bloodlust in the worst times. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petar_Brzica#cite_ref-2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petar_Brzica#cite_ref-2
  - fractallyte 9y ago
    I prefer to think that I could never turn into a monster. Solzhenitsyn managed to hold on to his humanity, through some of the worst atrocities imaginable. "The little daughter's on the mattress, Dead. How many have been on it A platoon, a company perhaps? A girl's been turned into a woman, A woman turned into a corpse. It's all come down to simple phrases: Do not forget! Do not forgive! Blood for blood! A tooth for a tooth!" -Prussian Nights by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prussian_Nights https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prussian_Nights)
    - verylittlemeat 9y ago
      You would be surprised. Some of the most terrible people in the Nazi concentration camps were fellow prisoners tasked with being Kapos (prisoner overseers). The Kapos were spared some of the worst labor but in exchange had to show extreme brutality to the prisoners they oversaw so the Nazis wouldn't question their effectiveness. This isn't the only example: Stanford prison experiment and the Milgram experiment. I'm sure there are others. When you value being alive many people will do anything to survive.
dfee 9y ago
Fucking horrific. What war does to men, and what men do in war. This can hardly be confined to Americans in Vietnam, and that doesn’t justify it, but rather provides an opportunity for pause and reflection. I’m left wondering if we’re just a bunch of dumb animals. Being capable of having that thought gives me some hope. But, what can we be when we’re surrounded by our own savagery?
megous 9y ago
Sadly, similar massacres are happening almost daily in this world. One day you see someone start a twitter campaing like #iamstillalive, the other you see a reports of him being killed in an airstrike with countless other people. People are daily begging on twitter for their lives, to be spared, to someone help them. You can easily find similar images from what you see in this article, from yesterday, day prior, almost any day of the week. Dead people, burned people, living people who have their arms baked to the bone, hacked off extremities... plenty of orhpaned children. Just yesterday ~61 people were burned to death in incendiary air strike in the middle of the city with many others injured. What is worrying though how much propaganda there is these days, which says that this is all made up, staged, people are doing it to themselves, and how many people seemingly take this shit seriously. How much effort there is to justify such attrocities. That's seriously deranged, and I still don't know what to think of it.
- rqs 9y ago
  Link: https://twitter.com/NYDailyNews/status/974073948299284481 https://twitter.com/NYDailyNews/status/974073948299284481 Weird to say but now you know why people in China treasures peace a little bit more than freedom. Massacres are common during Japanese invasion[0], and nobody stood up for civilians. The result of that was people got murdered village after village and then burned or lefted there for animals. That collective experience in some degree shaped the political landscape of China today. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Alls_Policy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Alls_Policy
  - ptaipale 9y ago
    Occasionally, a few people (foreigners) did stand up for civilians, although in the scale of events, it did not have large impact. Perhaps the most peculiar of them is the story of John Rabe, "a Nazi hero". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Rabe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Rabe
    - rangibaby 9y ago
      > “Nazi hero” Persons are always kind. It is people that do horrible things. Whether it’s the angry mob ready to stone Mary Magdalene or US soldiers wasting civilians at My Lai the principle is the same. The idea that because someone is on the other team in a war he is a monster is wartime propaganda used to justify and convince good persons to commit atrocities. There is another comment to this story where someone applies exactly this kind of thinking to the North Vietnamese.
deleted 9y ago
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eludwig 9y ago
I'd also like to recommend the Ken Burns "The Vietnam War," which can be found on PBS. It is amazingly well done and the depth of it is beyond most documentaries. For example, there is one episode (1.5+ hours) that covers a six month period from 1967 to '68. I was a small child during the war (10 in '68) and (to be truthful) only somewhat remember watching the coverage on TV. My mother said I used to ask her if I was going to have to go fight there and that I didn't want to. Thankfully, I didn't. The war ended in '75. I had just turned 17. Strangely, the My Lai massacre is not covered until a later episode. They slotted it in the time line where it was first reported --not when it actually happened. But be patient, they do get to it eventually. The sobering part about the series is that it absolutely captures the stupidity, futility, and mismanagement of the war over such a long period of time. The huge waste on both sides. The scale of it was staggering. Myself, I am always drawn to the jungle patrols and the combat portions, which are fierce, terrifying and totally engulfing. I can see why certain people are drawn to war. It's the ultimate video game. Everything is on the line. You have no idea what the enemy will do and (really, in the end) no idea what you will do when faced with that visceral terror and excitement. What a rush it must be! And how horrible too. I am in inveterate coward. I don't believe I would have gone if called, but my 17 year old self is someone I don't really know anymore. Anyway, the series is great and I highly recommend it.
- TaylorAlexander 9y ago
  Seconded. I just made it through the whole 20 hour series and it was sobering. I never learned very much about this significant war in American history (I am American). To think that we started this war to help an ally (France) maintain their colonial power over people who wanted to be free, and then stayed in it because it would look bad, is horrific. Nixon even interfered with peace talks before he was elected to make sure he’d have a better chance of being elected, and that fact was seen as so damaging that those in power decided to keep it the American people in the dark. A presidential candidate interfered with the peace process to get elected and the American people weren’t even told about it. And then the massacres. So much humanity was lost. Not just in the massacres but in the battles for a war that didn’t need to be fought. The Vietnam war is such a dark part of human history, and yet we barely talk about it. Or when we do, many people to this day believe the government lines they were being fed at the time of the war. That this was necessary, etc. And now we have a president that threatens war and people support him in it. Hell Obama pushed war too and advanced many war efforts. I wish we could stop all this killing. I mean - we could. I wish we would.
z3t4 9y ago
I think the savage is in the human nature. Maybe in the future wars can be fought virtually. With the advance of VR we fight it out in "Quake" rather in real life.
technotarek 9y ago
There's a good short video here with Seymour Hersh telling how he broke the story and brought it all to public attention: https://investigatingpower.org/vietnam-war/ https://investigatingpower.org/vietnam-war/ (Disclosure: We designed and developed the site.)
vnjp 9y ago
iam vietnamese
coupdejarnac 9y ago
There is a Frontline or other PBS special about My Lai from about 5 years ago. I think I saw it on netflix, but it should be on the PBS website, too.
arca_vorago 9y ago
Vietnam was never meant to be won, it just continued the Korea and WW2 bleed out strategy. (With a side of MICC profits and deep state drug running black profits) Read up on Robert G Thompson for more on the bleed out comment if you are genuinely curious. All these wars we get into, people need to focus on the "advisors" influencing policy. What ends up happening is people debate about the trees and miss the forest.
jashkenas 9y ago
For firsthand testimony by American soldiers involved in similar operations — I cannot recommend Winter Soldier, the 1972 documentary film, highly enough. It's something that every American adult deserves to see. Part 1: http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x67rpbi http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x67rpbi Part 2: http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x681bui http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x681bui In short: The film records a 1971 Vietnam Veterans Against the War event in Detroit, where dozens of veterans spoke in public, to the media and on the record, for the first time, about war crimes that they had seen and taken part in, just months or years before.
- deleted 9y ago
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slantedview 9y ago
While My Lai was horrible, evidence collected since then such as in Nick Turse's book "Kill Anything That Moves" [1] and at the Winter Soldier hearings [2] show that Mai Lai was hardly an aberration. Horrible atrocities committed by US soldiers were widespread in Vietnam, much more so than most people digesting the Ken Burns narrative realize. What's important to learn about My Lai isn't just that it happened - that Americans are indeed as capable of horrible atrocities as anyone - but that almost no consequences resulted. In fact, as Turse discovers, Army officials who were aware of what was happening in Vietnam later moved to take control of the Criminal Investigation Division in order to suppress investigation and prosecution of the innumerable war crimes that took place. The most significant prosecution that took place was of Lt. William Calley, who ultimately received 3 1/2 years of house arrest after being convicted of hundreds of murders. The message that this sends to the rest of the world is that we are imperialist killers of the highest order, and we are above the law. Without looking at these atrocities in the eye, we are doomed to repeat them. And so we have. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Kill-Anything-That-Moves-American/dp/1250045061 https://www.amazon.com/Kill-Anything-That-Moves-American/dp/... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter_Soldier_Investigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter_Soldier_Investigation
joshuaheard 9y ago
For many, this incident is a metaphor for the U.S. involvement in Viet Nam: thuggish U.S. soldiers came to a country they didn't understand and killed everyone. This view lacks the context of the war. The U.S. and its allies were fighting the Cold War, a war against Communist Bloc hegemony. We were fighting against the expansion of Communism in South Viet Nam, trying to prevent The Domino Effect. The primary reason we lost the war was micro-managing by Washington bureaucrats, and overly-limited rules of engagement. Keep in mind, our mission was to assist the South Koreans in defending a guerrilla war. For this reason, we never invaded North Vietnam, and initially refrained from going in to neighboring countries to attack the Viet Cong revolutionaries staging there. Nixon started bombing these countries, but by then, it was too little, too late, and he ended the war.
- stelonix 9y ago
  I believe this view also does not consider economic and government system hegemony as a good reason to end lives. Many of the people who lived those massacres, from Vietnam to Iraq seem to agree with this view. Since I come from a country that has also been victim to American interventionism I tend to agree, our lives are more important than capitalism, communism, war on terror or whatever it is the excuse of the times for invading sovereign nations and slaughtering its people. I believe we who see that "metaphor" rather see it as the truth: US soldiers go to countries they know nothing about and kill everyone. I do not fancy being murdered. Killing people is wrong, plain and simple.
pimmen 9y ago
The My Lai massacre is an important event because what happened to the soldiers who committed the atrocities (nothing) echoes through history. Nobody is still being punished for what happened in Haditha, Abu Ghraib or Gitmo. During the 1940s the US prosecuted Japanese and German war criminals by adhering to the Yamashita principle and disqualifying the Nuremberg defense; basically, commanders are always responsible for crimes that their soldiers commit if they aren't actively combating it themselves (this is what convicted Yamashita, who occupied the Philippines) and you can't blame your CO when you commit war crimes (which convicted a lot of people in Nuremberg). But, after the My Lai massacre, the soldiers could successfully use the Nuremberg defense themselves. Their CO was also not under the Yamashita principle because he only served three years of a commuted sentence. The My Lai massacre should not be forgotten because it's a reminder that it's been more than 50 years now, when is America going to start measuring up to the moral standards it claims it has?

230 points by user982 9y ago

I was surprised by how much war footage and gut-wrenching videos I could find online. More people should be exposed to those documents as a form of shock therapy. It gives weight and meaning to words so effortlessly spoken by our leaders. It might also help young people have a little more empathy for actual individuals, as opposed to abstract demographics. The article reminds me of War against War!. It's a 1924 anti-war photobook (180 images) designed by German pacifist Ernst Friedrich. It's a sobering read. http://craigritchie.co.uk/archives/2581 http://craigritchie.co.uk/archives/2581 [WARNING: 18+ NSFL] EDIT: I added a few quotes describing the War against War! photobook. > Outraged by the unprecedented barbarism and massive destruction of the First World War, Ernst Friedrich complied and published a collection of pictures and other visual material which attempted to illustrate not only the tragic human consequences of war, but also the lies and hypocrisy of the social, political, and economic forces that produced and promoted it. Aimed at an international audience with multi-lingual supporting text and captions, it was one of the first concerted photographic expressions of protest against the barbarism of modern warfare in all its tragic folly. > Friedrich’s strategy was to present shocking images of the atrocities of war and then juxtapose the official German patriotic and military propaganda and rhetoric of the time with graphic illustrations of what this discourse actually produced. > The horrific imagery builds gradually, commencing with illustrations of children’s toys and propaganda posters, followed by photographs of the soldier’s march to war, the privilege of the elites orchestrating the violence, the devastated and then forgotten battlefields [...] and the graveyards of the dead. > The most unbearable pages are in a section called ‘The Face of War’, twenty-four close-ups of military and non-military survivors with huge facial wounds. > Never before had the people there been subjected to such horrendous images of the savagery and the senseless destruction of the First World War. During WW1, most European governments forbade the publication of war photographs and few images of the war had appeared before the publication of Friedrich’s book.

Swizec 9y ago
I went to a First World War museum near the Italian Front as a kid. I will never forget this photo of soldiers who survived the war missing half their face. https://www.tripadvisor.ie/LocationPhotoDirectLink-g319788-d276481-i73732715-Kobarid_Museum_Kobariski_muzej-Kobarid_Slovenian_Littoral_Region.html https://www.tripadvisor.ie/LocationPhotoDirectLink-g319788-d...
fractallyte 9y ago
Most of the big wars were/are ultimately started (or allowed to start) by politicians. The word 'politician' can be thought of as a portmanteau: political technician. So the responsibility is on us to enforce this distinction: who among our political technicians is actually qualified to lead? Heinlein's Starship Troopers had the right idea. I wish just one nation in the world would implement it. Maybe it would lead to a cascade of rationality, and future wars would become impossible as a result.
- afarrell 9y ago
  In a society where politicians rely on a broad coalition of supporters in order to stay in power, I think it is an error to place all of the blame for misleadership on those same politicians. I think you have to first look at what incentives those politicians operate under and then look at which ones swim with or against those incentives. As CGP Grey says, Take the throne to act, and the throne acts upon you. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs
- afarrell 9y ago
  > Heinlein's Starship Troopers had the right idea. I'm pretty unconvinced that limiting voters to volunteer military veterans would prevent war. I think it would instead lead to a government which is more able to successfully pander to those with a value-system that leads them to volunteer for the military.
  - 7952 9y ago
    It is ironic how that is a mirror image of fascist beliefs about military virtue. They wanted to give power to veterans so that wars could be started and won! They wanted to suppress the influence of weak willed peacniks. It is ironic that this could be reversed to imply that rationality means peace. Heinlein had some pretty fascist ideas, and books like starship troopers project that in a comfortable form. It is easy to attach our own ideas of what is rational, but that is very subjective. To a fascist war is rational.

lopmotr 9y ago

How do people manage to condemn this type of thing but not the 100,000s murdered in Iraq because of the US invasion? I can't work out how Americans think being proud of their soldiers - both left and right wing people are. Is there something I don't know?

Larrikin 9y ago
My opinion has changed after you've marginalized a tragedy and treated it like an either or event in history. Thank you for showing that neither is important by what about ing.
- lopmotr 9y ago
  I don't really understand you. I want to know why Americans on both political wings aggressively support their soldiers. I can understand if it's a country being attacked and their own soldiers defend it. But nobody is attacking America. What good did its soldiers do by fighting wars instead of just waiting to defend?
  - meowface 9y ago
    In the US, support for soldiers is often completely orthogonal to support for the government or war plans. Soldiers are effectively considered brave men and women selflessly serving their country, even if they're fighting an unjust war. The rationalization is usually that politicians and other elites are to blame for the wars, while the soldiers are mere pawns who bear no culpability (or at least that's the perception for the ones who aren't torturing people or committing Abu Ghraib-like atrocities; those individuals are seen as a tiny minority of soldiers). They're "just following orders". As for the actual justification behind that, it's highly up for debate. But regardless, you'll generally find the vast majority of the US left in the somewhat paradoxical position of unilateral praise for soldiers with simultaneous hatred towards the government's military decisions and actions.
  - indymike 9y ago
    Two reasons: they chose to take the job (which can result in your own death and being ordered to do very difficult things in service to your country) and they are our children, brothers and sisters. Once they chose to serve, they are subject to the orders of our civilian government and so we separate the decision to go to war made by politicians from the decision to potentially die in service to our country made by soldiers, sailors, marines and airmen. Finally, most wars the US gets involved with are sold to the people as defense. We we sold that Iraq was behind the attack on the World Trade center and the removal of Sadam Hussein would make our country safe.

rdtsc 9y ago

> Duc was eight years old in March 1968, and as Haeberle spoke with him, through an interpreter, he realized with a jolt that the woman he had photographed dead behind a rock 43 years earlier was Duc’s mother, Nguyen Thi Tau. It was hard not to cry reading that. It is terrifying to think about all the other massacres where a photographer wasn't there to document it or someone like the helicopter pilot Hugh Thompson to intervene.

chrischen 9y ago

Wow had no idea the Vietnam was this bad (bad as in how bad the Americans were). Almost makes the invasion of Iraq look noble. I went through the US educational system and while we know about the Vietnam war, the protesters, this is definitely not the picture of the war that we were given. It's basically propaganda and history rewriting what they are doing here, even though the US didn't even technically win the war. We were taught that the Vietnam war protesters were just pacifist hippies. No wonder why China is fiercely anti-American (in terms of influence, policy, etc).

fractallyte 9y ago
Every nation will try to hide the atrocities its own forces inflict on the 'enemy'. There's nothing unique about America in this regard; China is just as guilty.
- chrischen 9y ago
  Except people only believe the other side hides these things.
- squarefoot 9y ago
  "Every nation will try to hide the atrocities its own forces inflict on the 'enemy'." An the other way around, which could be even worse. From 1991 to 2009 US TV stations were barred from showing coffins returning from war zones, so that the public was disconnected from the atrocities of war, no matter who would commit them. On one side we (though I'm not an US citizen the principle applies globally) have action war movies where badass heroes save the world - those are characters finely crafted in a way every teen would like to impersonate in real life - and on the other side there can be regulations preventing media from showing what really war is (not to mention the growing use of drones). This is the worst kind of propaganda, the one that makes you want to kill or be killed and be also excited or even proud of it.
contingencies 9y ago
AFAIK it's significantly more nuanced. Actually China did support Vietnam in the war - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_War#People's_Republic_of_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_War#People's_Republic_... - but invaded Vietnam shortly thereafter, as China was annoyed Vietnam de-throned their darling regime the Khmer Rouge. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Vietnamese_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Vietnamese_War (Meanwhile, the US bombed the shit out of Laos, who barely had any literacy and were essentially bystanders). Vietnam kicked their ass (the Chinese made basically zero progress in taking land, though later declared themselves "victorious", having "taught the Vietnamese a lesson"), but at a cost: many deaths and a legacy of landmines along the remote and mountainous border. The border was only fully demarcated about ten years ago. These days it is better known for people smuggling (mostly young women from Vietnam to China) and drug smuggling (heroin and meth). Factories are moving from China to Vietnam to obtain cheaper labour, and Vietnam's infrastructure has developed substantially, though it is still behind China. In the 1940s the US and Nationalist China were allies - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hump https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hump ... later, the Nationalists fled and and AFAIK Communist China's only major military engagement with the US was in Korea, where US agents descended from McCarthyism tortured Communists on what is now conveniently remade as a holidaying destination. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_War#Chinese_POWs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_War#Chinese_POWs Then there's the French being kicked out, the fact that Ho Chi Minh was French educated himself, evolution in US-French relations and the US takeover of France's former most favoured foreign nation status in Thailand, which was used as a strategic regional base for US military supply. Possible conclusion: It's all a mess, things are never simple in war, humans are sick greedy bastards, and getting over old hatreds stemming from nationalism and past events could be the best thing for the world.

fractallyte 9y ago

So, just finished reading the article... I guess everyone should, just for the sense of thoughtfulness it should provoke. The thing is, the perpetrators started out as ordinary young American men. What tipped the balance, to turn them into stone-cold killers? It's not unique to this situation: this is what soldiers eventually tend to do. The ultimate modern example of pure, large scale monstrosity is the Red Army, at the close of WWII. But - make no mistake - many (most?) males are capable of such acts. Some serious psychological tools need to be thrown at this problem.

Red_Tarsius 9y ago
Anyone could turn into a monster. Even you, even I. It's like the old myth of the Sirens and Ulysses. We have to be vigilant and protect human rights beforehand, lest we are lured by bloodlust in the worst times. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petar_Brzica#cite_ref-2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petar_Brzica#cite_ref-2
- fractallyte 9y ago
  I prefer to think that I could never turn into a monster. Solzhenitsyn managed to hold on to his humanity, through some of the worst atrocities imaginable. "The little daughter's on the mattress, Dead. How many have been on it A platoon, a company perhaps? A girl's been turned into a woman, A woman turned into a corpse. It's all come down to simple phrases: Do not forget! Do not forgive! Blood for blood! A tooth for a tooth!" -Prussian Nights by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prussian_Nights https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prussian_Nights)
  - verylittlemeat 9y ago
    You would be surprised. Some of the most terrible people in the Nazi concentration camps were fellow prisoners tasked with being Kapos (prisoner overseers). The Kapos were spared some of the worst labor but in exchange had to show extreme brutality to the prisoners they oversaw so the Nazis wouldn't question their effectiveness. This isn't the only example: Stanford prison experiment and the Milgram experiment. I'm sure there are others. When you value being alive many people will do anything to survive.

dfee 9y ago

Fucking horrific. What war does to men, and what men do in war. This can hardly be confined to Americans in Vietnam, and that doesn’t justify it, but rather provides an opportunity for pause and reflection. I’m left wondering if we’re just a bunch of dumb animals. Being capable of having that thought gives me some hope. But, what can we be when we’re surrounded by our own savagery?

megous 9y ago

Sadly, similar massacres are happening almost daily in this world. One day you see someone start a twitter campaing like #iamstillalive, the other you see a reports of him being killed in an airstrike with countless other people. People are daily begging on twitter for their lives, to be spared, to someone help them. You can easily find similar images from what you see in this article, from yesterday, day prior, almost any day of the week. Dead people, burned people, living people who have their arms baked to the bone, hacked off extremities... plenty of orhpaned children. Just yesterday ~61 people were burned to death in incendiary air strike in the middle of the city with many others injured. What is worrying though how much propaganda there is these days, which says that this is all made up, staged, people are doing it to themselves, and how many people seemingly take this shit seriously. How much effort there is to justify such attrocities. That's seriously deranged, and I still don't know what to think of it.

rqs 9y ago
Link: https://twitter.com/NYDailyNews/status/974073948299284481 https://twitter.com/NYDailyNews/status/974073948299284481 Weird to say but now you know why people in China treasures peace a little bit more than freedom. Massacres are common during Japanese invasion[0], and nobody stood up for civilians. The result of that was people got murdered village after village and then burned or lefted there for animals. That collective experience in some degree shaped the political landscape of China today. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Alls_Policy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Alls_Policy
- ptaipale 9y ago
  Occasionally, a few people (foreigners) did stand up for civilians, although in the scale of events, it did not have large impact. Perhaps the most peculiar of them is the story of John Rabe, "a Nazi hero". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Rabe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Rabe
  - rangibaby 9y ago
    > “Nazi hero” Persons are always kind. It is people that do horrible things. Whether it’s the angry mob ready to stone Mary Magdalene or US soldiers wasting civilians at My Lai the principle is the same. The idea that because someone is on the other team in a war he is a monster is wartime propaganda used to justify and convince good persons to commit atrocities. There is another comment to this story where someone applies exactly this kind of thinking to the North Vietnamese.

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eludwig 9y ago

I'd also like to recommend the Ken Burns "The Vietnam War," which can be found on PBS. It is amazingly well done and the depth of it is beyond most documentaries. For example, there is one episode (1.5+ hours) that covers a six month period from 1967 to '68. I was a small child during the war (10 in '68) and (to be truthful) only somewhat remember watching the coverage on TV. My mother said I used to ask her if I was going to have to go fight there and that I didn't want to. Thankfully, I didn't. The war ended in '75. I had just turned 17. Strangely, the My Lai massacre is not covered until a later episode. They slotted it in the time line where it was first reported --not when it actually happened. But be patient, they do get to it eventually. The sobering part about the series is that it absolutely captures the stupidity, futility, and mismanagement of the war over such a long period of time. The huge waste on both sides. The scale of it was staggering. Myself, I am always drawn to the jungle patrols and the combat portions, which are fierce, terrifying and totally engulfing. I can see why certain people are drawn to war. It's the ultimate video game. Everything is on the line. You have no idea what the enemy will do and (really, in the end) no idea what you will do when faced with that visceral terror and excitement. What a rush it must be! And how horrible too. I am in inveterate coward. I don't believe I would have gone if called, but my 17 year old self is someone I don't really know anymore. Anyway, the series is great and I highly recommend it.

TaylorAlexander 9y ago
Seconded. I just made it through the whole 20 hour series and it was sobering. I never learned very much about this significant war in American history (I am American). To think that we started this war to help an ally (France) maintain their colonial power over people who wanted to be free, and then stayed in it because it would look bad, is horrific. Nixon even interfered with peace talks before he was elected to make sure he’d have a better chance of being elected, and that fact was seen as so damaging that those in power decided to keep it the American people in the dark. A presidential candidate interfered with the peace process to get elected and the American people weren’t even told about it. And then the massacres. So much humanity was lost. Not just in the massacres but in the battles for a war that didn’t need to be fought. The Vietnam war is such a dark part of human history, and yet we barely talk about it. Or when we do, many people to this day believe the government lines they were being fed at the time of the war. That this was necessary, etc. And now we have a president that threatens war and people support him in it. Hell Obama pushed war too and advanced many war efforts. I wish we could stop all this killing. I mean - we could. I wish we would.

z3t4 9y ago

I think the savage is in the human nature. Maybe in the future wars can be fought virtually. With the advance of VR we fight it out in "Quake" rather in real life.

technotarek 9y ago

There's a good short video here with Seymour Hersh telling how he broke the story and brought it all to public attention: https://investigatingpower.org/vietnam-war/ https://investigatingpower.org/vietnam-war/ (Disclosure: We designed and developed the site.)

vnjp 9y ago

iam vietnamese

coupdejarnac 9y ago

There is a Frontline or other PBS special about My Lai from about 5 years ago. I think I saw it on netflix, but it should be on the PBS website, too.

arca_vorago 9y ago

Vietnam was never meant to be won, it just continued the Korea and WW2 bleed out strategy. (With a side of MICC profits and deep state drug running black profits) Read up on Robert G Thompson for more on the bleed out comment if you are genuinely curious. All these wars we get into, people need to focus on the "advisors" influencing policy. What ends up happening is people debate about the trees and miss the forest.

jashkenas 9y ago

For firsthand testimony by American soldiers involved in similar operations — I cannot recommend Winter Soldier, the 1972 documentary film, highly enough. It's something that every American adult deserves to see. Part 1: http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x67rpbi http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x67rpbi Part 2: http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x681bui http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x681bui In short: The film records a 1971 Vietnam Veterans Against the War event in Detroit, where dozens of veterans spoke in public, to the media and on the record, for the first time, about war crimes that they had seen and taken part in, just months or years before.

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slantedview 9y ago

While My Lai was horrible, evidence collected since then such as in Nick Turse's book "Kill Anything That Moves" [1] and at the Winter Soldier hearings [2] show that Mai Lai was hardly an aberration. Horrible atrocities committed by US soldiers were widespread in Vietnam, much more so than most people digesting the Ken Burns narrative realize. What's important to learn about My Lai isn't just that it happened - that Americans are indeed as capable of horrible atrocities as anyone - but that almost no consequences resulted. In fact, as Turse discovers, Army officials who were aware of what was happening in Vietnam later moved to take control of the Criminal Investigation Division in order to suppress investigation and prosecution of the innumerable war crimes that took place. The most significant prosecution that took place was of Lt. William Calley, who ultimately received 3 1/2 years of house arrest after being convicted of hundreds of murders. The message that this sends to the rest of the world is that we are imperialist killers of the highest order, and we are above the law. Without looking at these atrocities in the eye, we are doomed to repeat them. And so we have. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Kill-Anything-That-Moves-American/dp/1250045061 https://www.amazon.com/Kill-Anything-That-Moves-American/dp/... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter_Soldier_Investigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter_Soldier_Investigation

joshuaheard 9y ago

For many, this incident is a metaphor for the U.S. involvement in Viet Nam: thuggish U.S. soldiers came to a country they didn't understand and killed everyone. This view lacks the context of the war. The U.S. and its allies were fighting the Cold War, a war against Communist Bloc hegemony. We were fighting against the expansion of Communism in South Viet Nam, trying to prevent The Domino Effect. The primary reason we lost the war was micro-managing by Washington bureaucrats, and overly-limited rules of engagement. Keep in mind, our mission was to assist the South Koreans in defending a guerrilla war. For this reason, we never invaded North Vietnam, and initially refrained from going in to neighboring countries to attack the Viet Cong revolutionaries staging there. Nixon started bombing these countries, but by then, it was too little, too late, and he ended the war.

stelonix 9y ago
I believe this view also does not consider economic and government system hegemony as a good reason to end lives. Many of the people who lived those massacres, from Vietnam to Iraq seem to agree with this view. Since I come from a country that has also been victim to American interventionism I tend to agree, our lives are more important than capitalism, communism, war on terror or whatever it is the excuse of the times for invading sovereign nations and slaughtering its people. I believe we who see that "metaphor" rather see it as the truth: US soldiers go to countries they know nothing about and kill everyone. I do not fancy being murdered. Killing people is wrong, plain and simple.

pimmen 9y ago

The My Lai massacre is an important event because what happened to the soldiers who committed the atrocities (nothing) echoes through history. Nobody is still being punished for what happened in Haditha, Abu Ghraib or Gitmo. During the 1940s the US prosecuted Japanese and German war criminals by adhering to the Yamashita principle and disqualifying the Nuremberg defense; basically, commanders are always responsible for crimes that their soldiers commit if they aren't actively combating it themselves (this is what convicted Yamashita, who occupied the Philippines) and you can't blame your CO when you commit war crimes (which convicted a lot of people in Nuremberg). But, after the My Lai massacre, the soldiers could successfully use the Nuremberg defense themselves. Their CO was also not under the Yamashita principle because he only served three years of a commuted sentence. The My Lai massacre should not be forgotten because it's a reminder that it's been more than 50 years now, when is America going to start measuring up to the moral standards it claims it has?