How does The my Lai massacre portray the vietnam war?

Question

What is the importance of The my Lai massacre incident.
Why is this masscare happend during vietnam war?
Please, I want know the answer

Answer 1

Evidence stands in opposition to the claims of the prior answers. My Lai and My Song are not the exploited examples of communists revisionism. Rather they represent the brutality of the US war on the Vietnamese. A brutality so institutionalized that it is surprising only My Lai made it to the US head lines. In the rest of the world, we knew quite well that crimes against the peasant people of Indochina occurred everyday. Children sprayed with napalm and agent orange, women raped in torture rooms... as it is today, US cruelty against non whites is rampant. My Lai and Abu Gharib are an example of the impossibility to silence all the crimes committed by the US army. The vast majority of those crimes were covered up and remained covered up, so don't tell me this is a revision. Killing 4M people is genocide, a crime against humanity any way you put it.
The Viet Nam War can be portrayed as nothing other than the outright opposition of the US to human freedom.

Answer 2

My Lai was a symptom of an Army over extended and unwilling to face the situation. This is what happened to
the Army when it allowed really third rate officers command
over inexperienced young draftee soldiers who also lacked an experienced NCO corps.

It was a Brigade and a few battalions of men in a fairly secure area that was mostly fighting Viet Cong versus the NVA regulars that were the major threat at this time. Hence the unit got the dregs of replacements. Calley would have been unacceptable in most other units. He was that flawed
and everyone knew such.

OCS had many fine former NCO's and experienced men in the system but Calley got in when the OCS standards were lax. That does not excuse anything. It explains some. Most forget that there were a few level headed men around who did eventually stop the murder.

The one man (NCO) that may have prevented the incident was severely wounded a day or so before.

The report by General Peers is a good study of all that was wrong. Trust me I was in another unit and when we learned of the folly we besides feeling sick knew that "the Army" had
allowed the entire Brigade to exist with a lack of experienced NCO's and officers. Men from my unit would have deserted rather than serve in the unit that failed even before the episode. They were that pathetic. So, in a way many a "good" soldier knew that things were wrong before the
event. One does see lessons that we should have learned better as with a few in Iraq.

One cannot have infantry without seasoned NCO's, and well trained officers. The Boy Scouts had better leadership than the 11th Brigade. Yes, many of us wondered what would have happened if we would have been in that dreadful company and platoon with Lt Calley. Just a personal view,
he would have not lasted long in the 101st Airborne. But that does not make it any easier to recall.

This question should always be asked and the answers do reflect that most all "get it" now.

Answer 3

It resulted in a lot of bad publicity for the US, just like the Abu Graib scandal has.
Seymour Hersh's book on the massacre is very interesting if you want to learn more. He always does a thorough job of investigative journalism.
Basically there was a leadership failure from the platoon leader, Lieutenant Calley all the way up to the division commander, a two star general. The difference between the two is that Calley was court martialled and served his sentence under house arrest at Fort Benning where he is now a successful businessman. The general's career continued upward and uninterrupted.
In defense of the soldiers involved, it should be pointed out that they were constantly being targeted by mines and booby traps and never got to confront the enemy. Finally they snapped.

Answer 4

i don't really get what your question is about, but the mai lai massacre was a small, insignificant incident that got the US army into a lot of trouble. compareable acts by the viet-cong are never reffered to, but any impartial student of history knows that such acts were the reason that vietnam won the war. i'm not promoting such despicable acts, but had the western media been more responsible and less biased in its reporting, perhaps america would have won the war.

Answer 5

It is important because of the selective propaganda impact. It allowed the forces allied to the communists to pretend that the US army was a bunch of uncontrolled and murderous thugs.
Of course the same people chose to say nothing about the murder campaign waged by the pro-communist forces on a daily basis, or of the massacre in Hue during the Tet offensive.

Mind you, I am not saying that the My Lai murders were in any way justifiable. Just that it boggles the mind that an isolated incident of murder committed by overstressedand undertrained soldiers is portrayed as a institutionalised crime but the deliberate, planned murder of milions of people by the communists is "a detail of history" - assuming it is even acknowledged in any manner.

Answer 6

It portrays american soldiers in a very negative light, it was a terrible and shameful event that took the lives of innocent people. American soldiers were found guilty, I believe in the killing of people in the village of My Lai.