A forgotten hero stopped the My Lai massacre 50 years ago

> On the 30th anniversary of the massacre, Thompson went back to My Lai and met some of the people whose lives he had saved. "There were real good highs," he told me, "and very low lows. One of the ladies that we had helped out that day came up to me and asked, 'Why didn't the people who committed these acts come back with you?' And I was just devastated. And then she finished her sentence: she said, 'So we could forgive them.'

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-wiener-my-lai-hug...

His crew apparently deserve some credit also. From Wikipedia:

>Colburn and Andreotta focused their guns on the 2nd Platoon

That could have been fatal.

As a student of WW2, millions of Japanese lives were saved by the atomic bombs:

1) Japanese military leaders were planning to continue fighting until no citizens were left: "even if the Japanese people die, their spirit will live on."

Surrender rates in previous island battles were on the order of 1% (ie. 99% killed or seriously injured.)

2) the Japanese people were facing starvation had the war continued. The early surrender helped with the rebuilding effort and prevented the nation from literally starving to death.

3) American leaders chose to bomb secondary cities, rather than completely destroy Tokyo, a capital city

4) had Russia invaded Japan, they typically would de-industrialize the enemy by transporting power plants and other facilities back to Russia

5) Japan actually refused to surrender to the USA. The emperor's broadcast never used the word, and the leader who signed the surrender document was approx. #10 in the leadership hierarchy.

The emperor was a serious amateur microbiologist and realized what an atomic bomb was, so did not need convincing that the war was lost.

(He was against starting the war with China and the USA and said so, but faced assassination and constitutional issues if he made a serious effort to change sentiment.)

It is not as simple as that though. We know from war and concentration camps how many people 'just follow orders'.

Briefly...

In WW2 the Nazis learned from the Soviets that mass graves were a bad thing if discovered. They also knew that the Final Solution was an actual crime, the leaders acknowledged this but deemed the crime to be necessary for the survival of their own imaginably 'Aryan' race. Hence they got the Sonderkommando Jews to exhume mass graves and to build huge funeral pyres that they then used to burn the bodies. The Sonderkommando guys just followed orders until they were expected to build one final funeral pyre after all of the bodies were burned. By then they twigged that they were expected to meet their own fate that way. Only then, at the last chance, did they try to do something, e.g. try and escape or sabotage the gig. So long as there was someone in front of them in the queue these poor souls could be forced to do the unthinkable.

The Germans had it all worked out, they could get people to shove their own mother into the gas chamber. They had enough bullets to make this fully possible. They could get practically anyone to participate in the criminal venture. Even if life was a misery in the concentration camp they could get people to want to stay there another day because life under such circumstances was better than being actually dead.

I am certain in my own mind that everyone I have ever met in my entire life could be made into a Sonderkommando if push came to shove. This includes people in my family so quite a claim.

I am also sure that everyone I have met has heard of the holocaust. Yet I do not imagine any heroics of the Schindlers List type of Hollywood movie.

On the other hand, most regular soldiers do not like killing people, even if they are engaged in an 'honest war' and not a known crime. Some soldiers deliberately miss. Some go AWOL. Some play football with the enemy on Christmas Day.

But then you have situations like Abu Ghraig where atrocities happen but the people involved do not believe they are committing a crime and have no fear of being found out. These people really do have a psychological problem, they are actually 'sick in the head'.

However, during wartime the overwhelming majority of the population are not on the front line or anywhere near. Due to fear, propaganda and circumstance (e.g. being a parent, being too young, being too old) this bystander population passively goes along with the war, even if they do not fully subscribe to the doctrine of the day. These people have no skin in the game, they mostly support the doctrine and they don't think that far outside of what they are told to think, even if they laugh at some of the lies told to them. When the likes of MLK talk of being alone, it is these bystander folk that hurt the most.

Yes civilians do die in wars but the conduct of the US forces in South east Asia was pretty reprehensible by any measure. Particularly if you’ve read “Kill anything that moves” by Nick Turse