A thing more oft than not forgotten about war, is the individual element. I was in my countries armed forces, while necessary. I saw many different types of commanders during that time. One thing not to forget is that a person is still a human even if a soldier. My commander ordered things I hated to do, while a person in a similar position was hung for failure to perform duty, allegedly because of his belief in human life.
A forgotten hero stopped the My Lai massacre 50 years ago
41–50 of 107 posts
Re: A forgotten hero stopped the My Lai massacre 50 years ago
#42I want to add to what chris_mc and others said confirming this horrible instance is used as a training exercise for lots of the US military.
When I did USMC boot camp in the late 2000s this and other less publicized examples were used to enforce disobeying unlawful orders and encouraging critical thought.
To quote a West Wing episode (AFAIK): "All wars are crimes." I'm glad we try to do better by teaching from our mistakes.
Re: A forgotten hero stopped the My Lai massacre 50 years ago
#43There are a lot of people who use the My Lai massacre as an example of the 'real' America. There are a lot of My Lai's and William Calley's in other countries throughout history. But far fewer Hugh Thompson's and to me that's the 'real' America. In Michigan we've got the recent example of Dr. Hanna Attisha and the Flint water crisis. She was vilified by Flint officials, state officials and by the state's universities…
> There are a lot of My Lai's and William Calley's in other countries throughout history. But far fewer Hugh Thompson's and to me that's the 'real' America.
There were a lot of My Lai’s in Vietnam. Biggest misconception is that it was some kind of fluke. But in a “war” where entire civillian populated areas were designated “free fire zones” where you could kill anything that moves, civillian massacres were the norm. Not every solider did it of course but it was a regular feature of that war.
It is good to recognize brave soldiers that resisted. But we must be respectful enough of those who were murdered to not attempt to rehabilitate the image of America in Vietnam by pretending those resisters were the norm or represented the true spirit of America and what it was aiming for or some such sentimental nationalist nonsense. As the article notes, a My Lai happened every month in Vietnam. Civillian mass murder was an explicit goal and the U.S. was very good at it.
Re: A forgotten hero stopped the My Lai massacre 50 years ago
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
I see what you're saying here. But unfortunately, civilians get massacred in wars. If you laud the people who stop the massacres as heroes, you hopefully increase the odds of someone stopping the next massacre. Finally, Hugh Thompson absolutely is a hero. Your quotes around that word are unnecessary.
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
I completely agree - US forces behaved terribly during the Vietnam war. Sadly, I can't think of a war where civilians didn't get massacred. Maybe not to the same extent as in Vietnam, but massacres happen. The truly fucked up part is that there are likely many massacres that have never been reported.
Re: A forgotten hero stopped the My Lai massacre 50 years ago
#45There are a lot of people who use the My Lai massacre as an example of the 'real' America. There are a lot of My Lai's and William Calley's in other countries throughout history. But far fewer Hugh Thompson's and to me that's the 'real' America. In Michigan we've got the recent example of Dr. Hanna Attisha and the Flint water crisis. She was vilified by Flint officials, state officials and by the state's universities…
> There are a lot of My Lai's and William Calley's in other countries throughout history. But far fewer Hugh Thompson's and to me that's the 'real' America. There were a lot of My Lai’s in Vietnam . Biggest misconception is that it was some kind of fluke. But in a “war” where entire civillian populated areas were designated “free fire zones” where you could kill anything that moves, civillian massacres were the norm.…
Its one of those features of asymmetric warfare, that you can drag the enemy into the moral-mud-pits of combating opposition among the civilian population.
For the opposite side this has the benefit of getting new recruits among the relatives and survivors and obviously of leading a far superior enemy by the noose ring through the public arena -which raises Opposition in a democracy - and reduces combat effectiveness in the military in dictatorships and democracy's (sovjet afghanistan).
I would really love to have the CIAs Information on how much vietnamese population was in active opposition to the american "police" action. My estimate would be around 75 %.
Re: A forgotten hero stopped the My Lai massacre 50 years ago
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://outline.com/pvdxgM And 100% agreed, particularly for a major newspaper.
Thanks for the link. I hadn't heard of outline.com before, but seems like a useful service.
It is pretty nifty. They have a Chrome extension too, but that seems like massive overkill so I threw together a quick bookmarklet [1]. You need a decently new browser to use it.
fetch(
"https://outlineapi.com/parse_article?source_url=" +
encodeURIComponent(window.location)
)
.then(res => res.json())
.then(body => {
if (body.error) {
return alert(`Outline Bookmarklet Error: ${body.error}`);
}
window.location.href = `https://outline.com/${body.data.short_code}`
})
.catch(err => {
alert("Outline Bookmarklet Error. See console for details.");
console.error(err);
});
javascript:fetch("https://outlineapi.com/parse_article?source_url="+encodeURIComponent(window.location)).then(o=>o.json()).then(o=>{if(o.error)return alert(`Outline Bookmarklet Error: ${o.error}`);window.location.href=`https://outline.com/${o.data.short_code}`}).catch(o=>{alert("Outline Bookmarklet Error. See console for details."),console.error(o)});
Re: A forgotten hero stopped the My Lai massacre 50 years ago
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is not true, serious military figures in the US armed forces concluded that Japan was utterly defeated and was making peace feelers. They were basically defenseless at that stage of the war, against the bombing raids. The civilian massacre could have been prevented by merely demonstrating the bomb. However they chose to experiment by dropping it on an city.
I think it's more complicated than that. There were at least some people who were not planning to surrender. If it was up to me, I would have probably dropped it on a mostly uninhabited island near Japan. It's probably true we wanted to scare the Russians with our new super weapon. But the big question is if Japan was close to surrendering anyway is why didn't Japan surrender after the first one, why did it take a se…
Ernest Lawrence, who worked on the Manhattan Project (and won the Nobel Prize in Physics for inventing the cyclotron), famously recommended a non-lethal demonstration of the bombs:
> At the May 31 meeting, Lawrence suggested that a demonstration of the atomic bomb might possibly convince the Japanese to surrender. This was rejected, however, out of fear that the bomb might be a dud, that the Japanese might put American prisoners of war in the area, or that they might manage to shoot down the plane. The shock value of the new weapon could also be lost.
https://www.osti.gov/opennet/manhattan-project-history/Event...
Re: A forgotten hero stopped the My Lai massacre 50 years ago
#48It's a bit strange that we are remembering the "hero" but not the 500 or so innocent vietnamese men, women, children and infants who were raped, tortured and/or killed. Strange how we always have to make ourselves the good guys. The "heroes". If you look at the war photos. You'll see infants. Such a horrific war. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Lai_Massacre It's also strange that we say this is the worst event in vi…
Isn’t that how it usually works. Japan remembers its war dead, we remember ours. They rember their heroes, we remember ours. Same for Soviets, Germans, British, French, Spanish, Philipinoes, Indians, Pakistanis, etc..
Since you mention the Germans: Their process of working through the past ("Vergangenheitsbewältigung") very much includes remembering the victims, massacres and non-heros, as well as embarrassement and remorse, while spending very little energy discussing the actions of positive figures. And even they are seldomly described as "heroes" ("Helden"), probably to avoid any ambiguity regarding the responsibility of the German people for the horrible events. Alas, Germany might be unique in that regard.
Re: A forgotten hero stopped the My Lai massacre 50 years ago
#49I want to add to what chris_mc and others said confirming this horrible instance is used as a training exercise for lots of the US military. When I did USMC boot camp in the late 2000s this and other less publicized examples were used to enforce disobeying unlawful orders and encouraging critical thought. To quote a West Wing episode (AFAIK): "All wars are crimes." I'm glad we try to do better by teaching from our mi…
>I'm glad we try to do better by teaching from our mistakes.
...
> Kills a million people in iraq
Re: A forgotten hero stopped the My Lai massacre 50 years ago
#50If there was any justice in the world, the US officials who dictated military action in Vietnam would be tried for war crimes.