My Lai Massacre
The Milgram Experiment, Philip Zimbardo, and Understanding the My Lai Massacre
In the twentieth century the United States military was engaged in numerous wars and the U.S. government depicted these wars as forces of good, freedom, and morality (Americans) fighting against forces of evil, tyranny, and barbarism (America's enemies). The realities of American military behavior in these wars, however, did not always justify such a simplistic characterization. American troops at times committed war crimes and atrocities such as My Lai massacre in Vietnam and sexualized torture against Iraqi inmates at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. When these crimes were revealed to the public, American civilian and military leaders tried to minimize their significance by suggesting that what happened at My Lai and Abu Ghraib were isolated incidents committed by a "few bad apples." But the "few bad apples" thesis does not fully explain the My Lai and Abu Ghraib scandals since there were many other similar incidents that took place both in Vietnam and Iraq. By analyzing the case of the My Lai massacre, I argue in this paper that such incidents take place because of command structure that normalizes such practices and the psychological effects of continuous warfare.
My Lai was a village in the Son May area in Vietnam where U.S. troops, under the command of Lieutenant William Calley, murdered around five hundred Vietnamese civilians on March 16, 1968. There were unarmed men, women, children, and the elderly among the Vietnamese killed. According to a testimony by Ronald Haeberie, an Army photographer, one soldier shot dead two boys who Haeberie thought were about five years of age. Other accounts told of children having their throats cut and bodies mutilated, while one of the soldiers admitted during an interview a year later that he had killed "ten of fifteen...
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