My lai massacre research paper. My Lai Massacre Research Paper 2022-10-11
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The My Lai Massacre, also known as the My Lai Incident, was a mass murder of unarmed Vietnamese civilians by United States Army soldiers on March 16, 1968, during the Vietnam War. The incident took place in the village of My Lai, in the province of Quang Ngai, and resulted in the deaths of between 347 and 504 unarmed civilians, mainly women, children, and elderly people.
The massacre was committed by soldiers from the Company C, 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry Regiment, 11th Brigade, 23rd Infantry Division, which was led by Lieutenant William Calley. The unit was on a search and destroy mission, and had been told that the village of My Lai was a Viet Cong stronghold and that the villagers were providing support to the Viet Cong.
However, the villagers of My Lai were not Viet Cong and had no involvement in the war. The soldiers, under the command of Calley, entered the village and began shooting and killing civilians. Many of the victims were shot as they tried to flee, while others were rounded up and killed in groups. Some of the soldiers also raped and sexually assaulted the women and girls before killing them.
The massacre was not discovered until a year later, when a helicopter pilot, Hugh Thompson, reported the incident to his superiors. An investigation was launched, and Calley was eventually charged with murder and found guilty. He was sentenced to life in prison, but his sentence was later reduced to 20 years and he was released on parole in 1974.
The My Lai Massacre was a tragic and horrific event that resulted in the loss of hundreds of innocent lives. It is a disturbing reminder of the atrocities that can occur during times of war, and highlights the need for soldiers to always act with integrity and adhere to the rules of war. The incident also led to widespread outrage and condemnation, and contributed to the growing anti-war sentiment in the United States.
Today, the My Lai Massacre is remembered
My Lai Massacre During Vietnam War
Therefore, four officers and nine enlisted men were accused with major crimes relating to the gruesome massacre. This is because the American public saw him as a victim, not as a criminal, and opposed the court that punished him. The number of Vietnamese civilians killed could not be determined over but assumed around 500. The charges were formed against sixteen of these. Calley was the only one charged with killing 104 villagers. Introduction It is not just troops who get killed. We can be hurt.
The offensive launched by Vietcong guerrillas and North Vietnamese regulars on cities and towns throughout South Vietnam in 1968. Court martial, but only one individual tried five, 1st Lt. Few people in the documentary film community of New York City recognized the importance of what was about to happen. The situation in which the soldiers are left alone with prisoners display a similar behavior as witnessed with Why My Lai 1st semester project 46 the subject in the above mentioned experiment. The journal published on the case of Robert Rheault, a colonel in the Green Berets, who had been accused of shooting in cold blood a Vietnamese man My Lai clogged short of according a special status to its perpetrators. The crying mother displaying a maimed child, the aged grandparents herded off, the civilians crouching in unbelievable fear in brushes, ineffectively hiding from helicopters in which one of the monsters actually films their plight On the morning of 16 March 1968, American Division, US Army, entered the village of Son My, on the coast of Central Vietnam. Dawson had given Santiago food when his was confiscated, showing that Dawson cared about Santiago.
It is a fact of war that people will be killed in the crossfire, especially uniformed enemies, but it is the custom of the United States to spare the lives of the innocent. Austin: University of Texas Press, 259-422. Gun Ri one of two known cases of large-scale killings of noncombatants by U. This is a strange phenomenon, considering the feeling of horror many people get when reading about the My Lai massacre. His act stands alone in infamy among known atrocities by U.
Court but only one individual tried five, 1st Lt. Learn More Contrary to prospect there was no enemy armed forces were encountered during the assault on My Lai. If the soldiers of Charlie Company had slaughtered civilians at will. It was encouraging President Nixon to release the lieutenant from the stockade pending an appeal. New York: Simon and Schuster.
It is one of the most notorious school shootings that occurred in the United States to this day. New York: Oxford University Press. By passing the orientation and political ideology of the Vietnam War, Americans would like to show one of the most major violations of officer impunity in American military history. The Peers Commission Report with a Supplement and Introductory Essay on the Limits of Law New York: The Free Press, 1976 ; Richard Hammer, One Morning in the War: The Tragedy at Son My New York: Coward-McCann, Inc, 1970 ; Seymour Hersh, My Lai 4: A Report on the Massacre and Its Aftermath New York: Random House, 1970. It was visualized in the subsequent report, to the extent that civilian casualties were acknowledged.
The Geneva Convention was clearly violated when captain Medina and Lt. The bloody deeds perpetrated in My Lai had ethical analogues not just in many other aspects of the US military effort in Vietnam, but also in earlier national campaigns in the history of warfare in general. The friendly fire has a tragic side impact of combat and it represents the nation at war with itself. Following his conviction, many Americans were certainly prepared to describe William Calley as a hero, but this sentiment derived, it seems, from either a belief in his innocence or an attribution of his deeds to the honest naivety of a young patriot. The company encountered no enemy forces, no opposing fire of any kind. The immensity of genocidal passion is recounted here in factual, chilling detail, resembling a criminal, any tiny part of which simultaneously contains within itself the totality of the gruesome.
Gibson American History February 14, 2013 My Lai Massacre Unfortunate event occurred at Pink Vile when the Charlie Company was there. This kind of unique personal insight into the human soul had been an emergent theme in national discourse in the months preceding the revelations about the massacre at My Lai. Then Calley ordered his platoon to do the same, no one was spared, women were raped and children were shot. The people are instructed that acting under superior orders is no defense to a charge of murder or other war crimes. A woman is slit open from vagina to neck.
It is contradictory to the army norms, the divisional command allowed the 11th Brigade to investigate it. It functioned to undermine context that the armed services of the United States, uniquely amongst the national agents of war in the modern era that had been a force for good in the world, an instrument of liberation and the advance of social progress. In the opinion of some, the massacre revealed little about the United States as a whole; they argued robustly that the killings were an aberration, the only meaningful explanation for which lay in the specific criminality of Charlie Company, with the actions of Ernest Medina, William Calley and the men they led into My Lai that day. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. The brief details of the accusation Against Calley were released to the press.
And this is where I wish to enter the debate: to show how strongly the two-fold rank system plays a role in the mystifying power of military fictions. The young lieutenant and his men, it was argued, had acted out of frustration and hatred of the Vietnamese who had killed and wounded their comrades. What is absent in their works, however, is an adequate critique of the strictly delineated class system in the military, a feature I see as key to the efficacy of military discourse. Hanley, Sang-Hue Choe and Martha Mendoza, The Bridge at No Gun Ri: A Hidden Nightmare from the Korean War New York: Henry Holt, 2001 , 224—26. The empirical evidence of military defeat by an ostensibly weaker foe disrupted the narrative of aggregated national power. They show awful, frightened, totally disoriented human beings, humiliated, and murdered by massive.
Historically, it is far more crucial. They killed thirteen and wounded more than twenty before turning the guns on themselves. These men, who stand for every major combat part that saw accomplishment in Vietnam has given eyewitness evidence to war crimes and carnage they either partake in or witnessed. American Army unit, led by Lieutenant William Calley killed over 500 unarmed civilians on March, 1968. Some of the officials predicted it as a horrible thing, and find only one man finally convicted who set free after doing a relatively small part of his sentence.
