"Don't talk to me about atrocities in war, all war is an atrocity"

As I was reading the gory details of the Song My killings, better known today as the My Lai massacre, I was struck by just how much the war in Vietnam resembled the wars waged against the American Indians a century earlier. In both instances villages, containing mostly non-combatants, became the default target of US soldiers who were unable to locate the enemy that they were seeking. Indian warriors, and Vietnamese guerrilla fighters, had an infuriating tendency to only fight when the conditions were favorable to them. Unable to directly confront the overwhelming firepower wielded by their enemies, they both resorted to stealth tactics, which frequently resulted in days of fruitless chases on the part of the US Army.

A village offered a target of opportunity for frustrated soldiers who were frequently harassed by hit-and-run ambushes and, in the case of Vietnam, booby-trap devices that killed and maimed indiscriminately. Add to that the near-impossibility, on the part of the American soldier, to distinguish between friend and foe, and you have a perfect set of conditions for atrocities to occur. Every Vietnamese becomes an enemy, and "The only good Indian is a dead Indian".

That normal patterns of behavior are going to be distorted by the stresses of combat is a given. The military is also an institution that demands absolute obedience to orders, and individual soldiers are not encouraged to question whether or not an order is rational, or even sane. To expect a single soldier to openly defy a direct order by a superior, given in a combat situation, is not realistic. A soldier cannot simply "opt-out" in a situation such as the one at My Lai. He either turns his weapon on the villagers, as he was ordered to do, or he turns it on his fellow soldiers. What other choice is there at that moment?

The first-hand accounts are so excruciatingly painful that you just want to stop reading. What that helicopter pilot did was heroic beyond words, but that must be qualified with the fact that he was not a member of the unit involved, and he had a helicopter to fly away in. For those ground troops caught up in the massacre, there were absolutely no good options. The same excuse does not apply to those charged with investigating the crime. That the default response was to try and cover the whole thing up is not surprising, but is nonetheless despicable. And, as is so often the case in these things, most of the official outrage was directed at those who dared break the shameful silence surrounding the events.