Summary Of My Lai Massacre

In “The My Lai Massacre: A Military Crime of Obedience”, Herbert C. Kelman and V. Lee Hamilton argue that an average person feels justified in participating in massacres after three specific conditions are met: authorization, routinization, and dehumanization. The authors discuss this topic by referencing the specific incident that was the My Lai Massacre. Yet, while examining this specific incident, they are blinded by their academic mindset and manage to overlook that the event was not as black and white as they would like to believe. The authors of the article neglect to acknowledge alternate viewpoints on the incident because of their specific background as scholars and not as soldiers, narrowing their understanding of the situation, which results in a very one-sided article.
As an introduction to the article, Kelman and Hamilton provide a short recap of the events that transpired leading up to the massacre.
In this recap, they mention that the members of Charlie Company, the group of servicemen in question, were already restless due to the fact that one their comrades had been killed by a booby trap. To add to the strain of the upcoming mission, Charlie Company held a funeral for the sergeant just the day prior. The authors describe the Company at the time as being “in a mood for revenge (133)” as a result of this. The article recalls that the orders issued for the annihilation of My Lai were never transcribed and were unclear. While providing this short recap, the authors use diction such as “obliterated (132)” and “destruction (133)” to paint the soldiers who partook in the massacre in a negative
light. In the article, Kelman and Hamilton’s diction reflects how poorly they understood what was going on in the war from the soldier's point of view. Instead of referring to the soldiers as soldiers, they more frequently refer to them as the participants in the massacre. This completely dismisses the training that soldiers receive that teaches them to always follow orders from their superiors and the fact that the Vietnam conflict was complicated by guerilla warfare. During guerilla warfare anyone who seemed to be an average civilian could be actually be an enemy in disguise and out to take U.S. troops’ lives. Likewise, they refer to the villagers of My Lai as “stationary targets (134)”, which only further discredits the soldier’s humanitarian value. In relation to the topic of massacres in general, the authors claim that violence is only justified in “self-defense or in response to oppression (138)”. The reason they make this claim is to assert that the massacre was not justified since the villagers of My Lai had neither attacked U.S. troops or oppressed them. While doing this, they fail to acknowledge that the soldiers had no way to differentiate between the innocent civilian and an enemy lying in wait for a moment to strike. Yet, one thing the authors do address by making this claim, is that the U.S. troops had no reason to be in Vietnam as a whole in the first place. The sole reason that the U.S decided to send armed troops to Vietnam was because of the Containment Policy, which exists to stop the spread of Communism. The irony of the situation is that after the massacre at My Lai, one of the survivors recounted that “After the shooting, all the villagers became Communists (134)”, including himself. The U.S troops had created the very thing they were sent to Vietnam to fight because of this incident.