My Lai: A Brief History with Documents

The My Lai massacre raises a number of issues related to how warfare is conducted and specifically to how it is conducted by a democratic nation like the United States. For such an event to occur in the Vietnam War made it all the worse, for that war was already under suspicion by much of the public. A segment of the public had long been opposed to the war, and the size of that segment was growing as the war was shown every night on television, leading to concerns about what was seen on screen and about the reasons why America was in this war at all. The massacre only added one more element--now the terrible war was turning young Americans int

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am War. Military spokesmen insisted that My Lai was an isolated event, not at all representative of the entire war. Many Americans offered another explanation: Vietnam was a different war, and the men of Charlie Company should not be held accountable. After all, they had been forced to engage in a conflict nobody wanted, to confront an enemy that was indistinguishable from a noncombatant, to fight a war without fronts, and to put themselves in harm's way even though the military was constrained from using all of its resources to protect them (24). The authors presciently note that the narrative they are telling "is subject to constant revision" (25). In the years since, revisions have indeed been made. One was the recent admission by Robert S. McNamara that much of what was claimed about Vietnam by protesters was true and that the administration had deliberately lied in order keep the war going. By 1968, of course, the Johnson Administration was about ended. The Nixon Administration would begin in 1969 and would have to preside over the revelations about My Lai and the trial of those involved. Every president is faced with the need for an agenda on the domestic front and one on the foreign policy front. When Nixon entere
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1373
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page)

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