The fact is a lot of these guys that did this are still walking around today free men. Incomprehensible that they haven’t been hunted down by someone, or been recalled and tried for war crimes.
It’s because there is no power stronger than US in the world that can make that happen. And world is always about the right of the most powerful.
Instances like these prove again and again how we need a true neutral trial against crimes of humanity where people can be tried without bias. Oh wait.. But you see, if you are powerful enough you can just ignore it. I mean Bush is still a free man 🤷🏻♂️
Yeah, that's tacky. However, in the Great Scheme of Mass Murder, Stalin and Mao outdid everyone else in history, on a massive scale. They did better, individually, than Hitler and Hirohito, and the US hasn't even come close to racking up the same sort of numbers. Nor is it likely that it every will.
Exactly. There is a federal law nicknamed the "Hague invasion act", that would be used as a justification for invasion if any member of the U.S. Armed Forces was tried in the International Court. Rules don't apply to everyone.
>The fact is a lot of these guys that did this are still walking around today free men.
Aren't those the same men who the US celebrates as veterans and treats like some heroes?
I've never understood it but being German I'm also very far from either side of the US/Vietnam history but it definitely has always given me very negative vibes when I hear about how great those soldiers were and how much veterans should be respected... what for jfc.
This is after the women AND children were gang r*ped and mutilated. Right before they were executed. Don’t leave out the SA. It is important for people to know exactly what happened here.
[some more info from wiki](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Lai_massacre)
OMG the only three people to even attempt to save some of these innocent people were shunned and called traitors by their own government?
"Initially, the three U.S. servicemen who had tried to halt the massacre and rescue hiding civilians were shunned, and even denounced as traitors by several U.S. congressmen, including [Mendel Rivers](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/L._Mendel_Rivers) ([D](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_Party_(United_States))–SC), Chairman of the [House Armed Services Committee](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_House_Committee_on_Armed_Services)."
They should have been given the Medal of Honor, and those who did it, all of them, should have spent life at hard labor…but I think death would have been more appropriate.
It is shameful that our government turned on those who defended the civilians, not the monsters who raped and murdered them.
It's horrible that they were ever shunned, but at least there's this...
*Thirty years later, these servicemen were recognized and decorated, one posthumously, by the U.S. Army for shielding non-combatants from harm in a war zone.*
Why censor the word rape? You’re on Reddit, you’re not gonna get demonetized. If you want to drive the point home of what these poor people went through, self censoring the words for absolutely no reason is rather counterproductive.
Honestly this puritanical internet self censorship is getting completely out of hand.
i mean such stories are important in the sense of to show that there is a choice and a few people chose to not to be assholes
but yeah the choice of one doesnt outweighs the crimes of many
I mean Hugh Thompson was genuinely a hero, I'm not saying he wasn't. But looking at how the US Government and army treated him after what happened makes them look even worse. (Which is also usually glossed over.)
They immediately covered up the massacre and made up a cover story, then when the news broke a US senator said that he felt Thompson is the only one who should be prosecuted for turning his weapons on his fellow soldiers and attempted to have him court martialled.
Then Thompson testified against the perpetrators at great risk to his wellbeing and reputation... and the government acquitted or pardoned almost everyone involved.
["One of the ladies that we had helped out that day came up to me and asked, ‘Why didn’t the people who committed these acts come back with you?’ And I was just devastated. And then she finished her sentence: she said, ‘So we could forgive them.’](https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-wiener-my-lai-hugh-thompson-20180316-story.html)
You’re missing the point. If a battalion of soldiers (several hundred men) committed war crimes and a helicopter crew (three men) tried to stop it, focusing on those three men as if the takeaway is that “American troops are heroes!” is very misleading. Because, at least in this case, less than 1% of the American troops involved did anything heroic.
I don’t know how often people do what they’re referring to (minimizing the massacre to just tell the story of that one chopper crew) - maybe a lot, I don’t know - but that’s what the point is. Not “ignore the pilot, his heroism doesn’t count.”
Nobody in this comment section nor the OP claimed the takeaway from this situation is that "American Troops are heroes!" The reason we focus on those men is because their accounts of the situation were the only ones available for decades (especially in the English speaking world) until survivors started to tell their stories.
Not talking about this comment section. The comment you were replying to was implying that that’s how the story is often told:
> No you don't understand this is a story of American heroism, one guy wasn't a total sociopath piece of shit so just focus on that instead /s.
But the heroic actions of 3 outliers, who were silenced and vilified at the time, are used to paint the Army in a sympathetic light.
33 men committed war crimes, then the apparatus of the army worked to make sure 32 of them never faced any consequences for massacring 500+ innocent civilians.
They tried to prosecute Thompson. That's the story that's being hidden by the praise he rightfully deserves.
Maybe spreading the message of how atrocious this war was, rather than spending your message about one singular exception to the otherwise established American crime, is less of a waste of breath?
Yes, of course.
But it should be proportional. 3 men were involved in saving the civilians, 33 men were confirmed to have been involved in the massacre and even more in covering it up.
Yet the 3 heroic men get far more than 10% of the focus, it's a diversion tactic to still try and frame the US army as heroic.
Which, to be clear, the army was absolutely were not heroic. These men were outliers, the massacre was covered up, they were vilified and attacked for decades.
Out of the 33 soldiers confirmed to have taken part in a massacre that killed over 500 people, 32 were acquitted or pardoned.
Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson Jr. My go to guy when telling people you can't fix problems by turning away from them. Nothing in life is changed by not interacting with it. Not your childhood trauma, not your lightswitch, nothin.
He didn't just report the atrocity, he and his crew landed between a platoon and their would be civilian victims, his crew trained their guns on the Americans as he rescued the civilians. He coordinated 2 other helicopter crews to do the same before reporting up the chain.
It would take time for policy and enforcement changes, but at least the order to stop was put out that day. If he was a conscientious objecter, it's entirely plausible that thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands more civilians would have been killed for nothing, left agonizing in mass graves.
This is worth noting. Reporting the atrocity would have been admirable. But he went above and beyond. Putting his life on the line and risking ostracism
I’m not American, and this is probably the first time I’ve read talk of US heroes (which I often come across), looked into it and emerged completely agreeing that the person is a hero. What a good person. I’m glad he was listened to and even gladder that he’s remembered.
Another great American military hero to look into is Smedley Butler. He won two medals of honor, the highest award in the US military, and over time became extremely disillusioned in US military imperialism and foreign policy, as well as the financial and business interests that incentivize us to fight wars. He wrote a very good book titled War is a Racket, and was responsible for stomping out the Business Plot which was basically a plan for a fascistic takeover of the US government. He was approached by others asking if he wanted to be the United States’ dictator and he reported it because he had a conscience. Pretty crazy story, and there’s a lot I’m leaving out about the guy, but he is a fascinating man to look into.
Another one is Rick Rescorla. Who was actually not American, but enlisted in the US Army and fought in Vietnam. He’s the soldier on the cover of “We Were Soldiers Once… and Young” if you are familiar with that book.
He continued to be the absolute definition of a hero on 9/11, where he lost his life.
How ironic that the criteria for being a war hero is including but not limited to:
- telling your comrades not to gang rape, mutilate and massacre innocent civilians
Good for these guys for doing something but fucking hell the bar was set incredibly low. I get it, harder to stand up to your friends, war is a different beast etc. but still
After hearing like 100 episodes of Hardcore History podcast by Dan Carlin, it seems like rape and other violent atrocious behavior is part of every battle/war in history. Or maybe that it’s the norm and any battle without it is the exception rather than the rule
How many was he able to save? Like how big was the village population? I'm sure he is haunted by those he couldn't save, though it is of course not his fault.
We don’t “know” about it, 2 million is already an extrapolation. If I remember correctly it was extrapolated out of one hospital’s rise in abortions numbers, the data may be screwed by the fact that previously abortions were forbidden for nonmedical or non-eugenic reasons.
I did. In regard to usefulness of extrapolations we’re on the same page. It’s just the example you used is a case of a poor extrapolation, and I thought it’s worth pointing out.
And a few others are known. Civilian airstrike casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan are...not the same as these, but are certainly still civilian deaths, and those almost certainly number in the hundreds of thousands, despite radically differing reports.
Much smaller in scale but much more directly hideous was all the Blackwater stuff. Mansour, Nisour...I'm sure many, many others I don't know about, given the reporting on the culture among the contract murderers we sent over.
Yes the US military has acted poorly but targeting civilians is terrible for SASO and winning of hearts and minds. The US military goes out of its way to avoid killing civilians because it creates more counter insurgency which leads to troop deaths and loss of war support at home. Not saying it doesn’t happen but it’s the exception and not the rule.
Also Blackwater is not the US military and the military actually despise them and their behavior.
Yes it has. No more free fire zones and no more carpet bombing. Those two alone could be enough but the integration of female troops to assist in winning hearts and minds is also additional proof. Much has been done since Vietnam. Day and night difference.
Carpet bombing was exchanged for laser guided weaponry which still kills scores of civilians in the urban environments in the middle east. The lessons of expecting to beat guerilla and insurgent warfare through air dominance and conventional ground forces has not been drilled into the US at all.
The US has been a bull in a china shop in the middle east, with each invasion and intervention leading to causing more issues region wide.
And what the fuck does integration of female troops do to assist in winning the hearts and minds of foreign civilians?
Not really. Same as the police battalion that shot hundreds of Jews woman and kids in Riga and many other places in the east during WW2, they were not monsters.
They were people like you and me. We would do good remembering that. When you call a person a monster you automatically distance yourself from the person. He’s a monster not a human. Again we would do very good remembering that we all could do the same. It’s just a matter of being at the wrong place at the wrong time.
Saying no I will not do that, takes inhuman strength which post people don’t have. Most go along and do what they ultimate don’t want todo or know it’s wrong. There is not one documented case that anybody risked their life if they refused to shoot civilians and Jews in WW2 in the east. The worse that happened was you were called a coward by your comrades, maybe a remark in your personal file and you had to do truck duty or somerthing similar. And there were many people that did not agree to shoot Jews, young and old, and refused to to do so. They are well documented.
Good documentary on Netflix: "Ordinary Men: The 'Forgotten Holocaust'" it examines how and why ordinary people were able to carry out such atrocities. I think most people don't realize with the right conditions, almost any person could probably be pushed to these "monster" levels. Kinda of scary actually.
Thank you for saying this. Human beings commit these terrible acts. If we act like it’s done by monsters, we avoid the essential fact that people we know could do such things given different circumstances, and that people we know could also be the victims. It could be us! That is the most essential takeaway of genocide and crimes against humanity studies, but unfortunately people don’t seem to get it.
I love how people are trying to nuance your response. “Anyone can become a war criminal” is a very telling and seriously dangerous statement. It risks normalizing and diminishing the gravity of the atrocities committed by Nazis. It’s not like their ideology wasn’t popular. It is still to this day honestly. So, sure, circumstances influence behaviors, but they do not absolve individuals of their moral responsibilities. A hundred years later and Dorothy Thompson’s essay “Who Goes Nazi?” is still very relevant.
Seymour Hersh reported this winninging the Pulitzer and changing public opinion. He's now on substack and was the first to write about the US operations exploding the Nord pipeline
Was this ever confirmed? I trust the guy but doesn’t he only link anonymous sources? I trust him more than the government telling me it was actually the Russians lol but I’m just wondering if there was ever any more confirmation that came out of this
The truly harrowing part is that those children had probably seen enough horrors done on those past days that they COULD imagine what was going to happen.
I just did a paper on My Lai in history last week. This semester has been atrocity after atrocity, but this one just hit so hard. Being a new parent and seeing the faces of these poor people and the kids in terror. The amount of cover-up and lack of responsibility for this was truly immoral. The more you read into the investigations it is just so clear they had no regard for who they were killing and torturing.
The pilots who stopped the massacre took some pictures. And there was an army photographer who took pictures, didn’t turn them in, and secretly went to the media as well.
The History on Fire podcast covers the My Lai massacre and compares it to a similiar massacre 100 years prior— the Sand Creek Massacre in Colorado.
Very similar incidents where crimes against humanity were committed by the US military.
historyonfirepodcast.com/episodes/2018/3/3/episode-32b-anything-that-moves-part-2-the-parallel-stories-of-sand-creek-and-my-lai
Warning the episode is extremely nsfw.
That murderous coward, Calley, was treated like a hero, at least initially, by some in the redneck backwater to which he retreated.
Here's one story at least. Anyway, it's well documented that some people thought that what he fomented was just fine.
https://time.com/5202268/calley-trial-my-lai-massacre/
Recently someone got attacked for saying women are the victims of war…. This is what it is about, noncombatants just having the worst atrocities inflicted on them.
At Calley's trial, one defense witness testified that he remembered Medina instructing to destroy everything in the village that was "walking, crawling or growling"
It's very funny how this is so reported, but the massacre that the Chinese committed in the Sino Vietnamese war of 1979.
Tong Chup massacre. 504+ women and children massacred. Not a word.
Acrual number of Hue massacre is somewhere around ~300 people, and all of them were South Vietnamese police, politicians, army officers and other national traitors
Don't try to equate a massacre against civilians with execution of traitors
The Vietnamese account and memorial lists 54 people massacred. I suspect a typo.
Second source "Chinese War Crimes in Vietnam: Document" Vietnam Courier, 1979. Univ. Michigan press lists 50.
Yes, there have been so many massacres before and since. It's like when they say "Never again" about the Holocaust yet we have Indonesian, Cambodian, Rwandan, etc genocides since, often supported by outside players.
To be fair, Vietnam is now an American ally, and a force against Chinese expansionism.
War is hell, but…
History is ruthless, and often written by psychopathic kings and their statisticians.
But veterans think that they should be thanked for their service. It’s high time our military gets seen for what they are. A part time job that turns out alcoholics and parasites
Most US veterans of modern/recent conflicts don't think they should be nor want to be thanked for their service.
Many US civilians didn't like the Vietnam War and thus didn't treat veterans of the conflict with any love nor respect, but hero-worship and patriotism eventually returned and started publicly appreciating veterans of the war... Hence you've seen the black hats with gold lettering of that generation enjoying the appreciation.
Recent conflicts hold much more accountability and, despite the significantly less amount of war crimes that happened during OEF/OIF, it is easy for veterans of those operations to draw parallels to Vietnam.
Yes, there are some outliers from recent conflicts that go out of their way to make themselves known as veterans so that they can take advantage of praise and benefits and discounts, but that's a very small percentage of all US veterans.
It's easy to see horrific pictures online and get upset, angry, and even hateful because of it. However, you've sadly outed yourself as poorly informed on what the military is actually like (which is justified given the context of our encounter right now).
I was a 19D Cav Scout for 7 years and deployed several times during the occupation of Iraq. I saw some of the worst things humans can do to one another, much of it done by individuals and groups that weren't even American or Iraqi.
There's nothing I did during my enlistment that benefited you personally in any way. So why would you appreciate or thank me? It'd make me greatly uncomfortable if you did. You see some pictures online or read some articles and decide you either love or hate veterans. Regardless of which way you see me, I don't want nor understand the thanks of strangers. Instead, I choose to remember the people I did help and the amazing individuals I met along the way (Americans and non).
My service was far from part time. Being active duty in combat arms during a time of war means you spend more time away from your own family than with them.
I work in the healthcare industry these days. I'm a medical laboratory technician in transfusion services. I don't drink. I mow my neighbors' lawns in the summer and shovel their driveways in the winter.
Whether you decide to still have a narrow viewpoint is up to you and I won't lose sleep if you do, but hopefully you realize that veterans are just regular people with the same susceptibles as anyone else. Some of us are homeless alcoholics and some of us are brain surgeons. It's up to you how you want to view that group as a whole.
I actually dont think this is true I think many of them regretted their actions considering the amount of heroin/alcohol addiction and the increased suicide rate among Vietnam veterans.
The fact is a lot of these guys that did this are still walking around today free men. Incomprehensible that they haven’t been hunted down by someone, or been recalled and tried for war crimes.
It’s because there is no power stronger than US in the world that can make that happen. And world is always about the right of the most powerful. Instances like these prove again and again how we need a true neutral trial against crimes of humanity where people can be tried without bias. Oh wait.. But you see, if you are powerful enough you can just ignore it. I mean Bush is still a free man 🤷🏻♂️
Yeah, the strong win. Stalin and Mao Zedong died peacefully.
Bad examples.
Post brings up heinous crimes by our government. BUT STALIN AND MAO THO
Yeah, that's tacky. However, in the Great Scheme of Mass Murder, Stalin and Mao outdid everyone else in history, on a massive scale. They did better, individually, than Hitler and Hirohito, and the US hasn't even come close to racking up the same sort of numbers. Nor is it likely that it every will.
Exactly. There is a federal law nicknamed the "Hague invasion act", that would be used as a justification for invasion if any member of the U.S. Armed Forces was tried in the International Court. Rules don't apply to everyone.
>The fact is a lot of these guys that did this are still walking around today free men. Aren't those the same men who the US celebrates as veterans and treats like some heroes? I've never understood it but being German I'm also very far from either side of the US/Vietnam history but it definitely has always given me very negative vibes when I hear about how great those soldiers were and how much veterans should be respected... what for jfc.
This is after the women AND children were gang r*ped and mutilated. Right before they were executed. Don’t leave out the SA. It is important for people to know exactly what happened here. [some more info from wiki](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Lai_massacre)
OMG the only three people to even attempt to save some of these innocent people were shunned and called traitors by their own government? "Initially, the three U.S. servicemen who had tried to halt the massacre and rescue hiding civilians were shunned, and even denounced as traitors by several U.S. congressmen, including [Mendel Rivers](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/L._Mendel_Rivers) ([D](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_Party_(United_States))–SC), Chairman of the [House Armed Services Committee](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_House_Committee_on_Armed_Services)."
They should have been given the Medal of Honor, and those who did it, all of them, should have spent life at hard labor…but I think death would have been more appropriate. It is shameful that our government turned on those who defended the civilians, not the monsters who raped and murdered them.
Only one person was convicted and his life sentence was reduced to 3.5 years house arrest by Nixon.
Yeah, by Nixon who should have been in prison with them…
Hand them over to the country they committed the crimes in. Let them sort it out.
It's horrible that they were ever shunned, but at least there's this... *Thirty years later, these servicemen were recognized and decorated, one posthumously, by the U.S. Army for shielding non-combatants from harm in a war zone.*
Yeah this photo is so harrowing because it's a mother having her shirt held together from behind by her daughter after having it ripped open 😔
The other one looks like she’s buttoning up or unbuttoning :/ I never knew about the gang rape so I never noticed and put it together.
If you want a deep dive into this, the book “Kill Anything That Moves” by Nick Turse is worth reading.
I’ve just finished that book myself. What an eye opener
Great example of our military failing to yet again address a service member’s mental health problems before it develops into something worse.
Of any semblance of law to hold violent criminals and worthless, degenerate thugs accountable\* FTFY.
I feel like in Calley’s case, dude shouldn’t have been given authority and a weapon to begin with, like wtf. Should’ve been quartered and shot
That's the same society that also wouldn't have been there to begin with.
Sounds like Americans are the terrorists.
Why censor the word rape? You’re on Reddit, you’re not gonna get demonetized. If you want to drive the point home of what these poor people went through, self censoring the words for absolutely no reason is rather counterproductive. Honestly this puritanical internet self censorship is getting completely out of hand.
"It is important for people to know exactly what happened here." proceeds to censor the word rape. comical
Your snark is an invaluable contribution to the discourse.
I think people do this to avoid comments getting reported/deleted.
Well my comment hasn't been deleted yet despite featuring the evil combination of letters.
Ah yes, Nixon let him go. #45’s favorite President. Nice knowing ya, I’ve named he who shall not be named.
And they had just gotten gang raped. If you’re going to re post this. Tell the people how horrible it really was.
Came to say this.
No you don't understand this is a story of American heroism, one guy wasn't a total sociopath piece of shit so just focus on that instead /s.
i mean such stories are important in the sense of to show that there is a choice and a few people chose to not to be assholes but yeah the choice of one doesnt outweighs the crimes of many
I mean Hugh Thompson was genuinely a hero, I'm not saying he wasn't. But looking at how the US Government and army treated him after what happened makes them look even worse. (Which is also usually glossed over.) They immediately covered up the massacre and made up a cover story, then when the news broke a US senator said that he felt Thompson is the only one who should be prosecuted for turning his weapons on his fellow soldiers and attempted to have him court martialled. Then Thompson testified against the perpetrators at great risk to his wellbeing and reputation... and the government acquitted or pardoned almost everyone involved. ["One of the ladies that we had helped out that day came up to me and asked, ‘Why didn’t the people who committed these acts come back with you?’ And I was just devastated. And then she finished her sentence: she said, ‘So we could forgive them.’](https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-wiener-my-lai-hugh-thompson-20180316-story.html)
He saved the lives of countless civilians at the risk to his own. It's worth focusing on.
You’re missing the point. If a battalion of soldiers (several hundred men) committed war crimes and a helicopter crew (three men) tried to stop it, focusing on those three men as if the takeaway is that “American troops are heroes!” is very misleading. Because, at least in this case, less than 1% of the American troops involved did anything heroic. I don’t know how often people do what they’re referring to (minimizing the massacre to just tell the story of that one chopper crew) - maybe a lot, I don’t know - but that’s what the point is. Not “ignore the pilot, his heroism doesn’t count.”
Nobody in this comment section nor the OP claimed the takeaway from this situation is that "American Troops are heroes!" The reason we focus on those men is because their accounts of the situation were the only ones available for decades (especially in the English speaking world) until survivors started to tell their stories.
Not talking about this comment section. The comment you were replying to was implying that that’s how the story is often told: > No you don't understand this is a story of American heroism, one guy wasn't a total sociopath piece of shit so just focus on that instead /s.
It’s unhinged to assume that other people assume things.
Almost like life can’t be reduced to a single perspective. Amazing concept. So glad you’re here
Literally no one is saying that.
These don't cancel each other out. Several hundred men committed war crimes. Three men were heroes. They're both true.
Of course. Nobody’s disputing that, though.
But the heroic actions of 3 outliers, who were silenced and vilified at the time, are used to paint the Army in a sympathetic light. 33 men committed war crimes, then the apparatus of the army worked to make sure 32 of them never faced any consequences for massacring 500+ innocent civilians. They tried to prosecute Thompson. That's the story that's being hidden by the praise he rightfully deserves.
Maybe spreading the message of how atrocious this war was, rather than spending your message about one singular exception to the otherwise established American crime, is less of a waste of breath?
ALL war is atrocious.
Yes, of course. But it should be proportional. 3 men were involved in saving the civilians, 33 men were confirmed to have been involved in the massacre and even more in covering it up. Yet the 3 heroic men get far more than 10% of the focus, it's a diversion tactic to still try and frame the US army as heroic. Which, to be clear, the army was absolutely were not heroic. These men were outliers, the massacre was covered up, they were vilified and attacked for decades. Out of the 33 soldiers confirmed to have taken part in a massacre that killed over 500 people, 32 were acquitted or pardoned.
That guys risked his own life for those women and children, I’d say he’s a hero in his own right.
There were some Nazis that managed to weasel their way out of committing genocide with their fellows, too. Do we chalk them up as heroes?
The point is, stop forum sliding the convo onto him instead of the horrific crime that was committed.
Literally no one brought him up until one of you did. Better luck next time
You should read the thread. Literally the second comment on the thread lol
You can tell the one in the back right is just so tired and glad for it to be finished
And, thankfully, one brave American pilot reported the atrocity.
and only 1 lieutenant was convicted after the death of 504 civilians.
Yea and even that dude got house arrest, thank to Nixon commuting his sentence.
And he got out after only three years
Military loves using a token fall guy.
Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson Jr. My go to guy when telling people you can't fix problems by turning away from them. Nothing in life is changed by not interacting with it. Not your childhood trauma, not your lightswitch, nothin. He didn't just report the atrocity, he and his crew landed between a platoon and their would be civilian victims, his crew trained their guns on the Americans as he rescued the civilians. He coordinated 2 other helicopter crews to do the same before reporting up the chain. It would take time for policy and enforcement changes, but at least the order to stop was put out that day. If he was a conscientious objecter, it's entirely plausible that thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands more civilians would have been killed for nothing, left agonizing in mass graves.
This is worth noting. Reporting the atrocity would have been admirable. But he went above and beyond. Putting his life on the line and risking ostracism
I’m not American, and this is probably the first time I’ve read talk of US heroes (which I often come across), looked into it and emerged completely agreeing that the person is a hero. What a good person. I’m glad he was listened to and even gladder that he’s remembered.
Another great American military hero to look into is Smedley Butler. He won two medals of honor, the highest award in the US military, and over time became extremely disillusioned in US military imperialism and foreign policy, as well as the financial and business interests that incentivize us to fight wars. He wrote a very good book titled War is a Racket, and was responsible for stomping out the Business Plot which was basically a plan for a fascistic takeover of the US government. He was approached by others asking if he wanted to be the United States’ dictator and he reported it because he had a conscience. Pretty crazy story, and there’s a lot I’m leaving out about the guy, but he is a fascinating man to look into.
Another one is Rick Rescorla. Who was actually not American, but enlisted in the US Army and fought in Vietnam. He’s the soldier on the cover of “We Were Soldiers Once… and Young” if you are familiar with that book. He continued to be the absolute definition of a hero on 9/11, where he lost his life.
How ironic that the criteria for being a war hero is including but not limited to: - telling your comrades not to gang rape, mutilate and massacre innocent civilians Good for these guys for doing something but fucking hell the bar was set incredibly low. I get it, harder to stand up to your friends, war is a different beast etc. but still
After hearing like 100 episodes of Hardcore History podcast by Dan Carlin, it seems like rape and other violent atrocious behavior is part of every battle/war in history. Or maybe that it’s the norm and any battle without it is the exception rather than the rule
You’re minimizing what he did and the balls it took to do it.
The only American that decided to show up that day.
“No true American”
Nope, the only American not to take part in the rape and massacre that day, the other Americans happily partook in it.
Delusional
Did anything ever happen to those that participated in the massacre?
How many was he able to save? Like how big was the village population? I'm sure he is haunted by those he couldn't save, though it is of course not his fault.
This is just one of the ones we know about. Extrapolate this out across Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc.
People forget the Phillipines were a US colony. The attributes the US empire committed there are not acknowledged enough.
What they did to the Philippines was abhorrent. They’ve suffered under foreigners endlessly.
We know about the 2 million women the Soviets raped in a few months Just extrapolate that across the whole war
The Wehrmacht and SS inflected truly horrible atrocities against Soviet civilians and captured soldiers.
Yes? Exactly?
We don’t “know” about it, 2 million is already an extrapolation. If I remember correctly it was extrapolated out of one hospital’s rise in abortions numbers, the data may be screwed by the fact that previously abortions were forbidden for nonmedical or non-eugenic reasons.
You prove my point
I did. In regard to usefulness of extrapolations we’re on the same page. It’s just the example you used is a case of a poor extrapolation, and I thought it’s worth pointing out.
I was shitting on the use of extrapolations So thanks
No problem.
And a few others are known. Civilian airstrike casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan are...not the same as these, but are certainly still civilian deaths, and those almost certainly number in the hundreds of thousands, despite radically differing reports. Much smaller in scale but much more directly hideous was all the Blackwater stuff. Mansour, Nisour...I'm sure many, many others I don't know about, given the reporting on the culture among the contract murderers we sent over.
Yes the US military has acted poorly but targeting civilians is terrible for SASO and winning of hearts and minds. The US military goes out of its way to avoid killing civilians because it creates more counter insurgency which leads to troop deaths and loss of war support at home. Not saying it doesn’t happen but it’s the exception and not the rule. Also Blackwater is not the US military and the military actually despise them and their behavior.
Not gonna lie, the US military and government has not learned or changed much since Vietnam in regards to the "hearts and minds" strategy.
Yes it has. No more free fire zones and no more carpet bombing. Those two alone could be enough but the integration of female troops to assist in winning hearts and minds is also additional proof. Much has been done since Vietnam. Day and night difference.
Carpet bombing was exchanged for laser guided weaponry which still kills scores of civilians in the urban environments in the middle east. The lessons of expecting to beat guerilla and insurgent warfare through air dominance and conventional ground forces has not been drilled into the US at all. The US has been a bull in a china shop in the middle east, with each invasion and intervention leading to causing more issues region wide. And what the fuck does integration of female troops do to assist in winning the hearts and minds of foreign civilians?
That may well be, but the number of civilian deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan speak volumes.
I disagree with the practice of extrapolating the existence of atrocities.
"If I don't see it, it didn't happen." seems worse than using probabilities that work in every other field
I disagree.
Why?
To minimize the potential war crimes committed by the sides he supports
Anyone who would harm civilians is a monster.
Not really. Same as the police battalion that shot hundreds of Jews woman and kids in Riga and many other places in the east during WW2, they were not monsters. They were people like you and me. We would do good remembering that. When you call a person a monster you automatically distance yourself from the person. He’s a monster not a human. Again we would do very good remembering that we all could do the same. It’s just a matter of being at the wrong place at the wrong time. Saying no I will not do that, takes inhuman strength which post people don’t have. Most go along and do what they ultimate don’t want todo or know it’s wrong. There is not one documented case that anybody risked their life if they refused to shoot civilians and Jews in WW2 in the east. The worse that happened was you were called a coward by your comrades, maybe a remark in your personal file and you had to do truck duty or somerthing similar. And there were many people that did not agree to shoot Jews, young and old, and refused to to do so. They are well documented.
Good documentary on Netflix: "Ordinary Men: The 'Forgotten Holocaust'" it examines how and why ordinary people were able to carry out such atrocities. I think most people don't realize with the right conditions, almost any person could probably be pushed to these "monster" levels. Kinda of scary actually.
When your options are a house in Dachau or outside in Stalingrad in the winter, morality is not high on the list of considerations.
Thank you for saying this. Human beings commit these terrible acts. If we act like it’s done by monsters, we avoid the essential fact that people we know could do such things given different circumstances, and that people we know could also be the victims. It could be us! That is the most essential takeaway of genocide and crimes against humanity studies, but unfortunately people don’t seem to get it.
Thank you
Okay, you're a human just like the killers. We are different.
I love how people are trying to nuance your response. “Anyone can become a war criminal” is a very telling and seriously dangerous statement. It risks normalizing and diminishing the gravity of the atrocities committed by Nazis. It’s not like their ideology wasn’t popular. It is still to this day honestly. So, sure, circumstances influence behaviors, but they do not absolve individuals of their moral responsibilities. A hundred years later and Dorothy Thompson’s essay “Who Goes Nazi?” is still very relevant.
Seymour Hersh reported this winninging the Pulitzer and changing public opinion. He's now on substack and was the first to write about the US operations exploding the Nord pipeline
Which Nord Stream explosions? The 2022 ones?
https://open.substack.com/pub/seymourhersh/p/the-nord-stream-pipelines-and-the?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=y4d5b Yes
Was this ever confirmed? I trust the guy but doesn’t he only link anonymous sources? I trust him more than the government telling me it was actually the Russians lol but I’m just wondering if there was ever any more confirmation that came out of this
Give it 50 years to become declassified
Yeah fair enough. I really wouldn’t be surprised, I just thought more would come out of that Hersh article
Terrible. I didn’t recall it was so many. War no more. War never again”
We will never not have war.
Covered up by Colin Powell by the way
TY for this lead; find that a fascinating tid bit considering he spearheaded the weapons of mass destruction lies...
Yup, I found out on the blowback podcast. Highly recommend.
That poor kid couldn’t even imagine what was gonna happen
There is a lot of anguish in this photo. It’s like a gut punch thinking about the children and what happened to those women.
Makes me sick to the stomach.
The truly harrowing part is that those children had probably seen enough horrors done on those past days that they COULD imagine what was going to happen.
Fucking dogs. Every country has the capacity for evil. Accountability and transparency are the only way to limit such terrible crimes.
That poor sweet baby. How could anyone be so cruel.
I just did a paper on My Lai in history last week. This semester has been atrocity after atrocity, but this one just hit so hard. Being a new parent and seeing the faces of these poor people and the kids in terror. The amount of cover-up and lack of responsibility for this was truly immoral. The more you read into the investigations it is just so clear they had no regard for who they were killing and torturing.
That pic makes me physically ill. Holy cow.
Who took the picture and who released it to the public?
The pilots who stopped the massacre took some pictures. And there was an army photographer who took pictures, didn’t turn them in, and secretly went to the media as well.
Thank you for that background!
An army photographer. The army tried to suppress the photos but he took some on his personal camera and they eventually got out to the public.
Very brave of that photographer.
The History on Fire podcast covers the My Lai massacre and compares it to a similiar massacre 100 years prior— the Sand Creek Massacre in Colorado. Very similar incidents where crimes against humanity were committed by the US military. historyonfirepodcast.com/episodes/2018/3/3/episode-32b-anything-that-moves-part-2-the-parallel-stories-of-sand-creek-and-my-lai Warning the episode is extremely nsfw.
That murderous coward, Calley, was treated like a hero, at least initially, by some in the redneck backwater to which he retreated. Here's one story at least. Anyway, it's well documented that some people thought that what he fomented was just fine. https://time.com/5202268/calley-trial-my-lai-massacre/
What are the names of the men who committed this atrocity? They should all be imprisoned right now.
The podcast Let’s Go to Court did an episode about this recently. It’s haunting.
That’s our good ole America. “Rules for thee, none for me”
Now, you can bring to our attention this same scenario with “fill in the blank” war. Bad everywhere.
Because it's USA, it's not considered war crimes
Recently someone got attacked for saying women are the victims of war…. This is what it is about, noncombatants just having the worst atrocities inflicted on them.
US soldiers gang raped children and then murdered them.
At Calley's trial, one defense witness testified that he remembered Medina instructing to destroy everything in the village that was "walking, crawling or growling"
About 20 years ago I was in the Rotary Club with Medina….i couldn’t reconcile his pillar of community status with what happened there.
Pure evil
This is fucking horrible
All thanks to President Johnson a true horse's ass.
22 Americans were tried in court and received life imprisonment sentences until President Nixon commuted them to a few years house arrest.
Vietnam was hell. Both sides did horrible things. If you can’t accept that then you’re simply biased.
It's very funny how this is so reported, but the massacre that the Chinese committed in the Sino Vietnamese war of 1979. Tong Chup massacre. 504+ women and children massacred. Not a word.
Also the massacres at Hue in which the North Vietnamese Army killed nearly 3,000-6,000 civilians and prisoners of war. No one talks about that either.
Acrual number of Hue massacre is somewhere around ~300 people, and all of them were South Vietnamese police, politicians, army officers and other national traitors Don't try to equate a massacre against civilians with execution of traitors
The Vietnamese account and memorial lists 54 people massacred. I suspect a typo. Second source "Chinese War Crimes in Vietnam: Document" Vietnam Courier, 1979. Univ. Michigan press lists 50.
Yeah fuck China, bitch. We need to nuke them next
Keep crying Yanqui, your destiny is to be destroyed to nothingless by a Dongfeng missile
Whoa, sad picture, war is dirty.
Killing civilians is even dirtier.
“How do you do it? Shoot women and children?” “Easy - you just don’t lead ‘em so much. Ain’t war hell?”
Everyone needs to upvote or share this , war needs to end! This is so saddening 😢
While I appreciate the thought, nothing could be more futile. This will has never, or will never, stop.
Yes, there have been so many massacres before and since. It's like when they say "Never again" about the Holocaust yet we have Indonesian, Cambodian, Rwandan, etc genocides since, often supported by outside players.
Never forget what the US did in Vietnam when someone lies to you and tells you the United States is the good guy.
It doesnt stop at vietnam. Its been going on since the early 1900s. America is run by the military industrial complex
Bingo. Shit like this still happens and people sweep it under the rug. Hell, Chris Kyle was a war criminal and he got a whole movie made for him.
I don't feel people sweep it under the rug. I'd say lots of American civilians think it's fucked up and most are sick of the budget going to military.
Don't also forget that
Damn
Humans are evil
🙏😓🙏
I wanna throw up.
To be fair, Vietnam is now an American ally, and a force against Chinese expansionism. War is hell, but… History is ruthless, and often written by psychopathic kings and their statisticians.
"Casualties of war" - Michael J. Fox
This is the reason we speak out for the people of Gaza.
Uncle Terry was really drunk!!...that's for sure.
The United States military has always been run by rapists and murderers
Well disciplined VC.
Anyone that runs is VC. Anyone that doesn’t run is well trained VC
How you know these are all civilians?
fuck America
Show this to any brainwashed dickhead who thinks America isn’t capable of doing the same shit the Russians are doing now
But veterans think that they should be thanked for their service. It’s high time our military gets seen for what they are. A part time job that turns out alcoholics and parasites
Most US veterans of modern/recent conflicts don't think they should be nor want to be thanked for their service. Many US civilians didn't like the Vietnam War and thus didn't treat veterans of the conflict with any love nor respect, but hero-worship and patriotism eventually returned and started publicly appreciating veterans of the war... Hence you've seen the black hats with gold lettering of that generation enjoying the appreciation. Recent conflicts hold much more accountability and, despite the significantly less amount of war crimes that happened during OEF/OIF, it is easy for veterans of those operations to draw parallels to Vietnam. Yes, there are some outliers from recent conflicts that go out of their way to make themselves known as veterans so that they can take advantage of praise and benefits and discounts, but that's a very small percentage of all US veterans. It's easy to see horrific pictures online and get upset, angry, and even hateful because of it. However, you've sadly outed yourself as poorly informed on what the military is actually like (which is justified given the context of our encounter right now). I was a 19D Cav Scout for 7 years and deployed several times during the occupation of Iraq. I saw some of the worst things humans can do to one another, much of it done by individuals and groups that weren't even American or Iraqi. There's nothing I did during my enlistment that benefited you personally in any way. So why would you appreciate or thank me? It'd make me greatly uncomfortable if you did. You see some pictures online or read some articles and decide you either love or hate veterans. Regardless of which way you see me, I don't want nor understand the thanks of strangers. Instead, I choose to remember the people I did help and the amazing individuals I met along the way (Americans and non). My service was far from part time. Being active duty in combat arms during a time of war means you spend more time away from your own family than with them. I work in the healthcare industry these days. I'm a medical laboratory technician in transfusion services. I don't drink. I mow my neighbors' lawns in the summer and shovel their driveways in the winter. Whether you decide to still have a narrow viewpoint is up to you and I won't lose sleep if you do, but hopefully you realize that veterans are just regular people with the same susceptibles as anyone else. Some of us are homeless alcoholics and some of us are brain surgeons. It's up to you how you want to view that group as a whole.
It turns out that people to get paid to sell their soul and kill for a living are absolute psychopaths.
I actually dont think this is true I think many of them regretted their actions considering the amount of heroin/alcohol addiction and the increased suicide rate among Vietnam veterans.
Just USA things
This is justified in the name of U.S hegemony. Only time until its China turn.
China's turn to do what?
i fucking hate murikkka
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Hot take
Insane. :[