Free Response

During class, we watched a video that talked about the My Lai massacre. This video was not very surprising, but it really caught my attention. This massacre was in Vietnam during the Vietnam War. Soldiers were told to go into a village and if they saw anything alive, they were to shoot it. The leader of these soldiers thought that the village was going to be empty, but to their surprise there were still villagers in the town. When the soldiers saw the civilians, I think they didn’t know what to do because they knew it was against their morals to shoot innocent civilians. Once one soldier shot their first bullet, the soldiers started shooting everyone and destroying the town. Everyone forgot about their morals and had the adrenaline running through their body. By the time the soldiers left the town, there was nothing left of the town. Some of the soldiers captured the civilians and walked through fields because the soldiers knew that the civilians would know where the mine fields were. After a while they got to a ditch and the American soldiers started shooting at the innocent civilians. Only a handful of the Vietnamese people survived this massacre. I think this was a lose-lose situation because if the soldiers did not shoot the villagers, they were in harm of getting shot by the head of the mission. But if they started killing the town’s people, they were going against their morals and committing a war crime. I think it would be really hard for people to go against the command they were assigned and I think it would take a lot of courage. I am reading the book “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brian. In one part of the scene, a soldier, Rat Kiley, lost a really good friend during the war from a hand grenade. He did not show any emotion for a while until they found a baby water buffalo. They took it and brought it to their camp grounds. Rat Kiley tried to feed it food, but it wouldn’t eat anything so he started shooting at it. He did not want to hurt it, he just wanted it to feel pain. Just like the My Lai massacre, he was killing something that was purely innocent and did not deserve to be tortured like that. I think that Rat needed to blow off steam because his best friend died, but I don’t think it was appropriate to kill an innocent animal just like I don’t think it was right to kill the innocent Vietnamese.