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Comment by rmason | Hacker News Reader

There are a lot of people who use the My Lai massacre as an example of the 'real' America. There are a lot of My Lai's and William Calley's in other countries throughout history. But far fewer Hugh Thompson's and to me that's the 'real' America.

In Michigan we've got the recent example of Dr. Hanna Attisha and the Flint water crisis. She was vilified by Flint officials, state officials and by the state's universities. The state health director called her irresponsible and execs at her hospital wanted her fired.

Worries made her physically ill. I do not know how she stood courageously for so long but she did. Eventually a Detroit Free Press article supported her and in time everyone withdrew their opposition.

https://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/2015/10/10/h...

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> There are a lot of My Lai's and William Calley's in other countries throughout history. But far fewer Hugh Thompson's and to me that's the 'real' America.

There were a lot of My Lai’s in Vietnam. Biggest misconception is that it was some kind of fluke. But in a “war” where entire civillian populated areas were designated “free fire zones” where you could kill anything that moves, civillian massacres were the norm. Not every solider did it of course but it was a regular feature of that war.

It is good to recognize brave soldiers that resisted. But we must be respectful enough of those who were murdered to not attempt to rehabilitate the image of America in Vietnam by pretending those resisters were the norm or represented the true spirit of America and what it was aiming for or some such sentimental nationalist nonsense. As the article notes, a My Lai happened every month in Vietnam. Civillian mass murder was an explicit goal and the U.S. was very good at it.

Its one of those features of asymmetric warfare, that you can drag the enemy into the moral-mud-pits of combating opposition among the civilian population. For the opposite side this has the benefit of getting new recruits among the relatives and survivors and obviously of leading a far superior enemy by the noose ring through the public arena -which raises Opposition in a democracy - and reduces combat effectiveness in the military in dictatorships and democracy's (sovjet afghanistan).

I would really love to have the CIAs Information on how much vietnamese population was in active opposition to the american "police" action. My estimate would be around 75 %.

If the Vianamese were over here what percentage of Americans would be in active opposition immediately? What percentage after almost everyone saw friends and relatives slaughtered?

As the article quotes one soldier there was a mai Lai every month. You make it sound like this was a fact in the article. One unnamed soldier claimed that.

And I think the free fire zones were much more centered on artillery and air strikes and not ground infiltrations just walking and shooting whomever they wanted to, but it’s still horrible the disregard for human life.

But to state as you do that civilian mass murder was the goal, that’s false. The goal was war of attrition of actual combatants. What they did was not care or let civilian casualties stop them from trying to carry out that goal. Still horrible but come on there is enough bad stuff to point to without exaggeration and misleading.

That is pure unresearched wishful thinking.

They would fly helicopters up to farmers on a field who would look up at them in confusion and do nothing. Then they'd turn on a siren and when the farmers scattered they shot them all down for taking "evasive action", making them "combatants". There'd be reports of raids with hundreds of "viet cong" killed and a few weapons recovered. The killing machine was about body counts. Kissinger ordered "anything that flies on everything that moves." Villages were leveled in indiscriminate, massive bombing campaigns that exceeded twice the ordinance dropped in WWII. Millions were killed.

If you really want to research what happened in Vietnam start with Nick Turse's Kill Anything That Moves.[1] It's a polemical title but it's based on a ton of primary research, e.g. the Pentagon's War Crimes Working Group and the National Archives and interviews with over a hundred veterans. And that stuff will make any good soul polemical.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/1250045061/ref=rdr_ext_tmb

> twice the ordinance dropped in WWII

Nit-picking: it's "ordnance", not "ordinance".

> The Vietnam population did not see the kind of drop you would get from widespread systematic ethnic cleansing over a 19+ year war. 2.7 Million Americans went to Vietnam and a tiny fraction did some horrific things, but this was far more limited than often portrayed.

And deleted before I could reply - for anyone else interested and just two quick examples, read up on Free-Fire Zones and the Strategic Hamlet Program. The former is the indiscriminate killing of anyone found in the area and the latter is forced relocation of civilians and forced labor to build said new hamlets.

That's top down strategy and can't be put on people losing their composure in the field.

The Strategic Hamlet Program was adopted from the British, who used it to quell the Communist insurgency in Malaysia. Basically, round everybody up into a small group of villages for their "protection". Assume everyone who doesn't stay in the village is the enemy.

Notwithstanding the abuses in Malaysia (I'll leave it to others to question the necessity and efficacy), it definitely didn't translate to the Vietnam context. For one thing, in Malaysia the Communists mostly came from the ethnic Chinese community, who were a minority and already highly concentrated in the cities.[1] Vietnam had/has a similar ethnic Chinese minority (wealthy, urban, etc), but they were Capitalists, not the Communists. The pool of Communists was everybody else, the largely rural population.

[1] Interestingly, to this very day Malaysia still has laws which prevent Chinese from owning certain types of rural property, ostensibly to protect the rights of the rural Malay population. I don't know, but I presume such laws have always been in effect in Malaysia, even before the colonial era. At the time of the insurgency rural Chinese were probably already a suspicious group. In hindsight the insurgency was just an excuse for the powers (British, majority Malays) to reinforce the stable status quo, which is why the program "worked". In Vietnam the status quo was increasingly untenable.

If this was happening all the time, why was the helicopter pilot shocked? Sounds like the crew was equally shocked.

> Civilian mass murder was an explicit goal

It certainly was - of the North Vietnamese communists.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massacre_at_Hu%E1%BA%BF

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall_of_Saigon#Human_rights_af...

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