Four Hours In My Lai Essay

Four Hours in My Lai revolves around those “others” who died at the hands of the American military, when they never should have. But, it is not just an inquiry into the massacre of up to four hundred unarmed civilians by American troops, it is also a cautionary tale about Western arrogance in South-East Asia. Nevertheless, there is a clear impression that Vietnam has got over the Vietnam War; something, this books reminds us, cannot be said of the United States. The Vietnamese have fought in Cambodia and on their Chinese border since the Vietnam War, a martial fixture-list more punishing than the one faced by the United States in the same period. Of course, Vietnam did not experience the same sense of national humiliation: and yet its losses

On the contrary, they passed out from basic training as the best in their battalion. However, infantryman Michael Bernhardt remembers that there was lax discipline among them. There was also friction between Lieutenant William ‘Rusty’ Calley, the only man to later serve time for My Lai, and the company’s commanding officer, Captain Ernest Medina, even though the two shared a violent animosity towards the Vietnamese. In the aftermath of the enemy’s surprise Tet Offensive in January 1968, Charlie Company was on the trail of the élite 48th Battalion of the National Liberation Front, which had been resisting the Americans for three years in Quang Ngai province. The hunt turned into a grudge after three soldiers US were blown up in a minefield. Their deaths reinforced hostility to Vietnamese civilians, who were suspected of planting booby traps. By their own accounts, the GIs ceased to trouble themselves as to whether the people they dealt with were friends or foe. They were briefed that an early morning trip to My Lai would be their long awaited chance to engage the 48th Battalion at close quarters, and to get even for their dead buddies. In case they were worried about risks to civilians, intelligence reports offered them the risible assurance that all genuine non-combatants would be out at the market at that time of day, leaving only the Viet Cong at