My Lai Massacre Research Paper

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My Lai Massacre The Vietnam War started off just a civil rights battle within the country, but it later intensified to something way bigger. The United States ended up getting involved and it got very serious. The United States did a draft causing many men to go to the war to fight for the Vietnamese people rights. During the time in Vietnam, soldiers had to do many things they didn’t like. An example would be the My Lai massacre. The My Lai massacre was not necessary and it could have been avoided, but since it wasn’t innocent people died and women were raped. The My Lai massacre occurred on March 16,1968. It was said to be “the biggest thing going in the American Division that day” (Hersh 46). There were about three platoons from …show more content…

When they arrived they only thing the soldiers saw were villagers getting ready for their day and eating breakfast. That didn’t stop them from killing people. In the next hours the same day they murdered about 504 civilians in Vietnam. The crazy thing about them being murdered is even before they were murdered the soldiers were told to line them up in a ditch then shot them. Fifty children three years and younger, sixty-nine people between the age four and seven years old, and around twenty-seven people between seventy and eighty years were among the rest of the Vietnamese people who got murdered. As for the women being raped nobody knows how many. That wasn’t even the worst part about the massacre. They carved the phrase “C Company” in people’s bodies to let the rest of the Vietnamese people know who did it. The C was an abbreviation for Charlie. That wasn’t the only time the Charlie Company did cruel things. In one of my sources called My Lai 4 it says “After many weeks of no combat, the company began to systematically beat its prisoners, and it began to be less discriminating about who was—or was not—a VC” (Hersh

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