My Lai and the Perils of Obedience

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Recommended: “Review of Stanley Milgram’s Experiments on Obedience” by Diana Baumrind

My Lai and the Perils of Obedience The My Lai massacre is probably one of the most infamous cases of atrocity carried out by U.S. military personnel. This paper will attempt to connect the actions of the American soldiers at My Lai with the study conducted by Stanley Milgram in 1974 on the impact authority has on obedience. My Lai was a hamlet in the Son My Village. The hamlet was marked on American maps as consisting of My Lai 1 through My Lai 6. The massacre actually occurred at Tu Cung, a sub-hamlet of My Lai. Task Force Barker was to conduct a three-day search and destroy operation beginning at 0730 on 16 March 1968, code named “Operation Muscatine” (Raimondo, p. 4). As the purpose of the mission might suggest, this was a search and destroy mission. Search and destroy mission were generally a reference used to identify a mission against an enemy combatant; not a civilian population. However, that is exactly what happened. Within four hours of making first contact with the village, the soldiers from Alpha, Bravo, and Charlie Company of the 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry Division had murdered over 400 unarmed Vietnamese men, women, and children. What turned seemingly normal, albeit soldiers, into merciless killers of innocent civilians. According to Stanley Milgram, the answer may be found in “Obedience to Authority.” Milgram believed that obedience was as basic an element in the structure of social life as one can point to (Milgram, Perils, p. 1). This is a significant factor in why people are generally reluctant to question authority. In 1974, Milgram set up an experiment at Yale University to test how much pain a person might inflict on another person simply because they were ordered to do so. The basic design of the exp... ... middle of paper ... ...e they were relieved of personal responsibility for the learner, they were more willing to apply increased voltage to the participant. The same can be said for the soldiers. Once they believed the order was to kill everything that moved, they were simply the means to that end. Although there are many contributing factors to this atrocity, when combined with the stresses of war, ordinary people can become agents of significant hostility. This is the underlying lesson to Milgram’s experiment and likely the underlying cause for the transformation of the seemingly normal soldiers of My Lai. When even the destructive effects of their actions become clear and they are asked to continue with this action, even though it is obviously incompatible with their fundamental standards of morality, few have the wherewithal to resist the desires of authority. Sources Cited:

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