In my social psychology class we have been talking about the issue of MyLai.
For those of you who do not know what this is, during the Vietnam war a batalion of soldiers were ordered to go to this town MyLai and kill all the Vietcom there. These soldiers were inexperienced in combat and the only experience they had with losing men was to boobytraps and snippers while in Vietnam. The average age of the soilders was 20 and they were generally from middle class families. They rode on helicopters to just outside MyLai around 7 am on a Saturday morning.
They went into it expecting all of the people to be Vietcom because they were told that all civilians would be a market. They were also told to expect hostile fire, everyone was the enemy and they should kill all.
When they got there it wasn't exactly what they expected. There was no hostile fire and almost if not all of the people were civilians. So from normal rationality one would now think that they would just leave well enough alone and leave.
On the contrary, they started following the orders. This one guy from the video said the first person he shot was a woman who was running and carrying something, which he assumed was a gun. When he shot and killed this woman he realized that she was carrying a baby. He said on this video though that it started something in him and now his mind went blank and back to the training that they had gone through earlier. They killed, raped and other atrosities to these innocent people. Houses were burned to the ground and basically the whole town was leveled.
There was no hostile fire yet all of these vietmase people were killed. It became, at some point, something like the Nazi when they lined people up and then shot them.
So my point of writing about this, is that it is a horrible horrible thing that happened. However someone in my disscussion class said that these people just had to be horrible people and normal people wouldn't do that. I disagree. I don't condone what they did because it was still wrong but as I said before most of these men were 20 years old and from middle class families. Not that that doesn't mean you could be a bad person I just believe that the situation they were in caused at least the majority of what happened to happen. I believe that I am a generally good person and that I would never kill someone, so put in that situation I would like to say that I would be better than that and I would not do it. Well then I think back to what the situation actually was. They were ordered to do it and I usually do as I'm told especially by authority figures. Also conformity was an issue and as much as I would like to believe that I wouldn't do it just because everyone else was, well I don't think I would have the strength to stand up against a crowd.
Now I can't know for sure what I would do in the situation because I have never been in it, but that also means that you can't judge the situation if you've never been in it. Thoughts? Comments? I would love to hear what you think.
Jenna
