The Mi Lai Massacre, pronounced mee lye, was a terrible event in history. It occured in March 16, 1968 during the Vietnam War. Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry Regiment, 11th Brigade, American Division was ordered to go and totally destroy the village of Mi Lai. At the time the soldiers did not know that this village held only women and children. The Charlie Company was ordered to destroy it anyway. Most of the soldiers followed orders and they killed the civilans, but others disobeyed the orders and they helped the civilans escape from their deaths. I have to ask yo0u what you would do in this situation because both choices resulted in serious consequences. First of all if you disobeyed orders you would be charged with insubordination and then most likely sentenced to prison. On the other hand if you killed the civilans that is a war crime and you would also be sentenced to prison as well. What would you do? I think that I can tie this in to Mockingbird because when Boo killed Bob this was a crime even though it could've been percieved as defense. Still that was too extreme. Then if Boo didn't kill Bob he would've been letting a crime happen so what would you do in both of these cases? In Mi Lai I think that I wouldn't have killed the civilans and in the book to kill a Mockingbird I would have killed Bob. I couldn't live with myself knowing that I had killed an innocent person in the case of Mi Lai and I couldn't live with myself if I let an innocent person be killed if I didn't try to stop it in the case of Mockingbird. I encourage you to visit this link and click on the highlights in the link such as all of the contents. I know that it is alot to read but it is a very worth while and touching bit of history. It really made me see that even the US, "the so called greatest country in the world," can make big mistakes in my opinion.
4 comments:
I think that if I were one of the men that were asked to kill all those innocent citizens that I would have choosen to disobeyed the orders. I would do this simply because I feel that it would be better to go to jail for some thing that I did not do and save some peoples lives, than to kill all those people and go to jail for some thing I really did do. I would never be able to live with my self if I had killed so many citizens that were mostly women and children and were all innocent. I really think that many of the people who faced this problem for real had a really hard time deciding what they should do and if they decided to obey the orders that they had a really hard time living the rest of their lives knowing what they did was very wrong. Even though I would have to face going to jail for disobeying orders I would not even think about obeying the orders because no matter what the person in charge is saying killing innocent people is not and will never be the answer.
~SUSIE
Yeah so I kind of think that is like saying that in some situations it is OK to take the law into your own hands, but only in some cases.
This was a horrible situation!I wouldn't want to kill anyone so I would go to jail.I would feel so bad for taking anothers life.I agree killing people isn't the answer.Think about this though in WW2 was it right for the U.S. to bomb two Japanese towns full of innocent people??She we did get revenge on them but was it right?
The atomic bombs that we dropped are debatable because it ended the war alot sooner and saved American lives. If the war would've kept going the Japaneese people would not have surrendered until they were all dead and then the US would have lost more lives too.
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