>There's at least one parallel. I have an old friend
>who was an MP in Vietnam. He still has friends in
>the military. They told him they took umbrage at
>orders to shoot Iraqi soldiers who were basically
>just running away. Then there is the famous
>'highway of death.' Before the war started
>there were press accounts of a terrifying,
>inhumane weapon the Iraqis might use. I forget
>the name but it entailed spraying a fine, flammable
>mist over a wide area, then igniting it, creating
>a huge fireball. Of course, it was the U.S. that
>used this weapon.
>
>Now suppose one of these incidents was isolated
>and a scapegoat made of the lower-level officers
>involved. That seems a partial parallel, at least,
>to My Lai. My point is that the politics of fixating
>on an episode in this way, even when it involves
>higher-level officers, seems off point. And I
>wonder how service people would react.
It was Vietnam Veterans' own testimonies that let Americans know that My Lai was _not_ an isolated incident _at all_. Here's the website of Winter Soldier Investigation (at <http://lists.village.virginia.edu/sixties/HTML_docs/Resources/Primary/Winter_Soldier/WS_entry.html>). Read Richard R. Moser, _The New Winter Soldiers: GI and Veteran Dissent during the Vietnam Era_, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996, too. The journal called _Vietnam Generation_ is very good also.
Yoshie