You are ignorant of the history of modern warfare. There is nothing special about My Lai. My Lai is not an aberration created by what you call "group-based mental disorder." My Lai was the norm in the Vietnam War. In fact, the indiscriminate destruction of civilian lives is _the_ foundation of modern warfare. Bombings are intended to destroy civilian lives & civilian infrastructure. Vietnam was no exception. Howard Zinn writes in _A People's History of the United States_ (NY: HarperPerennial, 1980):
***** The massacre at My Lai by a company of ordinary soldiers was a small event compared with the plans of high-level military and civilian leaders to visit massive destruction on the civilian population of Vietnam. Assistant Secretary of Defense John McNaughton in early 1966, seeing that large-scale bombing of North Vietnam villages was not producing the desired result, suggested a different strategy...:
Destruction of locks and dams, however,...might...offer promise....By shallow-flooding the rice, it leads after a time to widespread starvation (more than a million?)....
The heavy bombings were intended to destroy the will of ordinary Vietnamese to resist, as in the bombings of German and Japanese population centers in World War II -- despite President Johnson's public insistence that only "military targets" were being bombed. (Zinn 471) *****
The same goes for the ground warfare:
***** Colonel Oran Henderson, who had been charged with covering up the My Lai killings, told reporters in early 1971: "Every unit of brigade size has its My Lai hidden someplace."
Indeed, My Lai was unique only in its details. [Seymour] Hersh reported a letter sent by a GI to his family, and published in a local newspaper:
Dear Mom and Dad:
Today we went on a mission and I am not very proud of myself, my friends, or my country. We burned every hut in sight!
It was a small rural network of villages and the people were incredibly poor. My unit burned and plundered their meager possessions. Let me try to explain the situation to you.
The huts here are thatched palm leaves. Each one has a dried mud bunker inside. These bunkers are to protect the families. Kind of like air raid shelters.
My unit commanders, however, chose to think that these bunkers are offensive. So every hut we find that has a bunker we are ordered to burn to the ground.
When the ten helicopters landed this morning, in the midst of these huts, and six men jumped out of each "chopper", we were firing the moment we hit the ground. We fired into all the huts we could.... (Zinn 470) *****
>The instructions given by the senior officers to the
>junior officers, including Lt. Calley, were ambiguous.
Orders were not ambiguous. Wasting civilians was the main strategy of the war, and Lieutenant Calley acted accordingly:
***** On March 16, 1968, a company of American soldiers went into the hamlet of My Lai 4, in Quang Ngai province. They rounded up the inhabitants, including old people and women with infants in their arms. These people were ordered into a ditch, where they were methodically shot to death by American soldiers. The testimony of James Dursi, a rifleman, at the later trial of Lieutenant William Calley, was reported in the _New York Times_:
Lieutenant Calley and a weeping rifleman named Paul D. Meadlo -- the same soldier who had fed candy to the children before shooting them -- pushed the prisoners into the ditch....
"There was an order to shoot by Lieutenant Calley. I can't remember the exact words -- it was something like 'Start firing.' "Meadlo turned to me and said: 'Shoot, why don't you shoot?' "He was crying. "I said, 'I can't. I won't.' "Then Lieutenant Calley and Meadlo pointed their rifles into the ditch and fired. "People were diving on top of each other; mothers were trying to protect their children...." (Zinn 469) *****
Why did Calley and soldiers under his command do this?
***** Large areas of South Vietnam were declared "free fire zones," which meant that all persons remaining within them -- civilians, old people, children -- were considered an enemy, and bombs were dropped at will. Villages suspected of harboring Viet Cong were subject to "search and destroy" missions.... (Zinn 468) *****
Part of the plan, you see. They were ordered to think of all Vietnamese people, armed or unarmed, of whatever age, as Viet Congs, actual or potential, or else Communist supporters. Intense racism -- to which American GIs of color were also subjected -- probably made it easier for some to follow the orders. The only good Gooks were dead Gooks. Just as many white Americans once thought: The only good Indians are dead Indians; the only good N-words are dead N-words; etc. Further, American soldiers themselves, of whatever color, were often brutalized by their commanding officers. What do the oppressed & brutalized do? They brutalize others, especially helpless enemies. Or else they revolt. Some did the former, while others chose to do the latter.
There is no profound psychological mystery in war.
Yoshie