Philosophy
Today is the 43rd anniversary of the massacre at My Lai in which U.S. troops brutally beat, tortured, raped, and slaughtered several hundred unarmed civilians, mostly women and children, in a South Vietnamese village.
Having taught at a military academy, one of the words you hear thrown around often is "honor." It is certainly part of the mythology of the warrior that they try to build. But is it possible to create someone who can do the job one asks of the warrior and not have them become like Heracles, blinded to the consequences of your actions when you are in the middle of them? Are horrors like My Lai inevitable when war is a reality? We hear terms like "bad eggs" applied to folks at Abu Ghraib, but is it the eggs that have gone bad or does the environment spoil them? Certainly, it is true that different people react differently to the same stimulus, and that not everyone will be changed in the same way by war or any other experience; but there are sociological regularities, there are trends. If you have a war, will it not affect a significant enough number such that My Lai-type incidents are a near certainty?
Is it something that strong leadership or better training can change or is such despicable evil a nearly necessary result of war itself?
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Philosophy
My Lai and the Nature of War
Today is the 43rd anniversary of the massacre at My Lai in which U.S. troops brutally beat, tortured, raped, and slaughtered several hundred unarmed civilians, mostly women and children, in a South Vietnamese village.
Having taught at a military academy, one of the words you hear thrown around often is "honor." It is certainly part of the mythology of the warrior that they try to build. But is it possible to create someone who can do the job one asks of the warrior and not have them become like Heracles, blinded to the consequences of your actions when you are in the middle of them? Are horrors like My Lai inevitable when war is a reality? We hear terms like "bad eggs" applied to folks at Abu Ghraib, but is it the eggs that have gone bad or does the environment spoil them? Certainly, it is true that different people react differently to the same stimulus, and that not everyone will be changed in the same way by war or any other experience; but there are sociological regularities, there are trends. If you have a war, will it not affect a significant enough number such that My Lai-type incidents are a near certainty?
Is it something that strong leadership or better training can change or is such despicable evil a nearly necessary result of war itself?
- Media Bias And Women In The Military
David Airth asks, "Marshall Mcluhan came to mind the other day with his "the media is message" idea. Many people argue that the media is bias towards liberalism. Is the media message then supposed to be liberal? But in the build-up to the Iraqi war the...
- Women And The Culture Of The Military
As I've been reading about Pfc. LaVena Johnson's suspicious death and the situation for female troops in Iraq, (from a Salon article on the matter) I have talked to more than 20 female veterans of the Iraq war in the past few months, interviewing...
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Green Eggs and Ham features two characters, an unnamed narrator and Sam-I-Am. The book begins with the narrator declaring that he does not like that Sam-I-Am. Despite this antagonistic attitude towards him, Sam-I-Am incessantly suggests that the narrator...
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Today marks the 10th anniversary of that surreal and catastrophic day that will be forever marked in our collective and individual memories. Needless to say, my heart and thoughts are with everyone affected by that tragedy. But I think this day also presents...