Military History Channel @ 9pm

Highly recommended, very powerful documentary interviewing the perpatrators, survivors and those that tried to stop a massacre.

My Lai

Highly recommended

My initial reaction was “why ?” ……it was a truly horrific act of barbarism, even by the standards of the Vietnam War – with its widespread rape, murder, chemical weapons, and carpet bombing. The fact that those responsible were all identified and yet never punished, simply adds to the outrage.

Not the most entertaining bit of TV viewing I would have thought.

But then it occurred to me that many might not know about My Lai, so yes, I would recommended watching. And not least because it was such important massacre which helped end US involvement in Vietnam, and exposed the lie that the US stood for an unshakable commitment to peace, democracy, and justice.

I can’t access the Military History Channel so won’t be seeing it.

“Why?”

Is a good question.

Firstly as you mentioned I had never heard of My Lai.

I also think things like this (The World at War and How Vietnam Was Lost are two more that spring immediately to mind) are important. These aren’t special effects, it shows the real consequences of war on all the people involved, military and civilian. No illusion of glory.

While I watch these programs I think ‘Could/would I have been able to do that?’ – whether that’s being one of the few to stand up to people on your own side in the case of My Lai or withstand a seige like Tobruk or be part of the resistance in Holland.

I was berated by a deranged woman in a New York bar once who heard my accent and decided that I must have been in some way responsible for Bloody Sunday. She was one of those tiresome Yanks who’ve convinced themselves that they are Irish or ‘Eye-Errrrr-Ish’ as she put it.

It soon became apparent that she knew nothing about Ireland and that her main qualification for co-opting somebody else’s cultural heritage was that she was ginger. I asked her what she thought of My Lai.

‘My what?’, she replied.

So, I filled her in on the massacre, but it was to no avail. She’d never heard of it, neither had her friends and all of them refused to believe that the event had ever occurred.

No expensive public enquiry at My Lai village hall, no drama on CBS about it etc etc