Breaking Point: An Exploration of the Psychosocial Factors Behind the My Lai Massacre

The haunting photograph of the moments before American rifles gunned down a group of Vietnamese women and children during the My Lai massacre of 1968 stands as a poignant emblem of one of the darkest and most shameful chapters of United States history. On March 16, 1968, roughly 200 American soldiers entered the village of My Lai and, in a span of four hours, killed an estimated 500 unarmed Vietnamese villagers. The mental poisoning of the soldiers that allowed this slaughter took root in the failures of the military to regulate its troops, failures that began in basic training. From 1965 to 1973, entrenched in a divisive and bloody conflict on foreign land against the communist government of North Vietnam, American soldiers encountered unthinkable violence and savagery. As the Vietnam War toiled on, taking the lives of more and more American men, the resulting public debate over military withdrawal spread throughout the nation, prompting the United States to pressure its army to produce favorable results. Thus, American combat troops implemented policies of attrition motivated by racism and the desire to satiate public discourse. However, failures in leadership in every step of a soldier’s path to Vietnam from their beginnings in military training to their physical experience in the foreign country rapidly eroded the men’s sense of identity and morality, which materialized in outbursts of extreme hatred and violence. Ultimately, the soldiers found themselves desensitized to killing the enemy, forced to weather the Vietnamese climate while surviving the mines and booby traps, and conditioned to follow orders without question, a confluence of factors that pushed them to commit atrocities like they did with the My Lai massacre. The fragmentation of the soldiers’ identities during basic training, followed by the final shattering of their minds in Vietnam, enabled these factors to materialize.

The initial military training, which aimed to equip the young soldiers with the capability to obey commands and with an indifference to killing, stripped the men of their individuality and fractured their minds. The introductory stage of basic training ordered a class-wide shaving of heads, removing a piece of the cadets’ self-expression, their hair, and demanding uniformity from the beginning. Commanding officers disciplined the young and impressionable recruits, many of whom were eighteen or nineteen years old, into believing that the ideal soldier embodied complete obedience and diligence to orders. Private First Class (Pfc.) Timothy Robinson of the Charlie Company (C.Co) Second Battalion wrote in letters home that the army was a “mad world of uniformity” that teaches to “do what you are told and not to think for yourself.” During basic training, commanding officers demanded strict adherence to this standard, forcing the soldiers to embrace the notion that they were no longer human, now simply obedient instruments of the military. Marine veteran Gene Holiday stated that:

[Military officials] tore you down. They tore everything civilian out of your entire existence---your speech, your thoughts, your sights, your memory---anything that was civilian they tore out and then they re-built you and made you over. But they didn’t build you from there up. First they made you drop down to a piece of grit on the floor. Then they built you back up to being a marine.

Exploiting the unquestionably obedient behavior instilled in the troops, drill sergeants further fragmented the minds of the soldiers with constant training to build a desensitization to death. “In boot camp they gave us bayonets and instructed us to stab at dummies while screaming ‘die, die, die,’” remembered Paul Brabant of the First Battalion, 13th Armored Division in a personal interview with Cattien Huynh. The military trained its broken soldiers to become indifferent to the act of killing, enforcing the notion that violent acts were nothing more than carrying out orders. Lieutenant William Calley C. Co First Battalion, the commander of the platoon responsible for the My Lai massacre, recounted in his memoir that: “[the sergeant] said don’t slit a man’s throat if you don’t want a sound: an ughughugh sucking sound[…a] good place to stab a man from behind is down through the shoulder, the sergeant said: the left shoulder, preferably, where the heart is, that’s how to kill someone best.”

The soldiers, conditioned by their superiors, learned the most optimal methods to eliminate their enemy with ruthless aggression, seeking to carry out their orders with the utmost efficiency. Their training officers replaced the men’s sense of humanity and free will with unwavering compliance and obedience. Military correspondent Gustav Hasford of the First Marine Division remembered that his drill instructor told recruits that they would be turned into “minister[s] of death, praying for war.” The superiors promoted the idea that the sole purpose of the men was to kill. Any free thought or moral objection to orders was silenced. “You still have to do it even if it doesn’t make any sense,” stated Michael Bernhardt C. Co First Battalion, one of the soldiers involved in the My Lai massacre. The loss of the soldier’s individuality and the inhumane violence, conditioned into them during basic training, created the first cracks in their minds and began their descent into thoughtless violence in Vietnam.

Now armed with the ability to kill, the broken soldiers were subsequently mentally prejudiced against the Vietnamese. Once desensitized to death, soldiers were then desensitized to their enemy. General William Westmoreland believed that “the Oriental [did not] put the same high price on life as does the Westerner.” Indeed, he argued that “[l]ife is plentiful, life is cheap in the Orient,” and, “[as] the philosophy of the Orient expresses it, life is not important.” This belief allowed Americans to justify their violence against the Vietnamese, arguing that if their opponent’s race did not put value on life, then there would be no harm in taking it. The racism interwoven into the combat training and military strategy, brought about by a psychologically supposed racist superiority, encouraged a merciless implementation of the skills primed in military school. Classes at military school promoted a casual racism that enforced the perception of Vietnamese people as caricatures rather than real human beings as the inhabitants of Vietnam. Instructors used the term “gook” to refer to the Vietnamese, accompanied by stereotypical descriptions of slanted eyes, to disparage their enemy and remove any essence of humanity within them. This prejudice diminished the Vietnamese from being seen as real humans into nothing more than dangerous enemies that must be conquered. The fear that the Vietnamese desired the blood of Americans loomed over the soldiers’ shoulders, influencing their subsequent actions. Lieutenant Calley wrote in his memoir that his drill instructors’ emphasis that “in combat [they] haven’t friends[…but] enemies” produced his belief that “everyone in Vietnam would do [him] in.” The military teachers instilled a mindset that kept the soldiers on high alert at all times, instructing them to not trust anyone and to stay on guard. Calley decided to embrace this notion. He, alongside the rest of those he trained with, was constantly paranoid that everyone around him was the enemy. With the idea that “everyone is his enemy,” those he encountered lost their humanity in his eyes, stripped down to purely “the enemy,” Gary Garfolo C. Co First Battalion, a perpetrator of the My Lai massacre stated that “you think it’s war […] and it’s either you or them” during a personal interview. Fighting against those considered both less than human and representative of the antithesis of their combat training, while also fighting to preserve their lives, the soldiers sunk into a brutish state of violence before even stepping foot in Vietnam.

While the men’s conditioning before deployment led to the first cracks in their psyches, the unique experience of Vietnam shattered it. Once in Vietnam, the hostile Vietnamese jungle and its scorching climate compiled physical exhaustion upon their mental fatigue. The experience of being in the country forced the soldiers to endure laborious and exhaustive daily activities that further strained their bodies. Pfc. Robinson wrote in letters home that daily tasks included one to twelve mile hikes throughout the mountainous terrain and vast rice paddies while carrying 65-pound packs of gear. The physical demands of each day drained the little energy still remaining in the exhausted men, who slowly crept toward the end of their mental capacity. Corporal Mike Jeffords wrote to his parents that the jungle’s unfamiliar 90° heat and humidity of one day combined with the tumultuous monsoon weather of the next assaulted the physical well-being of the men, constantly tormenting them with one extreme after another. The brutal yet volatile atmospheric conditions punished all of its inhabitants who remained helpless to its change, exacerbating the soldiers’ daily struggle and raising tensions. American journalist and veteran Philip Caputo wrote that:

For weeks we had to live like primitive men on remote outposts rimmed by alien seas of rice paddies and rain forests. Malaria, blackwater fever, and dysentery… took their toll. The sun scorched us in the dry season, and in the monsoon season we were pounded numb by ceaseless rain. Our days were spent hacking through mountainous jungles whose immensity reduced us to an antlike pettiness.

The merciless environment placed even more strain on the fatigued soldiers, demanding an exhaustive yet unwavering determination for survival. The weary Americans fought in a ground and air war on unforgiving land that unapologetically displayed its spectrum of destructive conditions. The stress of the ruthless environment combined with the apathy to life fractured the soldiers into a similarly merciless and violent group.

Furthermore, combat with an enemy concealed by the jungle intertwined adrenaline-soaked battle fatigue with layers of tension and frustration. Journalist Philip Caputo wrote that while enduring the weather and fighting the conditions, troops helplessly waited for incoming Vietnamese assailants to emerge from the dark. Under the shadows of the jungle’s thick bushels and dense trees, soldiers anxiously waited on guard for the moment the Viet Cong would attack from their hiding spots in the flora, pushing the men into a state of tense nervousness that threatened to rupture. More specifically, guerrilla-fighting broke the mentalities of the soldiers. Utilizing a form of warfare that saw the coordination of small surprise attacks that weakened the Americans by attrition, slowly picking them off one by one, the Viet Cong consolidated control over combat. In defending against an enemy that abused their superior knowledge and command of the land to wear down American forces,the stress of needing to stay alert in case of attack at all times created a platoon-wide nervous composition that threatened to snap at any small action. Caputo wrote that:

Some men could not withstand the stress of guerilla-fighting: the hair-trigger awareness constantly demanded of them, the feeling that the enemy was everywhere, the inability to distinguish civilians from combatants created emotional pressures which built to such a point that trivial provocation could make these men explode with the blind destructiveness of a mortar shell.

Those who broke under the extreme pressure unleashed a violent and ruthless fury that was facilitated by basic training. Caputo further wrote that the war was a matter of enduring long spans of expectant waiting with random intervals of vicious manhunts throughout the dense jungle where the enemy would pick off the soldiers slowly. However, the instances when Vietnamese chose to fight pitched battles allowed for the release of weeks of bottled-up tensions, seeing bursts of violent screaming and wild gunfire. To worsen the situation, a third of all engagements between the combatants were ambushes, with the Vietnamese executing three times as many as the Americans. The frustrated troops further lost control over the war, bending to the will of the rebels and whether or not they decided to interact. Losing a war to an invisible enemy distressed and angered the troops beyond measure. Despite a constant state of alert, American soldiers still wielded no control over contact with the enemy and continued to be caught off guard. The Viet Cong dictated the flow of battle, controlling the external factors of combat: the time, the preparedness of the opponent, and the location. During ambushes, the rebels maintained power over the Americans. Chaplain Ray Stubbe recalled being awoken at 5 am to the sound of incoming rockets and mortars exploding outside his tent. Even during sleep, a time of supposed peace and calm, soldiers were helpless to the will of their enemy which aimed to kill them. Fighting a seemingly unseen opponent hidden by an oppressive forest destroyed the last bit of the tense soldiers’ self-control.

Anger and frustration toward the deaths caused by mines and booby traps provided the final push toward the fragmentation of the soldiers’ minds that manifested in the violence in My Lai. On top of the punishing weather and unforeseen ambushes, troops suffered at the hands of an intangible enemy: mines and booby traps. During the weeks before the My Lai massacre, in the Charlie Company’s unit of little more than 120, four men were killed, and 38 were wounded by explosives and traps. With the small number of interactions that physically staked the American men against other men, the soldiers grew increasingly frustrated at the lack of direct action they could react with. The absence of a physical enemy wrecked the psychologies of the soldiers who found themselves lost in how to react or avenge their allies. The distinction between civilian and combatant quickly eroded as their anger clouded their judgment. Jocko Willink remembered that his high school teacher once said that

We would walk around a village and one of our guys would hit a booby trap everyday, every other day. And the villagers are out there walking on the same trails, but they’re not getting blown up. And so, after weeks and then months of this happening, of me losing two guys, three guys, six guys, getting blown up, getting killed, losing their legs, losing their arms, losing their lives. And the Vietnamese villagers aren’t hitting anything. Eventually in our minds, they become guilty.

The frustration of constantly losing their men to an unseen enemy’s devices compounded the stress of being in Vietnam, which turned their attention toward the civilians. Their anger and disappointment toward themselves for being helpless in stopping the continuous loss of life was alleviated by placing the guilt onto innocent villagers. Garfolo from C. Co admitted that “[they] were feeling pretty down about all these people that were getting hit by these mines[…] There’s nothing [they could] do about it. A lot of [them] wanted a little bit of revenge [...] to see them and get into them because they were always hiding.” With a physical human being to assign culpability for the deaths of their comrades, despite no tangible evidence that they were liable, the soldiers reclaimed control and were able to avenge their comrades. The desperate hunger for retribution drove the broken men toward the indiscriminate violence in the My Lai massacre.

The need for revenge and the desire to complete “the mission” culminated in the definitive order to wipe out My Lai the night before. General Ernest Medina, fueled by the burning desire for revenge, briefed his platoon to be indiscriminate in killing the villagers. General Medina instructed that “when we go into My Lai, it’s open season. When we leave, nothing will be living. Everything’s going to go. Nothing [will] be walking, growing, or crawling. They’re all VCs, now go in and get them. We owe them something.”

Hours before the massacre, the superiors commanded the troops to lay waste to the village, encouraging a mindset that viewed every Vietnamese person as the enemy, which, combined with the intense desire for revenge, caused the ruthless and chaotic bloodbath of the My Lai massacre. Gary Garfolo recalled that General Medina “said shoot everything[…] that could aid the VC (Viet Cong). Every living thing, that was the order.” The soldiers felt as though they were simply following orders, a mindset their training had prepared them to assume. Their mission to be the perfect soldier, carrying out orders without question—along with their desire for an excuse to release their insurmountable feelings of frustration and stress—took over any moral objection in their mind. Garry Crossley C. Co First Battalion stated in a personal interview that “this is the type of thing that during training you’re told to do.[…]You don’t question it,” and, to an interview question about if a search and destroy mission justified brutalizing the people, he responded “right.” Not only did the environment and tensions create a hostile realm, their superiors encouraged violence. The soldiers were motivated to avenge their fellow soldiers with the only language they understood: violence. This savageness did not spare anyone. Varnado Simpson C. Co First Battalion argued that they believed that every villager was either Viet Cong or had the potential to grow into one so all inhabitants of My Lai, including the children, were to be disposed of. The paranoia and stress of fighting in Vietnam had shattered their minds, to the point of justifying pedicide. The final shattering of the men’s minds, exploited by their superiors, resulted in the violence of the destruction of My Lai.

The My Lai massacre of 1968 exemplified the systemic erosion of the soldiers’ moral compasses and the psychological toll of warfare on American soldiers during the Vietnam War era. The atrocity epitomized the disastrous consequences of a rapid breakdown of the human psyche, that in 1968 was cultivated by the desensitization to killing and the enemy, the Vietnamese climate and terrain, the threat of mines and booby traps, and the adherence to a culture of unquestioning obedience. The factors that compiled into such a tragedy provides an understanding of the psychological damage caused by the failures ingrained into American systems. Demolishing the long-standing myth of American exceptionality and forcing the world to confront the reality that Americans are as susceptible to barbarity as any other nationality under the appropriate circumstances, the senseless violence seen in 1968 stands not as an isolated incident, but rather as the shining example of the failure of the American government to properly discipline its troops and enforce combat ethics. With the term “My Lai” being synonymous with the atrocities of war, the massacre serves as a lesson to the world of the horrific dangers of unchecked power on the human condition and the barbaric nature of war, reminding us of historian Roger Spiller’s declaration that “we are all one step away from My Lai.”