How US Foreign Policy in the Vietnam War led to the My Lai Massacre

The infamous massacre has been wrongly psychologized, when it was in fact a direct result of Washington’s resolve to force the Vietcong into submission through excessive force.

In the morning hours of March 16, 1968, a group of American soldiers from Task Force Barker entered the South Vietnamese fishing hamlet of My Lai looking for Vietcong. By the end of the day, they had murdered between 347 and 504 unarmed civilians, committing one of the worst war crimes in US history. 

Although the perpetrators tried to cover up their tra…