My Lai reveals much about the nature of the US war effort in Vietnam as of March 1968. Just two years before My Lai, Vietnamese civilians would have met spirited and disciplined American soldiers, mostly volunteers who had enlisted out of patriotic duty and perhaps ideological conviction. No later than October 1966, however, Secretary of Defense McNamara had privately concluded that the war could not be won. It probably was not long after that that the men in the field must have begun to sense that the objectives they had been given were not achievable. The consequent erosion in their discipline was captured by one My Lai survivor: “The first time they came, they played with the children and gave them sweets. The second time, they drank the water we gave them and said nothing. The third time, they killed everyone in the village.”
The American war effort reflected the biases and blind spots of the technological superpower we had become. Our war making powers were enormous, and we brought them to bear with increasing ferocity on our enemy. Over time, the bombs and the fighter jets and the helicopters became the logic of our position. When dropping bombs in the north didn’t work, we dropped more in Cambodia; when we doubted the South Vietnamese Army’s capabilities, we gave them more tanks. Technology culture tends to elide what Graham Greene elsewhere called “the human factor.” In the Vietnam War, we ignored the human factor on both sides. We ignored the motivational gap between our Vietnamese allies and our Vietnamese foes. We also ignored the increasing demoralization and lawlessness of our own troops. I will never believe that My Lai represents America or the American soldier. But we can connect the dots between who we were as a nation in that period and the failure of our war effort.