Charlie Company: Explaining The My Lai Massacre

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Explaining My Lai In 1968 the civilians in South Vietnam were killed by American soldiers called Charlie Company. They killed around 350 to 500 unarmed villagers because they were ordered to by William Calley, a platoon leader in Charlie Company. Previous to the massacre Charlie Company had suffered many injuries and 5 deaths due to booby traps, but there were no sight of the people who had set them. Charlie Company were told that after 7:00 am the only people left in the nearby village would be NLF or NLY sympathisers, they were told to leave no one alive, burn houses and crop. When the soldiers attacked the village there was no resistance, only women, children and the elderly who were there, they got brutally murdered and even raped and…show more content…
Normative conformity can be defined as; ‘Yielding to group pressure because a person wants to fit in with the group. Conforming because the person is scared of being rejected by the group.’ (www.simplypsychology.org),. This type of conformity usually means the individual is compliant in a group, but truly they reject them. Knowing this you could say that the soldiers were all acting how they thought they should be behaving as part of Charlie Company. ‘Lieutenant William L. Calley recalled witnessing one of his soldiers raping a civilian and telling him “to get his pants back up and get over to where he was supposed to be.” Instead of reprimanding his subordinate for committing a crime of war, the Lieutenant casually tells him to stop and does not instill any type of punishment.’ (http://apeaceofconflict.com) The soldiers were not being punished for this type of behaviour and it would seem that it was perfectly acceptable. Consequently if this was thought as normal behaviour of Charlie Company, it could be possible that others in the group will conform to fit in with the group. Consequently these behaviours could start to explain why the My Lai Massacre happened. The social identity theory could also be another factor of why the My Lai Massacre happened. Social identity theory assumes that prejudice can explain how we identify ourselves as part of a group, and how people classify others as within that group or a part of it. There are three stages to the social identity

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