10/5/2009

WARNING THIS POST IS REALLY DEPRESSING

My Lai is by far the most sobering place that we have been. It officially tops the War Remnants Museum which was also intense. The Museum seemed like a museum, it was for me separate from the actual events, partly because there was so much propaganda and partly because everything in that museum was put there with the specific purpose of shock and awe. The design of that museum was telling a very specific communist side of the story. My Lai was not like that at all. There was no separation for me mentally between the people that died here and the reports of their death. I couldn't just write this off as a common act of war, which is was, but what could ever go through someone's mind to allow them to take life unnecessarily. Somethings I will never understand. Instead of dwelling on the tragedy I would instead like to reflect on the heroism. There were 10 survivors at My Lai and 8 of them survived because two men decided to do the right thing. A helicopter pilot named Hugh Thompson saw villagers running for their lives and dropped down and tried to convince the soldiers to stop, when they didn't he took 8 villagers including 6 small children to a near by village for safety. While he was flying the villagers to safety he saw movement in a pile of dead bodies and went down to the pile and dug through to find a wounded infant and took that little boy to the hospital and saved his life. Thompson did all of this with the support of this gun man. Those to men are heroes in Vietnam as they should be. They risked their own lives to save people because it was the right thing to do. They didn't just follow orders as so many had done before them. It is much easier to follow a Shepard, than to act on your own morals and beliefs. My Lai is just one of these massacres that occurred in many wars. The movie the Patriot also depicts act like this one that happened during the Revolutionary War and although the movie is one of fiction, there is some truth to the events that occur. How do you teach someone right and wrong, and more importantly how do you teach someone to have the courage to go act against a friend in order to do the right thing? I cannot answer this question, but I can say that we should spend more care when teaching the people who lead this country in the matters of life and death. I truly believe that life is the most important gift that we are given in this world and I don't think that you get a second chance.