Examination of the My Lai massacre- one of the most infamous events of the Vietnam War Review of the book "My Lai: A Brief History with Documents" (James Stuart Olson, Randy Roberts)

Abstract

This report will look at the book My Lai. Written by the history professors James S. Olson and Randy Roberts. Distinguished Professor of History in Houston, James S Olson is a historian whose main concern is recent American history. In this respect, he had been very interested in Vietnam, having edited the Dictionary of the Vietnam War and The Vietnam War: Handbook of the Literature and Research(1993). He co-wrote “Ma Lai” with Randy Roberts another History professor at Purdue University. He was also interested in recent American history. The Vietnam War was the lengthiest and probably one of the most polemical military conflicts in the history of the U.S.

In order to understand the complexity of the Vietnam War, it is necessary to look at the context and period of history in which this conflict took place. Problems started in Southeast Asia after the Second World War, when Japan decided to invade Vietnam, which used to be part of Indochina, controlled by the French. As Olson and Roberts established, “France imposed a new form of colonialism. French officials and their Vietnamese surrogates dominated the political bureaucracy" (Olson and Roberts: 3). Foreign occupation of Vietnam generated the creation of the nationalistic movement in Vietminh. In 1964, the American president Lyndon Baines Johnson ordered direct intervention in the conflict. Writers like Michael Lind had defended the argument that the intervention of the U.S. in Vietnam, arguing that the Vietnam War was unavoidable and “necessary” (Lind: 9).

The domino theory, seemed to provide a basis for this assumption, based in the belief that the defeat of South Vietnam would provoke the spread of communism to other areas of South East Asia and other parts of the world. Unlike in other Asian territories colonized by European countries, the ideology of Vietnam's movement for independence was Communist. This transformed what was first a conflict for the independence of Vietnam into an ‘international conflict of vast proportions' (Herring: 460). At that time, the American government believed in the domino theory. Herring questioned this assumption, arguing that the conflict in Indochina had its origin in France's refusal to accept the independence of its colonies.