Mỹ Lai

- Photo taken by United States Army photographer Ronald L. Haeberle on March 16, 1968 in the aftermath of the My Lai massacre showing mostly women and children dead on a road. Wikipedia

I was in high school when the Mỹ Lai massacre took place. This was one of the reasons I was then against the Vietnam war ...

The Mỹ Lai massacre ... was the mass murder of unarmed South Vietnamese civilians by United States troops in Sơn Tịnh District, South Vietnam, on 16 March 1968 during the Vietnam War. Between 347 and 504 unarmed people were killed by U.S. Army soldiers .... Victims included men, women, children, and infants. Some of the women were gang-raped and their bodies mutilated, as were children as young as 12. Twenty-six soldiers were charged with criminal offenses, but only Lieutenant William Calley Jr., a platoon leader in C Company, was convicted. Found guilty of murdering 22 villagers, he was originally given a life sentence, but served three-and-a-half years under house arrest after President Richard Nixon commuted his sentence ...

I was remembering this when the news came out about Bucha and other similar Ukrainian towns in which Russian britality to civilians has been discovered. Added proof - Germany intercepts Russian talk of indiscriminate killings in Ukraine.

Some will say that this kind of stuff always happens in war. Yes, it does sometimes happen, but here's the thing: most of the time when it happens, as with the Mỹ Lai massacre, it's considered an aberration and deemed a war crime.

With Russia, this kind of behavior is not an aberration but a well-established modus operandi: think of the Putin-led Russian attack on the Chechnya city of Grozny (Battle of Grozny (1999–2000)) ...

The 1999–2000 battle of Grozny was the siege and assault of the Chechen capital Grozny by Russian forces, lasting from late 1999 to early 2000. The siege and fighting left the capital devastated. In 2003, the United Nations called Grozny the most destroyed city on Earth. Between 5,000 and 8,000 civilians were killed during the siege, making it the bloodiest episode of the Second Chechen War. ...

Read more: Second Chechen War crimes and terrorism.

I'm worried this is what is going to happen to Ukraine unless we help them to defeat Russia and eject them from their country.