“The massacre at My Lai was an event waiting to happen.” —Dr. M. Scott Peck, People of the Lie
Some mornings arrive without warning—ordinary, unhurried—until something small shifts the weight of the day.
I remember one such morning, standing idly before my home bookshelf, not really looking for anything in particular. Then a title caught my eye, almost as if it had been waiting longer than I had: People of the Lie. I pulled it out, more out of instinct than intention, and began leafing through its pages.
Then I saw a chapter heading that refused to let me go: "My Lai: An Examination of Group Evil."
What began as casual browsing turned into stillness. And that stillness turned into a kind of reckoning.
I found myself reading, then re-reading—linger longer than I expected, as if the words were not just describing a past event, but quietly interrogating the present. That morning did not feel like discovery. It felt like recognition.
And somewhere in that slow unfolding, this reflection began to take shape—the very thread that would later become this ATABAY piece.
Peck’s haunting line is more than a historical observation—it is a warning that refuses to fade. "My Lai" was not a sudden eruption of cruelty. It was the slow, deliberate flowering of something already rotten—arrogance left unchecked, deceit normalized, and conscience quietly surrendered.
And so, the question presses itself upon us now, uncomfortably, insistently: Are we once again living in an atmosphere where such atrocity is merely waiting to happen?
Or worse—is it already unfolding before our eyes, just under different names?
The Rotten American Atmosphere
In 1968, the rice paddies of Quang Ngai Province became a graveyard not just for bodies, but for illusions.
Charlie Company entered My Lai believing it to be a Viet Cong stronghold. That belief, however, did not arise in a vacuum. It was cultivated—fed by a military culture already drifting into moral numbness, a political leadership detached from truth, and a citizenry lulled into passive trust.
What happened in My Lai was not accident. It was the logical outcome of a rotten system that had learned to dehumanize first—and justify later.
Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph "The Terror of War"
History teaches us this uncomfortable truth: When deceit becomes policy, when arrogance passes for strength, and when citizens grow accustomed to not asking questions, atrocities do not shock the system.
They fulfill it.
The Day of Fire and Silence
On the morning of March 16, 1968, Task Force Barker moved into a cluster of hamlets collectively known as My Lai.
It was supposed to be routine—a “search-and-destroy” mission. But there was nothing to search. And no one to fight.
The soldiers found no Viet Cong. No armed resistance. No incoming fire.
Only women. Children. Old men. Unarmed. Unprepared. Human.
What followed cannot be softened by language.
Between 500 and 600 villagers were killed. Some were shot inside their homes—bullets tearing through thin walls, bodies falling where they stood. Others were gunned down in open fields as they ran, instinctively, toward life. Groups were herded together—twenty, forty at a time—then cut down by rifle fire, machine guns, and grenades.
The killing did not happen in a moment of chaos. It stretched across hours. It unfolded in daylight.
And most chilling of all—almost no one stopped it.
One helicopter pilot, seeing the horror from above, tried. He landed, confronted the soldiers, pleaded. When that failed, he radioed command. The response was indifference. The machine moved on. So eventually, did he.
Only about fifty soldiers pulled the triggers. But around two hundred witnessed. And the rest of the system? It absorbed the act, concealed it, and reported it as success.
Victory. The lie was not an afterthought. It was part of the operation. And when the truth finally surfaced, the world recoiled—not just at what was done, but at how easily it had been hidden, justified, and almost forgotten.
"My Lai" became more than a massacre. It became a mirror.
The Machinery of Justification
The United States was not in Vietnam reluctantly.
It went in with fervor—almost celebratory, as if war itself had become a proving ground for identity. The mission was sanctified from the highest office, wrapped in the language of necessity and destiny.
And beneath that fervor was another quiet faith—the faith in technology. Machines would make everything efficient. Clean. Precise. Even killing.
But what Vietnam revealed—what "My Lai" exposed—was that no machine can sanitize moral failure. It can only accelerate it.
The justification, of course, was simple: Communism.
But history would later complicate that narrative. The world was not as morally divided as it had been presented. Human rights abuses were not confined to one ideology. Suffering was not owned by one side.
Yet instead of reexamining its worldview, America doubled down. It chose force over reflection, destruction over humility.
It sought not to understand Vietnam—but to erase it.
And in so doing, it revealed something deeper, something more disturbing: That power, when fused with insecurity, can become destructive not for survival—but for self-preservation of a fractured identity.
That is the anatomy of what Dr. Peck called evil: the use of power to destroy others in order to protect a diseased sense of self.
A Cautionary Tale for Today
More than five decades later, the warning has not aged. It has sharpened.
The Middle East today feels eerily familiar—ceasefires collapsing, rhetoric hardening, weapons systems growing ever more precise and ever more devastating.
Drones that see everything. Missiles that reach anywhere. Buttons that once pressed, cannot be unpressed.
And above all—there is the bullying.
The theater of intimidation. The calculated fear. The voice of the most powerful man on the planet—Donald Trump—carried not in restraint but in spectacle, sounding, at times, almost apocalyptic.
We hear not the language of caution, but of certainty sharpened into threat: promises of total victory, enemies spoken of as if they must be erased, entire realities reduced to something that can simply be "blown to hell."
These are not passing words. They are signals—of a mindset unhinged, dangerous in its confidence, and all the more perilous for the power it commands.
And then, something even more unsettling—almost surreal in its audacity.
A leader who, in the wake of attacking a spiritual figure like Pope Leo XIV, circulates an image of himself cast in the likeness of Jesus Christ. Not as parody, but as projection. Not as humility, but as elevation.
One is left to ask—not lightly, but with a certain trembling—what kind of imagination permits such a gesture?
Is this not, in its own quiet way, a kind of writing on the wall?
As Provebs 16:18 has long warned: “First pride, then the crash—the bigger the ego, the harder the fall.” (TLB)
Around him stand cabinets that echo rather than question—yes-men who translate aggression into policy, who refine rage into strategy.
Military leadership has begun to flirt with something more dangerous than nationalism: a religious framing of conflict that borders on blasphemy—a language of “destiny,” even of “holy” confrontation, where war is no longer a last resort but a “crusade moment.”
Legislative bodies, meant to check power, is not unified—a reflection instead of broader national debate on foreign policy and military engagement with a language resembling a blank check.
And the public?
Tired. Polarized. Overwhelmed. Scrolling past headlines. Absorbing without resisting. Not evil—but relatively quiet. And it is in that quietude where danger matures.
The Lessons Never Learned
If "My Lai" teaches anything, it is this: Atrocity does not begin with bullets. It begins with permission—to dehumanize, to exaggerate threats, to silence doubt, to look away.
By the time the trigger is pulled, the moral decision has already been made—long before, in quieter rooms, in softer language.
Vigilance, then, is not optional. Moral clarity is not idealistic. Communal responsibility is not abstract. They are the only barriers. Silence is not neutral; it is participation by absence.
The Quiet Before the Next My Lai
History rarely repeats itself in exact detail. It changes names, locations, uniforms. But its patterns remain.
Somewhere today, decisions are being made in conference rooms far from the dust and blood they will produce. Words are being chosen carefully—words that will justify, soften, conceal.
Somewhere, a young soldier is being prepared not just with weapons, but with a way of seeing the world—who is human, who is not, who matters, who doesn’t.
Somewhere, a citizen is choosing not to ask one more question.
And somewhere, in a place not yet marked on the maps of memory, another “event waiting to happen” is already taking shape.
And then, as it always does, a quiet morning will come.
Someone will stand before a shelf, or pause mid-scroll, or stumble upon a name they have never heard before. Bandar Abbas, perhaps. Or another name we have not yet learned to mourn.
The tragedy of "My Lai" is not only that it happened.
It is that it remains possible—and that what comes next may arrive larger, faster, and far more apocalyptic.
And the burden it leaves us is not simply to remember—but to interrupt.
Before the next quiet morning carries another name, and we find ourselves, once again, wishing we had stopped time when it still listened.
Content & editing put together in collaboration with Bing Microsoft AI-powered Co-pilot & ChatGPT
Head collage courtesy of Canva, Getty Images, and AI-generated image
Still photos courtesy of History.com, Getty Images, Freepik, The Guardian, Etsy, GMA News Online, Time Magazine, Politico, study.com, & The European Conservative
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