My Lai and the Perils of ObedienceThe My Lai massacre is probably one of the most infamous cases of atrocities perpetrated by American military personnel. This article will attempt to connect the actions of American soldiers at My Lai with Stanley Milgram's 1974 study on the impact of authority on obedience. My Lai was a hamlet in Son My village. The hamlet was marked on American maps as consisting of My Lai 1 to My Lai 6. The massacre actually took place in Tu Cung, a subhamlet of My Lai. Task Force Barker was to conduct a three-day search and destroy operation beginning at 7:30 a.m. on March 16, 1968, codenamed “Operation Muscatine” (Raimondo, p. 4). As the purpose of the mission might suggest, this was a search and destroy mission. Search and destroy mission was generally a benchmark used to identify a mission against an enemy combatant; not a civilian population. However, that is exactly what happened. Four hours after making first contact with the village, soldiers from Alpha, Bravo, and Charlie Companies of the 1st Battalion of the 20th Infantry Division had murdered more than 400 unarmed Vietnamese men, women, and children. Which apparently became normal, even if they were soldiers, into ruthless killers of innocent civilians. According to Stanley Milgram, the answer can be found in “Obedience to Authority.” Milgram believed that obedience was as fundamental an element in the structure of social life as can be indicated (Milgram, Perils, p. 1). This is an important factor in why people are generally reluctant to question authority. In 1974, Milgram set up an experiment at Yale University to test the amount of pain a person could inflict on another simply because they were ordered to do so. The basic design of the experiment...... middle of document ...... e they were relieved of any personal responsibility to the learner, they were more willing to apply increased tension to the participant. The same can be said of the soldiers. They once believed the order was to kill anything that moved, but they were only the means to that end. Although many factors contribute to this atrocity, when combined with the stress of war, ordinary people can become agents of significant hostility. This is the underlying lesson of Milgram's experiment and likely the underlying cause of the transformation of My Lai's seemingly normal soldiers. When even the destructive effects of their actions become evident and they are asked to continue that action, even if it is clearly inconsistent with their basic standards of morality, few have the means to resist the desires of authority.: