Week 5 Amylynn Nguyen

Amylynn Nguyen

ASA 02 A02

Week 5

When reading Darrell Y. Hamamoto’s piece, “Empire of Death and the Plague of Civic Violence”, I did not quite understand the correlation between the writing and Asian American studies. It was not until Hamamoto mentions the Vietnam war that I understood why we were reading this piece. In the beginning of this piece, Hamamoto starts by discussing the different methods of killing and murder in American society. He discusses things such as serial killings and mass murders that have been executed by seemingly normal people of society. Hamamoto then goes to discuss the “casual” murders that have been carried out by our very own government during the Vietnam war. He mentions people such as William Calley, a lieutenant during the Vietnam war, and the innocent women and children that he murdered during the My Lai massacre. Calley was granted a presidential pardon, and was never really held accountable for his actions. This situation relates to Professor Valverde’s discussion about the rewriting of the Vietnam war. Professor Valverde talked about how the government initiated a program that would document the Vietnam war in a way that would make the US look less brutal than they actually were. The William Calley situation is similar to this because the presidential pardon makes it look as if what he did was not mass murder. In reality, what William Calley did during the My Lai massacre was murder. He is not a military hero, but a savage killer like the rest of the criminals mentioned in the beginning of the reading.

Question: Why hasn’t the US formally acknowledged the fact their involvement in the Vietnam war hurt the citizens more than it helped?

Resources:

Hamamoto, D. Y. (n.d.). Empire of Death and the Plague of Civic Violence . Retrieved October 18, 2017.

[My Lai Woman]. (2012, April 29). Retrieved October 19, 2017, from http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/active_learning/explorations/vietnam/my_lai_woman_gray.jpg