For many, this incident is a metaphor for the U.S. involvement in Viet Nam: thuggish U.S. soldiers came to a country they didn't understand and killed everyone. This view lacks the context of the war. The U.S. and its allies were fighting the Cold War, a war against Communist Bloc hegemony. We were fighting against the expansion of Communism in South Viet Nam, trying to prevent The Domino Effect.
The primary reason we lost the war was micro-managing by Washington bureaucrats, and overly-limited rules of engagement. Keep in mind, our mission was to assist the South Koreans in defending a guerrilla war. For this reason, we never invaded North Vietnam, and initially refrained from going in to neighboring countries to attack the Viet Cong revolutionaries staging there. Nixon started bombing these countries, but by then, it was too little, too late, and he ended the war.
I believe this view also does not consider economic and government system hegemony as a good reason to end lives. Many of the people who lived those massacres, from Vietnam to Iraq seem to agree with this view. Since I come from a country that has also been victim to American interventionism I tend to agree, our lives are more important than capitalism, communism, war on terror or whatever it is the excuse of the times for invading sovereign nations and slaughtering its people.
I believe we who see that "metaphor" rather see it as the truth: US soldiers go to countries they know nothing about and kill everyone. I do not fancy being murdered. Killing people is wrong, plain and simple.
The primary reason we lost the war was micro-managing by Washington bureaucrats, and overly-limited rules of engagement. Keep in mind, our mission was to assist the South Koreans in defending a guerrilla war. For this reason, we never invaded North Vietnam, and initially refrained from going in to neighboring countries to attack the Viet Cong revolutionaries staging there. Nixon started bombing these countries, but by then, it was too little, too late, and he ended the war.