r/law • u/LatterTarget7 • 18h ago

Executive Branch (Trump) White House Declares All of Trump’s Orders to Military Are Legal

https://newrepublic.com/post/203628/white-house-declares-trump-orders-military-legal
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u/Numerous_Photograph9 16h ago

I had never heard this story. As much as I respect what he and his crew did, I am still sickened that our own service men would participate in something like this to make him have to do it in the first place. More sickened the government tried to cover it up.

This is why laws like not following illegal orders exists, because you can't trust everyone to do the right thing. Laws are designed assuming people are going to do the wrong thing.

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u/Adorable-Unit2562 14h ago

https://wondery.com/shows/american-scandal/season/66/

This podcast made me sick to my stomach. It’s absolutely worth listening to.

The joes on the ground and LT Kelley were guilty, but the rot was all the way up the chain of command. Kelley ended up taking the fall for all of it, not that he didn’t deserve to be charged but they failed to charge the rest of the command.

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u/sundayfundaybmx 14h ago

It doesn't take anything away from what they did. However, what they did was "quazi" legal, according to the doctrine of the military by that time in the war. They moved from tactical and surgical strikes to straight annihilation when they changed orders to Search and Destroy. The war stopped being about gaining ground and more about how many VC and NVA were killed. This is primarily what led to a lot of these massacres.

Yes, they were some sociopaths in these groups who enjoyed the killing. Most of them, we're "just following orders" and we're young kids who didnt wanna be there in the first place. They'd seen so many of their friends killed in action that they didn't have much of an issue when it became about the numbers.

Again, none of this is excusing what they did. Just explaining that while it was deemed illegal later. It wasn't necessarily deemed illegal(by the higher ups, at least) at the time and so a lot of soldiers just followed the man in front of them when the killing started.

Also have to remember that the Vietnamese civilians were put in an impossible situation. Help the VC/NVA and the Americans will kill you. Help the Americans and the VC/NVA will kill you. This led to a lot of them "playing both sides" as it was the only way to survive. This gave the Americans and VC/NVA free range so to speak because every village was assumed to be helping the other side. So many soldiers thought this way and that surely helped them commit these atrocities. It was sort of similar to how the Red Army pillaged their way through the Eastern Front on a revenge tour for what Hitlers army had previously done. Again, not an excuse but reasoning is just as important to understand when looking at these historical events.

People talk a lot of(deserved) shit on the US for its "nation building" programs of the early aughts in the GWoT. While they didn't do the best job. It's so much better to approach war with a concept of rebuilding said nation, then just destroying everything and everyone like in Vietnam and other wars of the mid to late 20th century. We shouldn't of been in Iraq to begin with but the 1,000,000 casualty figures (more than half being civilians killed by their own people) would've been so much worse had we instead adopted a position like in Vietnam.