'Just Following Orders': From the My Lai Massacre to Trump and Hegseth

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/will-bunch/115541/just-following-orders-from-the-my-lai-massacre-to-trump-and-hegseth

‘Just Following Orders’: From the My Lai Massacre to Trump and Hegseth
by Will Bunch | November 27, 2025 - 6:13am

— from the Philadelphia Inquirer

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While almost every expert on military laws describes these attacks—which have killed at least 83 people—as extrajudicial killings lacking legal justification, the Office of Legal Counsel in Trump’s Justice Department has nonetheless written a secret classified memo to justify them. Any officer or lower-level troop ordered to blow up these boats and kill all the people on board hasn’t seen the memo. And they won’t get a medal for saying “no”—at least not in 2025. They will be court-martialed and vilified by MAGA.

New York Times opinion writer David French, a Harvard Law grad who served as an Army lawyer in Iraq, notes the congressional video didn’t advise troops on what exactly is an illegal order, and adds: “Individual service members don’t have sufficient knowledge or information to make those kinds of judgments. When time is of the essence and lives are on the line, your first impulse must be to do as you’re told.”

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It is very much in the spirit of Joseph Heller’s World War II novel and its legendary Catch-22: A soldier must disobey an illegal order, yet orders, in the heat of the moment, are almost never illegal.

That doesn’t mean Trump and Hegseth threatening Kelly and the other Democrats with jail and possibly the noose isn’t utterly outrageous. After all, they did nothing more than remind soldiers of their obligation to the law in the same language their drill sergeants use in boot camp.

I do also think—understanding the limitations of a MAGA-fed Congress—that good people of both parties on Capitol Hill should be doing a lot more to invoke the War Powers Act, hold hearings, debate impeachment, and do whatever else they can to prevent Trump’s reckless acts in the Caribbean and elsewhere. In other words, stop illegal orders before they’re given.

That said, as the Trump regime deteriorates, there may come a day when right and wrong feels as obvious as it did that 1968 day in the rice paddies of Vietnam. If, heaven forbid, this government ever ordered troops to put down a protest by firing on citizens, we will need a platoon full of Hugh Thompsons and no William Calleys, “just following orders.”

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