will US troops fire on American Citizens

From everything I have ever read Ohio NG still holds the distinction of being the only guard force to have ever fired upon Americans on American soil. But if'n you say otherwise I've got no reason to doubt ya.

 

I just went back and added the link to the site I was looking at. Sorry. I should have included that at the beginning. Here it is.
http://www.militarymuseum.org/HistoryKingMilOps.html

 

All I have to say is July 28, 1932....

Yes they would fire on us

 

I have my druthers....I'd ruther not think about it...!
Short answer: without a doubt.

 

Yes, and that was the regular army. One of a number of times that Douglas Macarthur felt that he knew better than his political masters, disobeying his Commander In Chief's orders. Truman got it right, eventually, and handed Douglas a bowler hat for wanting to enlarge the Korean conflict to take on the PRC directly.

Bonus Army - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The sanctions against mutiny, disobeying commands,(lawful or otherwise), and sedition are burned deeply into the military psyche and as Milgram, Grossman and others have discovered...authority figures are capable of exerting a strong influence on their followers to do the most alarming things imaginable to their fellow humans (civilian or otherwise).

Milgram experiment - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Overcoming the Resistance to Killing - Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman, Author

On Killing - Grossman, Lt. Col. Dave - Google Books

 

Ah, I always look forward to your posts Chell. I see your opinions as unbiased because you aren't American. I am not saying that there is anything wrong with being from another country, it is nice to have a different view from someone that is "looking in" from the outside. Great point about the sanctions, they are almost brainwashed to not think for themselves.

 

Hopefully there will be enough soldiers with moral courage..

Hopefully there will be enough officers, NCOs and soldiers, sailors and airforce personnel in the miltary with moral courage...to make a difference.

Obeying orders, is a matter of training and indoctrination and enculturation in the military. It is something that is diffucult to counter if orders come from someone vested with an accepted formal authority, and the orders have at least some fig leafesque veneer of legitimacy.

The unquestioned obeying of commands is such, that soldiers will often follow, albeit reluctantly, bad and unsound commands; and in some instances, immoral and unlawful commands. Where junior officers and NCO's have consistently given bad and unsound commands to the detriment of the soldiery's survivability, the soldiery sometimes resolve the insubordination dilemma with fragging or judiciously accurately inaccurate marksmanship in the heat of combat.

The good news is, that not all soldiers are unthinking automatons, and some at least are prepared to exercise moral courage and make moral decisions about compliance / non compliance with illegitimate and unlawful commands, even if at their own expense. At Me Lai, some soldiers chose not to participate in the wanton murder of civilians, indeed some tried to frustrate Calley's orders and were roundly denounced for doing so once news of the atrocity became more widely known back in the USA.

http://www.usna.edu/Ethics/publications/documents/ThompsonPg1-28_Final.pdf

* The US military very belatedly acknowledged the moral courage of (then Warrant Officer) Hugh Thompson and his crew, with Soldier's Medals....some 30 years after the events that warranted their award.


Hugh Thompson, Jr. - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

I had the opportunity to get to know William Calley after he was released from custody, following his trial. My father owned a watch and jewelry repair shop just a few doors down from the posh jewelry store that Calley ended up working in for years, in Columbus, Georgia. He was in our shop many times during my teenage years. Calley became enamored with, and married, the daughter of jeweler V.V. Vick. She was an activist type, who had become involved with Calley's defense.

My point in bringing this up is that Calley was the last person in the world that one would suspect in perpetrating the My Lai massacre. He wasn't some testosterone-driven, wild-eyed maniac. At the point that I knew him, he was a short, slightly balding, very congenial fellow. You wouldn't even assume that he had ever been in the military.

In Vietnam, he found himself in extraordinary circumstances, doing things that he couldn't have pictured himself doing a year before that moment in time, or a year after that moment in time. He was just an ordinary guy who managed to shuffle off his humanity for a short time; something required of all Soldiers, to one degree or another, during wartime.

Extraordinary circumstances can result in extraordinary actions, good or bad. I think that the answer to the question of this thread is an easy "yes", but I think that those soldiers will have found themselves in extraordinary circumstances, doing something that they never wanted to do, and never could have foreseen themselves doing.

 

Just hope that the good guys are in command on the day.....

I think that it is too easy to demonise Calley as a monster and write him off as some kind of rogue psycho. Calley is a far more complex person than he has been portrayed to be, and unfortunately for him he was at the bottom of a chain of command that failed him and cut him loose to his fate. If CAlley was way over his head, was reponding ineffectually to a situation which was clearly beyond his capabilities and followed the orders given to him uncritically and unreasonably, there were other players at command level who sandbagged themselves out of the way of being found culpable for their own command responsibility failures.

One of the ironies of military life is that moral courage is punished more often than ought be the case...and moral cowardice is rewarded with medals and promotions more frequently than should be the case. It's the nature of the beast unfortunately.

In metropolitan USA, there will be military leaders and followers of varying capability and competency...just hope that it is the good guys, those men and women with physical, and moral courage, who are in command on the day.

 

Some veterans have had the years pass...but the memories still remain, of things done in the heat of the moment....some became enraged after a convoy was savagely attacked...many friends and acquaintances died as a result....the end result was not something most would want to live with....It was not a question of orders...it was not something you talk about...it was an "event" which those that participated in have taken to the grave with them, or still have to live with.
I know all too well about the atrocities committed in war and anger....Trouble is, what is done is just that, and nothing will ever change it.

 

Few things happen without consequence, and soldiers all too often pay a heavy price for having been put in harm's way by their nation: either at the time that they served in combat, or much later in life, when reliving the horrors of what they had experienced.