Editing My Lai massacre (section)

===Classification as a war crime===
[[Telford Taylor]], a senior American prosecutor at Nuremberg, wrote that legal principles established at the war crimes trials could have been used to prosecute senior American military commanders for failing to prevent atrocities such as the one at Mỹ Lai.<ref>Taylor, Telford. ''Nuremberg and Vietnam: An American Tragedy'', Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1970, p. 139. Cited in Oliver, Kendrick. ''The My Lai Massacre in American History and Memory''. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006, p. 112. {{ISBN|978-0719068904}}</ref>

[[Howard Callaway]], Secretary of the Army, was quoted in ''The New York Times'' in 1976 as stating that Calley's sentence was reduced because Calley honestly believed that what he did was a part of his orders—a rationale that contradicts the standards set at Nuremberg and Tokyo, where following orders was not a defense for committing war crimes.<ref name=Marshall/> On the whole, aside from the Mỹ Lai courts-martial, there were 36 military trials held by the U.S. Army from January 1965 to August 1973 for crimes against civilians in Vietnam.<ref>{{harvnb|Bourke|1999|p=196.}} [https://www.google.com/books/edition/_/hbfuAAAAMAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&bsq=%22Excluding%20the%20My%20Lai%20trials%22 A count of other courts-martial for war crimes]</ref>

Some authors<ref name=":1"/> have argued that the light punishments of the low-level personnel present at Mỹ Lai and unwillingness to hold higher officials responsible was part of a pattern in which the body-count strategy and the so-called "[[Mere Gook Rule]]" encouraged U.S. soldiers to err on the side of killing suspected Vietnamese enemies even if there was a very good chance that they were civilians. This in turn, [[Nick Turse]] argues, made lesser known massacres similar to Mỹ Lai and a pattern of [[war crime]]s common in Vietnam.<ref name=":1">{{Cite book|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=6q3vpJ3ePH4C&q=kill+anything+that+moves|title=Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam|last=Turse|first=Nick|date=2013|publisher=Macmillan|isbn=978-0805086911}}</ref>