‘I Want To Meet These Soldiers Again And Ask Them Why’ Vietnamese Villagers Still Live With Nightmare Of My Lai Massacre
Truong Thi Le can’t escape the nightmare of My Lai.
Her house is built on the ashes of the hut U.S. Army soldiers burned on March 16, 1968, the day they slaughtered hundreds of unarmed men, women and children in her village.
Across the dirt lane is the water well where American soldiers threw her 72-year-old neighbor, Truong Tho, after shooting him at point-blank range.
Thirty yards south is the spot where American GIs gunned down 15 neighbors, including children as young as 2. And a few steps farther is where soldiers opened fire on Le and scores of other villagers, killing 102 at that spot. She and her 6-year-old son survived by sliding into a rice paddy and hiding beneath the bodies that fell on them, she said.
Like the other survivors of My Lai, Le, whose 16-year-old daughter, husband, mother, three brothers and three nephews were killed that day, knows the horrific details. What she doesn’t understand, 30 years later, is: Why?
On Sunday, that question haunted My Lai survivors as they held simple Buddhist services in their homes to honor the last day their loved ones were alive.
“I still don’t understand why this happened,” said Le, 69. “I want to meet these soldiers again and ask them why they came here and killed civilians.”
Two U.S. veterans who tried to stop the massacre, former helicopter pilot Hugh Thompson and gunner Lawrence Colburn, were in the village over the weekend to meet some of the people they helped save. Earlier this month, the two were honored by the Pentagon for their actions at My Lai.
But none of the principals involved in the killings, including Lt. William “Rusty” Calley - the only man convicted of crimes related to the My Lai massacre - has ever expressed regrets or offered a full explanation as to why American soldiers raped, tortured and killed hundreds of Vietnamese civilians that day, as an exhaustive U.S. Army investigation documented. The Army investigation concluded that at least 350 people were killed, while a Vietnamese count set the death total in My Lai and a nearby village at 504.
An official 30th anniversary memorial service was held early this morning in My Lai, which the Vietnamese call Tu Cung. Despite a plea by some veterans, the U.S. government declined to send an official representative.
The decision is one measure of the controversy the My Lai massacre still generates in the United States, three decades after it came to symbolize a Cold War crusade gone horribly wrong for the country.
In November 1969, when the story of the massacre by Company C of the Americal Division first broke, Americans were shocked and horrified.
“It added to the general feeling of the public in America of ‘My god, what are we doing there,”’ said Stanley Karnow, the author of “Vietnam: A History” and a former Vietnam War correspondent. “Here we are, in Vietnam to save democracy and all that, and here our boys are killing women and children.”
But by the time a military court convicted Lt. Calley of murdering 22 Vietnamese civilians in March 1971, My Lai had become a fault line in American attitudes toward the war.
Despite testimony by fellow soldiers that Calley, one of Charlie Company’s three platoon commanders, had personally killed scores of unarmed civilians at My Lai, he was hailed as a hero by many Americans. He wound up serving only three years of his original life sentence, and that was under house arrest rather than in prison.
In his memoir, Calley described the My Lai killings as an effort to “destroy communism.” He brushed off condemnation for murdering babies, writing, “If we’re in Vietnam another 10 (years), if your son is killed by those babies you’ll cry at me, ‘Why didn’t you kill those babies that day?”’
The U.S. soldiers who rampaged through My Lai didn’t encounter any enemy soldiers. Charlie Company’s only casualty that day was a soldier who shot himself in the foot. The savagery shown by American soldiers was particularly stunning to My Lai residents because of their previous encounters with U.S. troops. In the three months prior to the massacre, U.S. soldiers had passed through My Lai on at least two occasions.
“They were very friendly,” said Pham Thi Thuan, who lost six family members in the massacre - her father, sister, younger brother and three nephews. “They gave candy to children.”
Thuan, a widow whose husband was killed by an American artillery shell as he worked in nearby rice fields in 1965, was cooking breakfast when the soldiers arrived on the morning of March 16. The men roughly ordered Thuan and her two daughters, ages 6 and 3, to the banks of a nearby irrigation ditch, where more than 100 people were gathered, she said.
“Anyone who resisted, they hit with their guns,” she said.
The soldiers - including Calley, the Army investigation later established - began shoving the villagers into the ditch and firing into the mass of bodies. Thuan pushed her oldest daughter below the water and hugged her 3-year-old to her chest.
“People were crying, screaming, begging for their lives,” she said. “The water was red from all the blood.”
Bodies quickly piled up on top of them, shielding them from the bullets. She kept her baby quiet by nursing her. She and her older daughter played dead as the soldiers returned twice more to shoot anyone still moving.
“There were so many dead people on top of me, I thought I must be dead,” she said. “I thought that I was only dreaming I was still alive.”
Le and her 6-year-old son, Do Tan Dung, were dragged from their house to a rice field, where GIs turned M-60 machine guns on more than 100 terrified villagers. Le pushed her son into the rice paddy and covered him with her body. She was shot through the thigh, but they were saved by the bodies that fell on top of them.
After the shooting stopped, she waited for a long time before digging her way out of the pile of bodies. The trail to her house was littered with the bodies of her friends and relatives. She came upon her daughter, who had been badly wounded and was clutching her dead grandmother. At her daughter’s urging, Le returned to the rice field to hide with her son. When she returned that evening, her daughter was dead.
“My heart was broken,” she said.
Following the massacre, My Lai remained deserted until the communist victory in 1975.
Today, My Lai’s small brick houses are surrounded by lush groves of coconut palms, banana and papaya trees and towering stands of bamboo. Children scamper up and down the dusty lanes, shrieking with carefree glee. Chickens and ducks pick their way around the dirt yards, past pigs, cows and water buffaloes.
The rice fields are lush, with new fast-growing strains yielding three crops a year. Diesel pumps, rather than manual labor, now keep the fields irrigated during the dry season.
It is a place of beauty and serenity. But it is not enough to erase the horrors etched into the memories of the older massacre survivors.
“I think about the massacre every day,” said Thuan, crying at the memories. “I think about my friends and neighbors in the village, how they died, and the American soldiers who killed them. Sometimes I have nightmares about it and I can’t get back to sleep.”
Both Thuan and Le say they would find some peace if they could talk to the American soldiers who carried out the massacre and understand why it happened.
But Pham Dat, 70, bitterly says there is nothing to talk about.
“Even if they apologize, they can’t bring the dead back to life,” said Dat, who was crippled by an American bullet that shattered his leg and had 11 family members killed by the soldiers, including his wife, their 7-month-old baby and his mother. “If there wasn’t a massacre, I would have a wife and all my children today, and I wouldn’t be standing in front of an altar, praying and burning incense.”
But the children of the older generation of massacre survivors have made new lives for their families. Their children are in school, learning English and other skills, and they are filled with hopes for the future.
Do Tan Dung, the son Le saved by covering his body in the rice paddy, is now 36 years old, a handsome farmer with a shy smile and four children. He wears a Pepsi cap as he and his wife, a massacre survivor who bears bullet scars on her hip and wrist, spread rice to dry in the fading light.
“I’m very busy so I don’t think of the massacre often,” he said.
There is a notable lack of hostility toward Americans in My Lai. Children flash big grins, wave and shout “Hello! Hello!” to visitors from the United States. A middle-aged man pedals by on a bicycle and flashes a broad, betel nut-stained smile.
“At the time of the massacre, I hated Americans very much,” Thuan said. “Now, 30 years have passed. I understand that only some soldiers did this, not all the American people. The relationship between the U.S. and Vietnam is better, and we want to look to the future.”
Long ago, the anniversary services that the families of My Lai hold each year on the eve of the massacre ceased to be bitter affairs, but, rather, occasions for families to come together.
At Dat’s house on Sunday, after prayers for the dead were said and incense lit, the men sat around a round table and ate plates of steaming rice noodles, thinly sliced pork, steamed vegetables sweetened by pineapple chunks and shredded papaya. They sipped strong rice wine, offered toasts and talked about the changes that had come to My Lai in the years since the war - and their desire to set aside the wrongs of the past.
Late Sunday, after holding their own family memorial, Dung and his wife returned to their work in the rice fields. They spread their harvest out to dry in big woven trays, a few feet from the spot where more than 100 villagers died on March 16, and where his mother shielded him from the American bullets with her body.
As night fell, the sweet smell of rice-husk cooking fires filled the air.