Sacred Ground

VIETNAM: SACRED GROUND Thirty years later, the memories of My Lai still haunt the site of one of the war's most barbaric incidents	VIETNAM	March 16, 1998 VOL. 151 NO. 10
Echoes Of My Lai Thirty years after a brutal Vietnam War massacre, the survivors, and their children, still ask: Why? By TIM LARIMER Son My he quiet is what's most unsettling. The villages of central Vietnam known collectively as My Lai have been stamped by history as places of horrific acts of war. More than 500 people, many of them women and children , were slaughtered here by American G.I.s on March 16, 1968. They were ordered out of their homes, lined up in ditches and shot. Soldiers tossed hand grenades into their bunkers and torched their thatched huts. So it is strange to come to this place, 30 y ears later, and find it so beautiful, and so serene. A gentle breeze from the nearby seashore brings relief from the penetrating sun, and carries the sounds of life: a baby crying, the hum of a rice thresher. Inside a small airy house in Tu Cung, one of t he villages destroyed by U.S. soldiers, medals of bravery line the concrete walls, evidence that Pham Hon, now 53, had fought with the Viet Cong. "I saw my father killed," he says, recalling how he watched, cowering in a bunker, as a G.I. shot the man in the forehead from point-blank range. "I was so angry, that's why I joined." The road to My Lai, 12 km off Highway 1, Vietnam's only north-south artery, cuts through rice fields resplendent with their varying hues of greens and golds. A tri-shaw driver balancing a load of bamboo stalks pedals furiously to keep pace with the motorb ikes. On careful examination one notices that the man's left leg is an artificial stump-another casualty of war. In a village in Son My commune, where the massacre occurred, children play on the beach, using twigs as pretend rifles. A boy makes the poppin g sound of gunfire; a girl falls to the sand, playing dead. Such a game might seem innocent elsewhere; here, it is chilling to watch. A few meters from the make-believe battleground, dozens of real bodies are buried in a mass grave that Truong Quang Ran, now 70, helped fill. "There weren't enough coffins," he says, "so we wrapped the bodies in rattan mats." The children cannot help but know about the tragedy of March 1968. The grave stones, the pock-marked tree trunks, the fitful nights of sleep that still haunt their parents make even the most carefree child realize something is not right. A 14-year-old gir l quietly curls up on a bed and listens, stunned, as her father talks about the killing he witnessed when he was 11. It's the first time she has heard the details, heard about anything other than that many people died during a terrible time. "When the sun rose, we heard artillery shelling. There were helicopters flying in the sky," Vo Cao Duc, now 41, tells a visitor, as his daughter listens in. Duc and his siblings took refuge in a bunker. "We could hear the sound of gunfire getting nearer and nearer. I realized they were coming at us." He could hear English being spoken and peered out to see the rucksacks of American G.I.s, familiar figures who had doled out sweets on earlier visits. Some of the villagers ran outside, including Duc's younger sister; the y were gunned down. The people inside yelled to the Americans: "No V.C.! No V.C.!" Duc saw a grenade tossed inside and crawled toward the back of the bunker. When it exploded, he was knocked unconscious and the shelter collapsed around him. Duc doesn't kn ow how he was rescued. "I don't have much time to tell my children these things," he says. My Lai's place in American history is firmly entrenched, as a disturbing wake-up call that the U.S. military could be as guilty of inhumane acts as any Army. The incident, initially covered up for more than a year, stunned the nation and added fire to the anti-war movement. It still can stir emotions. Last week the Pentagon awarded a medal to Hugh Thompson, an Army officer who witnessed the massacre as his helicopter hovered above My Lai. He landed and stopped a group of G.I.s from assaulting more civilia ns. Thompson is scheduled to return to My Lai for an anniversary ceremony this month. The U.S. government declined to send a representative. "We talked about doing something," says a State Department spokesman in Hanoi, "but decided not to." For the war's victors, the symbolic meaning of My Lai is surprisingly complicated. Although North Vietnam was quick to capitalize on My Lai to drum up international support during the war, sending one young survivor on a world-wide speaking tour, it has n ot been treated since the war as a seminal event. What's emphasized instead are battles that can be interpreted as victories: the Tet offensive, for example, or the Christmas bombings of Hanoi. Even though the communist side suffered huge losses, both eve nts can be manipulated into glorious achievements. That's more difficult with My Lai. There was only suffering. It served Vietnam's efforts by weakening Americans' already-shaky resolve, but Hanoi had little to do with it. Vo Dinh Hoang, a war veteran who se family was wiped out in the massacre puts it this way: "There were many My Lais." Nonetheless, Hanoi is still sensitive about My Lai. A reporter's recent visit was closely monitored by police and officials of the provincial Quang Ngai government. The villagers themselves seemed mostly curious, and eager to re-tell what had transpired. They showed a notable lack of hostility toward Americans. "So much time has gone by," says Pham Thi Thuan, now 60. She was breast-feeding her baby daughter when soldiers opened fire on a group of villagers who had been forced into a ditch. Three people ne xt to her were hit and fell on top of her; she clutched her baby to her chest for hours waiting for the Americans to leave before climbing out to safety. "The nightmare often comes to me in my sleep," she says. "I don't know why they killed so many ordina ry people. Even now the question is in my mind. It is what I would like to ask them." The Vietnamese government, by contrast, plays down the incident, as if focusing on My Lai would diminish the suffering and sacrifices Vietnamese experienced elsewhere. Still, many citizens ask why the American government hasn't given assistance to My Lai' s survivors. A group of U.S. veterans helped build a school; another private group constructed a health clinic. But Uncle Sam has given nothing. It is still a poor area, where people scratch out their living from the soil and from the sea. One of the vill ages was wired for electricity only in December; another still is waiting. A few people have battery-powered televisions; no one has a private telephone. Cut off from the get-rich-quick zeal that has sprung up in Vietnam's cities and more prosperous villages, the people of My Lai are left to live with their memories, and with their emotional scars. Truong Thi Le, 69, survived the killings by scampering thr ough the paddy fields with her 6-year-old son in tow. Every time she heard the crack of gunfire, she fell to the earth, cradling her child and pretending to be dead. After a few moments of silence, she would jump up and dart off again, repeating this exer cise of deception a half-dozen times before finally making it to safety in the next village. "I returned to look for my mother and daughter, but they were shot dead," she says. "Even the papaya trees were cut down. Our house was burned down. There was not hing for us to live on." These days she still works in the rice fields. To get there she walks 55 paces down a dirt path, to the well into which a man was thrown and shot, then 40 paces to a silkwood tree, where 15 people, two of them toddlers, were shot, and finally 70 paces to the site of a now-destroyed watchtower, where 102 villagers were assembled and slaughtered. She doesn't think about the killings all the time, she says. "Only when I walk by here." How often does she make that trip? "Every day." Photograph by PETER STEINHAUER for Time
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Thirty years after a brutal Vietnam War massacre, the survivors, and their children, still ask: Why?

By TIM LARIMER Son My

he quiet is what's most unsettling. The villages of central Vietnam known collectively as My Lai have been stamped by history as places of horrific acts of war. More than 500 people, many of them women and children , were slaughtered here by American G.I.s on March 16, 1968. They were ordered out of their homes, lined up in ditches and shot. Soldiers tossed hand grenades into their bunkers and torched their thatched huts. So it is strange to come to this place, 30 y ears later, and find it so beautiful, and so serene. A gentle breeze from the nearby seashore brings relief from the penetrating sun, and carries the sounds of life: a baby crying, the hum of a rice thresher. Inside a small airy house in Tu Cung, one of t he villages destroyed by U.S. soldiers, medals of bravery line the concrete walls, evidence that Pham Hon, now 53, had fought with the Viet Cong. "I saw my father killed," he says, recalling how he watched, cowering in a bunker, as a G.I. shot the man in the forehead from point-blank range. "I was so angry, that's why I joined."

The road to My Lai, 12 km off Highway 1, Vietnam's only north-south artery, cuts through rice fields resplendent with their varying hues of greens and golds. A tri-shaw driver balancing a load of bamboo stalks pedals furiously to keep pace with the motorb ikes. On careful examination one notices that the man's left leg is an artificial stump-another casualty of war. In a village in Son My commune, where the massacre occurred, children play on the beach, using twigs as pretend rifles. A boy makes the poppin g sound of gunfire; a girl falls to the sand, playing dead. Such a game might seem innocent elsewhere; here, it is chilling to watch. A few meters from the make-believe battleground, dozens of real bodies are buried in a mass grave that Truong Quang Ran, now 70, helped fill. "There weren't enough coffins," he says, "so we wrapped the bodies in rattan mats."

The children cannot help but know about the tragedy of March 1968. The grave stones, the pock-marked tree trunks, the fitful nights of sleep that still haunt their parents make even the most carefree child realize something is not right. A 14-year-old gir l quietly curls up on a bed and listens, stunned, as her father talks about the killing he witnessed when he was 11. It's the first time she has heard the details, heard about anything other than that many people died during a terrible time. "When the sun rose, we heard artillery shelling. There were helicopters flying in the sky," Vo Cao Duc, now 41, tells a visitor, as his daughter listens in. Duc and his siblings took refuge in a bunker. "We could hear the sound of gunfire getting nearer and nearer. I realized they were coming at us." He could hear English being spoken and peered out to see the rucksacks of American G.I.s, familiar figures who had doled out sweets on earlier visits. Some of the villagers ran outside, including Duc's younger sister; the y were gunned down. The people inside yelled to the Americans: "No V.C.! No V.C.!" Duc saw a grenade tossed inside and crawled toward the back of the bunker. When it exploded, he was knocked unconscious and the shelter collapsed around him. Duc doesn't kn ow how he was rescued. "I don't have much time to tell my children these things," he says.

My Lai's place in American history is firmly entrenched, as a disturbing wake-up call that the U.S. military could be as guilty of inhumane acts as any Army. The incident, initially covered up for more than a year, stunned the nation and added fire to the anti-war movement. It still can stir emotions. Last week the Pentagon awarded a medal to Hugh Thompson, an Army officer who witnessed the massacre as his helicopter hovered above My Lai. He landed and stopped a group of G.I.s from assaulting more civilia ns. Thompson is scheduled to return to My Lai for an anniversary ceremony this month. The U.S. government declined to send a representative. "We talked about doing something," says a State Department spokesman in Hanoi, "but decided not to."

For the war's victors, the symbolic meaning of My Lai is surprisingly complicated. Although North Vietnam was quick to capitalize on My Lai to drum up international support during the war, sending one young survivor on a world-wide speaking tour, it has n ot been treated since the war as a seminal event. What's emphasized instead are battles that can be interpreted as victories: the Tet offensive, for example, or the Christmas bombings of Hanoi. Even though the communist side suffered huge losses, both eve nts can be manipulated into glorious achievements. That's more difficult with My Lai. There was only suffering. It served Vietnam's efforts by weakening Americans' already-shaky resolve, but Hanoi had little to do with it. Vo Dinh Hoang, a war veteran who se family was wiped out in the massacre puts it this way: "There were many My Lais."

Nonetheless, Hanoi is still sensitive about My Lai. A reporter's recent visit was closely monitored by police and officials of the provincial Quang Ngai government. The villagers themselves seemed mostly curious, and eager to re-tell what had transpired. They showed a notable lack of hostility toward Americans. "So much time has gone by," says Pham Thi Thuan, now 60. She was breast-feeding her baby daughter when soldiers opened fire on a group of villagers who had been forced into a ditch. Three people ne xt to her were hit and fell on top of her; she clutched her baby to her chest for hours waiting for the Americans to leave before climbing out to safety. "The nightmare often comes to me in my sleep," she says. "I don't know why they killed so many ordina ry people. Even now the question is in my mind. It is what I would like to ask them."

The Vietnamese government, by contrast, plays down the incident, as if focusing on My Lai would diminish the suffering and sacrifices Vietnamese experienced elsewhere. Still, many citizens ask why the American government hasn't given assistance to My Lai' s survivors. A group of U.S. veterans helped build a school; another private group constructed a health clinic. But Uncle Sam has given nothing. It is still a poor area, where people scratch out their living from the soil and from the sea. One of the vill ages was wired for electricity only in December; another still is waiting. A few people have battery-powered televisions; no one has a private telephone.

Cut off from the get-rich-quick zeal that has sprung up in Vietnam's cities and more prosperous villages, the people of My Lai are left to live with their memories, and with their emotional scars. Truong Thi Le, 69, survived the killings by scampering thr ough the paddy fields with her 6-year-old son in tow. Every time she heard the crack of gunfire, she fell to the earth, cradling her child and pretending to be dead. After a few moments of silence, she would jump up and dart off again, repeating this exer cise of deception a half-dozen times before finally making it to safety in the next village. "I returned to look for my mother and daughter, but they were shot dead," she says. "Even the papaya trees were cut down. Our house was burned down. There was not hing for us to live on." These days she still works in the rice fields. To get there she walks 55 paces down a dirt path, to the well into which a man was thrown and shot, then 40 paces to a silkwood tree, where 15 people, two of them toddlers, were shot, and finally 70 paces to the site of a now-destroyed watchtower, where 102 villagers were assembled and slaughtered. She doesn't think about the killings all the time, she says. "Only when I walk by here." How often does she make that trip? "Every day."

Photograph by PETER STEINHAUER for Time