TADIOTO

Here’s a story I promised I would offer you about a place called My Lai: 

For many, the name Viet Nam simply means a war – one that killed 58 thousand Americans.  Few in America even know that some three million Vietnamese died.  Many Vietnamese have tried to remind the world that Viet Nam is in fact a country with a long history, a vibrant culture, and an energetic people.  I have tried to do the same in the decades I lived in America, but now that I’ve returned to live in Viet Nam, it seems everywhere I turn, every month that passes, there’s a terrible and tiring reminder of the horrors of war.  Last week, I went to a village in central Viet Nam called My Lai.

It has always seemed odd to me that one way the name My Lai can be translated into English is Mixed with American Blood, as in ‘of mixed parentage.’  In fact it was the blood of the over 500 Vietnamese that was spilled. 
          Come to My Lai, and from morning to evening, you can hear the story of 40 years ago on public speakers outside the local museum.  On the morning of March 16, 1968, dozens of American soldiers went beserk for 4 hours.  They were described as angry and frustrated men, thrown into a country and a war they couldn’t understand.  There’s no way to understand what they did.  They threw people, mostly women and children, into wells, burned down their houses, and raped some of them.  They gathered people and threw grenades at them, or they pushed them into ditches and shot them again and again with automatic rifles and machine guns.  Among them was Ha Thi Quy, then a woman of 43.  She put her palms together to beg the soldiers for mercy. 
          “They shook their heads, they didn’t say anything, then they pushed me down and shot me,” she recounts. 
          “They hit me in the leg. People fell on top of me while the machine guns were going, bam bam, and they hit me in my buttock, and I screamed.  The more I screamed the more they shot at us.  That ditch had 170 people; two of us survived.” 
          Ha Thi Quy lost her mother, a daughter and a son.  Another son lost an arm and a leg. Her husband was hit in the head and lived for 2 or 3 years. Quy says she’s too old to remember – and at 83, she’s afraid she might not remember all the details about the massacre to respond to visitors’ questions.
          My Lai remains as poor as it was 40 years ago.  The collection of hamlets is almost unchanged since the days of the massacre.  Quy, with sad eyes and wrinkles that make hers a perfect face for National Geographic magazine, still occasionally works the fields gathering potatoes.

Other survivors have since died, or left the area.  Of the ten or so thought to still be living here, the most prominent is Pham Thanh Cong.  He is a daily presence to any visitors as the area marks the 40th anniversary of the massacre.  “When I think of this anniversary, of course I’m very sad,” he says.  ”I feel the hurt because my parents, brothers, sisters all died in the massacre. I’m haunted always by this horrific massacre.”                   
          There are some debates as to what orders the soldiers received.  After the events of 1968 came to light, many said they “were simply following orders.”   Cong was 11 when the soldiers came.  Wounded and covered under his mother, he survived alone. He lost his entire family of five.  Now the head of the museum devoted to the events of My Lai, Cong seems dry and firm, his story a bit rehearsed after all these years.

He’s glad, Cong says, that the U.S. and Viet Nam are now friends, but the wounds of four decades ago are still left unattended.
          “The American government hasn’t been all that responsible towards our country over this massacre, or even unfair in terms of helping the country and the victims to rebuild their lives,” Cong says.  “It hasn’t done much at all.”    
          There has been enough attention from American media over the years, but not much from the government.  This year, for the 40th anniversary of this incident, among the foreigners who visited My Lai this time were many journalists, from Kyodo News, Agence France Press, Associated Press, the British Broadcasting Corporation, and a television crew from Al Jazeera. 
          The film crew also managed to bring back one American soldier who took part in the rampage.  He and Pham Thanh Cong had a long conversation during which they became pretty sure the American was the one to have killed many of Cong’s family members. 
          Cong was seething with anger, according to the Al Jazeera reporter, but kept his emotions in check and merely talked of how the U.S. and Viet Nam are now friends.  They met and talked for a long while.   
          That night, Cong apparently became very drunk, and somehow related the story of his older brother, more than 20 years his senior.  At some point, the man had been captured by the French for some reason.  They tore his stomach open, poured gasoline in it, and set him on fire.
          Wars will often provide chances for racist, inhuman crimes.  And governments, as well as history books, will often hide the facts.
          The American authorities tried first to cover up the massacre in My Lai.  Colin Powell, then a 31-year old Army Major, contradicted a letter written by an American soldier complaining of atrocities committed by his comrades.  It was months before the media and the public learned of the events.  The Army then investigated and court martialed a number of officers and GIs.
          Only one was ever convicted.  
          Lt. William Calley, leader of one of the attacking platoons, served a weekend in jail for killing 109 people, and then was released and placed under house arrest for about four years.
          Forty years later, director Oliver Stone is plotting to retell the story in a movie called Pinkville, the name given to the area by soldiers who believed everyone there was a communist.  For 83-year-old Ha Thi Quy, Americans are both monsters, and heroes.  
          As she recounts, “Later this American pilot came to visit many times before he died. He came and told us and we finally understood, we’re very grateful; if I am alive now, I am grateful to him.”
          That would be Hugh Thompson Jr., a helicopter pilot who landed his aircraft between the rampaging soldiers and the victims.  He and two other men tried to stop the killings, and managed to ferry some of the wounded to safety.  He would later received the Soldier’s Medal, the highest award for bravery not involving direct contact with the enemy from the U.S. Army.  Thompson died in January of 2006 a hero mourned and admired by many.  But no one person’s heroic act can erase the nightmares of My Lai, and Pham Thanh Cong talks about similar fates still happening to others today.
          “The suffering, the deaths, losing our country, the destruction of our homes,… we have known all of that,” Cong says.  “So the situation with the people in Iraq dying everyday, their misery, the loss of their nation, all of that hurts us too, and we just totally disagree with the situation.              
          Cong’s museum gets about 70 thousand visitors a year, from Japan, Holland, the US, and from many parts of Viet Nam. The pictures of the piles of dead people are chilling.  So are the innocent enlistment portraits of the soldiers. It makes you question not just war, but humans.  It certainly shocked some of the young people here who tend to have little appreciation for history.

 
This one, in the middle, is a definite exception: her grandmother has taken her here twice.  Her name is Do Thi Huyen Trang.  She tells me: “When I see this, I want Uncle Ho to still be alive, the people in this area not to have American soldiers beating them up, destroying them.”
          Do Thi Huyen Trang has a face that will melt your heart, and a voice that will break your heart.  She speaks in a way that a ten-year-old does – mixing the past with the present, and wishing for things that are simply impossible.  If you can excuse the official propaganda about North Viet Nam’s leader Ho Chi Minh, there’s something in her voice, and in her face, that makes you think all this ugliness will pass.
          So would the tasteful Asian garden outside called the My Lai Peace Park.

It was built by the Quakers and friends, to offer remembrance and hope.  But just beyond the park, you’ll find remnants of the homes destroyed by the men of Charlie Company.
          Burnt down to their foundations, the houses are ugly, eerie, with cement dogs and pigs strewn about as if they were just killed yesterday.  

It’s hard to stand in front of this scene, and think another translation of the name of this place comes out to Where Beauty Revisits.