So, after missing my first train up from Tuy Hoa, I finally get the TH1 and roll into Quảng Ngãi a little after midnight.
I've changed trains here late at night before and know that Quảng Ngãi will have gone to sleep long before I arrive. Sure enough, the streets are all but deserted. I wander down shadowy streets to my hotel where I knock up somebody to let me in. They'd been warned of my late arrival, so I don't feel too bad. Wait, was that a real stuffed tiger in the lobby? Too late to worry about that now. I need some zeds. Been up for so long.
Up and out with the larks for some coffee. Yup. That's definitely a stuffed tiger.
I'm only booked in for one night and decide that hotels with stuffed cats aren't really for me. I book in to somewhere with 'Riverside' in its name. Stretching the facts a little as it turns out, but it's fine.
I take Google map's slightly longer road from my hotel to the Quán Cơm Chay An Lạc on Trần Hưng Đạo. This turns out to be a good choice.
Food is good.
I wander out to Quang Trun Street to look for a xe ôm to take me to Mỹ Lại. Hmm, not so thick on the ground. But I am invited to have a seat and a drink of tea until one can be found. An ageing granny is impressed by my physique. Not something that happens to me often. A lady xe ôm, or at least a lady who is happy to be a xe ôm for a while is flagged down. Granny's eyes sparkle with the possibility of romance only she can see in the situation. I take in the state of the bike. Quảng Ngãi is one of the poorest provinces in Vietnam. Young folks with any get up and go have all used it to land jobs in Saigon or Hanoi. It's becoming an old folks place. I'm not sure there's much optimism about the future. I negotiate a price to be dropped at Mỹ Lại. My xe ôm lady seems a little vague about the route, but Google maps will surely get us there.
Half way there, a puncture brings us to a halt. As always, the nearest sửa xe máy place is within rolling distance. A grotty tube is extracted and a previous repair has obviously failed. A new tube is inserted with the rear wheel barely disturbed. Everybody comes out to be my friend. The patriarch engages me in earnest conversation. He places his hand rather higher up my thigh than I am used to as he leans in to emphasise a point. I don't reciprocate. There are many subtleties to be mastered when it comes to personal interactions in Vietnam and I'm still not sure of all the rules. I ante up 60k for the repair to be deducted from the fare and we are off.
Lady xe ôm is set to fly past the Mỹ Lại site until I bring her to a halt. We arrange for her to come back for me in 3 hours.
I am alone at the Mỹ Lại memorial.
There is an age thing at work when it comes to Mỹ Lại. Many intelligent, educated folks know nothing of this place. Then there are those who want to forget. And those, like me, who grew up with Vietnam on the television in our early teens. I have always been a bit of a news junky and I remember hearing about Mỹ Lại back in the day. It made no sense to me then and it makes no sense to me now. Vietnam pretty much dropped off my radar after my 20th birthday: 30/04/1975, the fall of Saigon. I remember the fall of Saigon. I don't remember much else of that birthday. The seeds planted lay dormant until 1997 when I first came to Vietnam. Since then, Vietnam has taken so many little pieces of my heart.
So here I am. At Mỹ Lại. Where 504 Vietnamese civilians, old men and women, young men and women, children and babies were systematically slaughtered by American troops.
There is no room for whataboutism here. This was a war crime. This was a war crime covered up right up as far as the White House. This was a war crime where the heroes of the day, and there were heroes, were not given credit for truly outstanding courage until 30 years later. This was a war crime where only one man was ever convicted. And the day after he was convicted, Nixon ordered him moved from prison to house arrest. 3 and a half years later he was a free man. He lives, still. The heroes are all dead now.
The heroes on that day were few: Thompson, Andreotta, Colburn. Their story is worth reading. Another, after the fact, hero was Ron Ridenhour who sparked the investigation which led to Mỹ Lại coming to public attention. Few others back then can claim to have done the right thing.
Charlie Company was dropped off at Mỹ Lại early in the morning of 16th March 1968, expecting to meet stiff resistance from the 48th Viet Cong Battalion. They found only old men, women and children and proceeded to implement a policy of Burn All, Destroy All, Kill All.
Hugh Thompson was a helicopter pilot who saw lots of bodies and Americans shooting, but no incoming fire against them. He had pointed out wounded civilians who needed help. When he returned after refuelling, he found them dead. He pointed out another wounded woman and watched a captain approach her and shoot her,
Unable to understand what he was seeing, he landed his helicopter between a group of Vietnamese civilians and the G.I.s of Charlie Company pursuing them. He told his crew Glen Andreotta and Laurence Colburn to cover him and open fire on the troops if they fired on him. A standoff ensued and the shooting came to an end. He reported what he had seen and done to his commander. Thus started the cover up. And 30 years of ostracism for Thompson. No action was taken against anyone in Charlie Company or anyone in the chain of command.
That would be the last we had heard of Mỹ Lại without another hero: Ron Ridenhour. Ridenhour heard tales of the massacre from soldiers who had been in training with him. He began to search out all the members of Charlie Company he could find and collecting their stories. Ridenhour had friends, 'good guys', in Charlie Company. He, and often they themselves, could not understand how they could have lost all sense of morality. Wary for his own safety, he wrote nothing down. Once back in the world, he sent of a 2000 word letter to Nixon, the secretary of defense and some members of congress, documenting what he knew of the massacre. An investigation was now inevitable. An army photographer had been present on the day and had documented the massacre and the photos shocked the world.
Thompson reports on a visit to Mỹ Lại many years later, that one of the ladies he saved came up to him. "Why didn't the people who committed these acts come back with you?" He said that he was "just devastated" but that she finished her sentence: "So we could forgive them."
Mỹ Lại wasn't the only American massacre. And the Americans weren't the only ones guilty of massacres in Vietnam. But that changes nothing of what happened here.
I explore the museum. The names and ages of the 504 dead are prominently displayed. Man's inhumanity to man on display. Thompson, Andreotta and Colburn's part is shown. Seymour Hersh's "Letter from Mỹ Lại" has me weeping openly.
I have read a lot on Mỹ Lại and Vietnam, but a book by a survivor is on display. Nobody is about. My Em oi! brings a young lady up from below stairs. I would like to look at that book, I say in my carefully rehearsed Vietnamese. She gets me a copy out. It doesn't take much reading to persuade me to add it to my collection.
I buy Pham Thanh Cong's memoir. Herded into a bunker with his mother and siblings and a grenade tossed in after them, he alone survived. He too talks of forgiveness. Forgiving is easy, he says, But we can't forget. Perhaps one day, America will have a president brave enough to come here and say "sorry". And accept forgiveness. It won't be the current one.
It seems that the Vietnamese are ready to forgive and the Americans just want to get on with the forgetting. Not the best way of learning from history.
Outside, the concrete paths between the groups of houses have tracks of bicycles and children embedded in the surface. All is quiet. Only the people are missing.
I sit and have a cà phê sữa đá while I wait for my lady xe ôm . It's a beautiful site.
My lady xe ôm turns up on time. We head back to Quảng Ngãi but have only gone a couple of hundred meters before a clattering of metal pursues us along the road. Lady xe ôm seems happy to continue. I persuade her to stop since my right foot and the exhaust are now wobbling in the wind. We head back to collect up the scrap metal littering the road behind us. But, there's a couple of bolts I can't find, so we can't even finger tighten the foot peg and exhaust enough to ride on. Lady xe ôm rings for the cavalry. I head up to explore the conveniently nearby temple to Trương Định about whom I know less than nothing. The Mỹ Lại memorial was lightly visited - this place looks like it's yet to hit the big time. I light some incense sticks to the world. The rains come. Finally, I see lady xe ôm waving to me. The cavalry has arrived. Another lady xe ôm has come out from Quảng Ngãi to fetch me. I bid farewell to my first lady and we head into town.
Excellent veggy food then a stroll to my new hotel. I never watch TV at home, but at night, alone in Vietnam, off the beaten track, entertainment is limited. I discover American Masterchef. It's all new to me and it's like discovering Christians v lions at the Colosseum. Darrick forgets to use his vanilla bean and admits he had never whipped cream before. Gordon is shocked and Darrick realizes his dream has died. I give up on the TV feeling a little guilty for intruding into Darrick’s pain. The walls here are not well soundproofed. I can hear the couple next door, but I am asleep before the lady gets to where she is going.
Up at the crack of dawn and off to Chu Lai airport for my flight to Hanoi. It was from here that the helicopters took off for Mỹ Lại in 1968. The revetments are still there.
On to Hanoi. I am glad I came.
Further reading and listening all worth your time:
Ron Ridenhour on his part (and thoughts) on Mỹ Lại: Part 1 Part 2
Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam by Nick Turse
Biography of Hugh Thompson: The Forgotten Hero of My Lai by Trent Angers
4 Hours in Mỹ Lại by Michael Bilton and Kevin Sim
Mỹ Lại 4: A Report on the Massacre and Its Aftermath by Seymour Hersh
The Witness from Pinkville by Pham Thanh Cong
I've changed trains here late at night before and know that Quảng Ngãi will have gone to sleep long before I arrive. Sure enough, the streets are all but deserted. I wander down shadowy streets to my hotel where I knock up somebody to let me in. They'd been warned of my late arrival, so I don't feel too bad. Wait, was that a real stuffed tiger in the lobby? Too late to worry about that now. I need some zeds. Been up for so long.
Up and out with the larks for some coffee. Yup. That's definitely a stuffed tiger.
 |
| Not sure about the wisdom of this |
I take Google map's slightly longer road from my hotel to the Quán Cơm Chay An Lạc on Trần Hưng Đạo. This turns out to be a good choice.
 |
| The road less travelled |
Food is good.
I wander out to Quang Trun Street to look for a xe ôm to take me to Mỹ Lại. Hmm, not so thick on the ground. But I am invited to have a seat and a drink of tea until one can be found. An ageing granny is impressed by my physique. Not something that happens to me often. A lady xe ôm, or at least a lady who is happy to be a xe ôm for a while is flagged down. Granny's eyes sparkle with the possibility of romance only she can see in the situation. I take in the state of the bike. Quảng Ngãi is one of the poorest provinces in Vietnam. Young folks with any get up and go have all used it to land jobs in Saigon or Hanoi. It's becoming an old folks place. I'm not sure there's much optimism about the future. I negotiate a price to be dropped at Mỹ Lại. My xe ôm lady seems a little vague about the route, but Google maps will surely get us there.
Half way there, a puncture brings us to a halt. As always, the nearest sửa xe máy place is within rolling distance. A grotty tube is extracted and a previous repair has obviously failed. A new tube is inserted with the rear wheel barely disturbed. Everybody comes out to be my friend. The patriarch engages me in earnest conversation. He places his hand rather higher up my thigh than I am used to as he leans in to emphasise a point. I don't reciprocate. There are many subtleties to be mastered when it comes to personal interactions in Vietnam and I'm still not sure of all the rules. I ante up 60k for the repair to be deducted from the fare and we are off.
Lady xe ôm is set to fly past the Mỹ Lại site until I bring her to a halt. We arrange for her to come back for me in 3 hours.
I am alone at the Mỹ Lại memorial.
There is an age thing at work when it comes to Mỹ Lại. Many intelligent, educated folks know nothing of this place. Then there are those who want to forget. And those, like me, who grew up with Vietnam on the television in our early teens. I have always been a bit of a news junky and I remember hearing about Mỹ Lại back in the day. It made no sense to me then and it makes no sense to me now. Vietnam pretty much dropped off my radar after my 20th birthday: 30/04/1975, the fall of Saigon. I remember the fall of Saigon. I don't remember much else of that birthday. The seeds planted lay dormant until 1997 when I first came to Vietnam. Since then, Vietnam has taken so many little pieces of my heart.
So here I am. At Mỹ Lại. Where 504 Vietnamese civilians, old men and women, young men and women, children and babies were systematically slaughtered by American troops.
There is no room for whataboutism here. This was a war crime. This was a war crime covered up right up as far as the White House. This was a war crime where the heroes of the day, and there were heroes, were not given credit for truly outstanding courage until 30 years later. This was a war crime where only one man was ever convicted. And the day after he was convicted, Nixon ordered him moved from prison to house arrest. 3 and a half years later he was a free man. He lives, still. The heroes are all dead now.
The heroes on that day were few: Thompson, Andreotta, Colburn. Their story is worth reading. Another, after the fact, hero was Ron Ridenhour who sparked the investigation which led to Mỹ Lại coming to public attention. Few others back then can claim to have done the right thing.
Charlie Company was dropped off at Mỹ Lại early in the morning of 16th March 1968, expecting to meet stiff resistance from the 48th Viet Cong Battalion. They found only old men, women and children and proceeded to implement a policy of Burn All, Destroy All, Kill All.
Hugh Thompson was a helicopter pilot who saw lots of bodies and Americans shooting, but no incoming fire against them. He had pointed out wounded civilians who needed help. When he returned after refuelling, he found them dead. He pointed out another wounded woman and watched a captain approach her and shoot her,
Unable to understand what he was seeing, he landed his helicopter between a group of Vietnamese civilians and the G.I.s of Charlie Company pursuing them. He told his crew Glen Andreotta and Laurence Colburn to cover him and open fire on the troops if they fired on him. A standoff ensued and the shooting came to an end. He reported what he had seen and done to his commander. Thus started the cover up. And 30 years of ostracism for Thompson. No action was taken against anyone in Charlie Company or anyone in the chain of command.
That would be the last we had heard of Mỹ Lại without another hero: Ron Ridenhour. Ridenhour heard tales of the massacre from soldiers who had been in training with him. He began to search out all the members of Charlie Company he could find and collecting their stories. Ridenhour had friends, 'good guys', in Charlie Company. He, and often they themselves, could not understand how they could have lost all sense of morality. Wary for his own safety, he wrote nothing down. Once back in the world, he sent of a 2000 word letter to Nixon, the secretary of defense and some members of congress, documenting what he knew of the massacre. An investigation was now inevitable. An army photographer had been present on the day and had documented the massacre and the photos shocked the world.
Thompson reports on a visit to Mỹ Lại many years later, that one of the ladies he saved came up to him. "Why didn't the people who committed these acts come back with you?" He said that he was "just devastated" but that she finished her sentence: "So we could forgive them."
Mỹ Lại wasn't the only American massacre. And the Americans weren't the only ones guilty of massacres in Vietnam. But that changes nothing of what happened here.
I explore the museum. The names and ages of the 504 dead are prominently displayed. Man's inhumanity to man on display. Thompson, Andreotta and Colburn's part is shown. Seymour Hersh's "Letter from Mỹ Lại" has me weeping openly.
I have read a lot on Mỹ Lại and Vietnam, but a book by a survivor is on display. Nobody is about. My Em oi! brings a young lady up from below stairs. I would like to look at that book, I say in my carefully rehearsed Vietnamese. She gets me a copy out. It doesn't take much reading to persuade me to add it to my collection.
I buy Pham Thanh Cong's memoir. Herded into a bunker with his mother and siblings and a grenade tossed in after them, he alone survived. He too talks of forgiveness. Forgiving is easy, he says, But we can't forget. Perhaps one day, America will have a president brave enough to come here and say "sorry". And accept forgiveness. It won't be the current one.
It seems that the Vietnamese are ready to forgive and the Americans just want to get on with the forgetting. Not the best way of learning from history.
|
|
 |
| The ditch. 170 people were murdered here |
I sit and have a cà phê sữa đá while I wait for my lady xe ôm . It's a beautiful site.
My lady xe ôm turns up on time. We head back to Quảng Ngãi but have only gone a couple of hundred meters before a clattering of metal pursues us along the road. Lady xe ôm seems happy to continue. I persuade her to stop since my right foot and the exhaust are now wobbling in the wind. We head back to collect up the scrap metal littering the road behind us. But, there's a couple of bolts I can't find, so we can't even finger tighten the foot peg and exhaust enough to ride on. Lady xe ôm rings for the cavalry. I head up to explore the conveniently nearby temple to Trương Định about whom I know less than nothing. The Mỹ Lại memorial was lightly visited - this place looks like it's yet to hit the big time. I light some incense sticks to the world. The rains come. Finally, I see lady xe ôm waving to me. The cavalry has arrived. Another lady xe ôm has come out from Quảng Ngãi to fetch me. I bid farewell to my first lady and we head into town.
Excellent veggy food then a stroll to my new hotel. I never watch TV at home, but at night, alone in Vietnam, off the beaten track, entertainment is limited. I discover American Masterchef. It's all new to me and it's like discovering Christians v lions at the Colosseum. Darrick forgets to use his vanilla bean and admits he had never whipped cream before. Gordon is shocked and Darrick realizes his dream has died. I give up on the TV feeling a little guilty for intruding into Darrick’s pain. The walls here are not well soundproofed. I can hear the couple next door, but I am asleep before the lady gets to where she is going.
Up at the crack of dawn and off to Chu Lai airport for my flight to Hanoi. It was from here that the helicopters took off for Mỹ Lại in 1968. The revetments are still there.
On to Hanoi. I am glad I came.
Further reading and listening all worth your time:
Ron Ridenhour on his part (and thoughts) on Mỹ Lại: Part 1 Part 2
Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam by Nick Turse
Biography of Hugh Thompson: The Forgotten Hero of My Lai by Trent Angers
4 Hours in Mỹ Lại by Michael Bilton and Kevin Sim
Mỹ Lại 4: A Report on the Massacre and Its Aftermath by Seymour Hersh
The Witness from Pinkville by Pham Thanh Cong
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