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Business News/ Mint-lounge / Features/  History in a ditch
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History in a ditch

A chilling, quiet memorial to a massacre that killed 504 people, including 173 children, during the American war in Vietnam

American military helicopters at My Lai. Photo: Ronald S Haeberle/The LIFE Images Collection/Getty ImagesPremium
American military helicopters at My Lai. Photo: Ronald S Haeberle/The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images

It’s nearly dawn and the hotel is frantic with activity. The breakfast tables are full and there’s a scramble at the coffee machine. Outside, tourist taxis and buses are gearing up for the morning excursions. As I wait for my ride, I watch the curious ritual of tour bus attendance unfolding in front of me; a group of American pensioners is off to see the My Son temples. Guidebooks say its ethereal beauty is best captured in the early morning hours. No such suggestions are made for My Lai, where I am headed.

I am in Hoi An, an ancient and picturesque port town on the coast of the South China Sea in Vietnam. The town boasts of Unesco World Heritage Site status. Rows of intricately carved wooden houses, ornate bridges and pagodas make graceful appearances at almost every turn. Small cafés along narrow, meandering paths serve the freshest treats from the sea and gossamer fishing nets are illuminated in the cool light of paper lanterns at night. There’s the quiet hum of life by the sea.

But I am not here for the sea, or even Hoi An’s heritage beauty. I am here to see a ditch. On the morning of 16 March 1968, that ditch was clogged with the bodies of women, children, old people—remnants of an entire village gunned down by young American soldiers. What does that ditch look like 48 years later, filled to the brim with fresh water?

I cannot remember when I first heard of My Lai; by the time I was born, in the 1980s, the Vietnam War had been all but forgotten. But I do remember one cloudy monsoon afternoon in late 2011 when all the floating snippets of information I had heard came together. It was a documentary I accidentally stumbled upon on YouTube called Four Hours In My Lai—a 1989 film, first broadcast on Yorkshire Television’s reportage show, First Tuesday. Veterans from Charlie Company, an American contingent of about a hundred soldiers, spoke desperately to the camera. Some broke down mid-sentence. Most of them were undergoing therapy, which included heavy doses of anti-depressants and anti-anxiety pills. A couple of them had developed suicidal tendencies. Since then, I have always associated My Lai with the empty faces of those slight, nervous wrecks of men, trying really hard to look tough.

***

In My Lai, the museum adjacent to the memorial for the dead is run by the government. It is easy to tell that it’s not Vietnam’s biggest tourist draw. It isn’t marked on the GPS like other landmarks; in fact, it seems to have simply dropped off the map. There are no road maps, no road signs and no tourist-friendly landscape.

Our car eventually moseyed along the dirt road, from one paddy field to another, stopping occasionally to ask for directions. With each misinformed turn, my driver grew more frustrated and my confidence began wavering. Had I misread the village name? Did such a museum really exist? Maybe they had closed it or pulled it down, like the statue of Ho Chi Minh in Saigon City Square, in January 2015.

Riled and sweaty, I was just about to give up when the car drew into an empty, abandoned-looking premises right in the middle of an overgrown paddy field. An unmistakably government architectural block stood in front of me as I got out of the car, sun-battered and exasperated. The brownish-grey, two-storey building, which must surely have been pink once, bore signs of neglect. Just diagonally behind the block was the white stone outline of an imposing Soviet-style statue—a woman standing erect with her clenched fist raised towards the sky, a dead baby dangling from her left arm. To the left and behind the monument, small rice paddy squares shone a brilliant green.

Inside, beside the walls were waist-high tables with glass-top drawers. Through the thin layer of dust on the glass, I could see American platoon maps of Operation Pinkville (as My Lai was referred to in military documents), official letters of approval from Task Force Barker—the unit high command—followed by blatant denials of those approvals, handwritten witness accounts of army whistle-blowers and letters from the families of the dead; fading ink on yellowing paper frayed at the edges, all sealed in creased plastic covers, displayed, perhaps, to convince all the deniers that the museum must have thought would arrive at its door.

A scene recreated at the museum at My Lai. Photo: Hoang Dinh Nam/AFP
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A scene recreated at the museum at My Lai. Photo: Hoang Dinh Nam/AFP

Today, the war remains an issue mainly for the older generation and tourists. Americans are no longer singled out for their war atrocities. Why blame them alone? A young restaurant attendant back at the hotel in Hoi An had said: “Do you think it’s only the Americans who raped our women? What about the French and the Chinese?"

Recent diplomatic initiatives have set the US free of its festering guilt. It is now considered a friend, a potential ally against China. Tourism is flourishing, and Vietnam is slowly learning to cash in on the value of its past. Clearly, I am not the first or the last to have gone looking for its past, out of some morbid curiosity or a sort of morose reassurance that this stuff from the history books really happened.

Once I had finished exploring the dingy labyrinth of the museum corridors, I found a petite lady in her late 30s, hidden by the stack of string-bound files piled on the table in front of her. The musty smell of that room resembled an Indian bureaucrat’s office. Dripping air-conditioner unit—check. Mouldy walls—check. Boxes filled with rubber stamps and stamp ink—check. “Excuse me, I am visiting from India and was wondering if I could have someone show me around." Betraying both surprise and curiosity, she agreed.

At first, she spoke in the refined tone of a tour guide, sticking to familiar phrases. She portrayed the Vietnamese as “a warm and open-hearted people" and carefully avoided any note of accusation. “We forgive, but we do not forget," she said. I nodded and quietly followed her to the exhibition room.

We had to cross a giant water puddle in the doorway to the big hall. Inside, the air was clammy and smelt of old blankets and rust. The air conditioners whirred noisily and dripped profusely. She led me carefully through the maze of muddy water streams on the floor to the exhibit: a meticulous collection of enlarged photographs of the massacre, many taken by American army photographer Ronald Haeberle, a whistle-blower in his own right. He is said to have smuggled the negatives out of My Lai in his combat boots after the massacre and sold them to Time magazine at a time when the US president, Richard Nixon, was desperately trying to downplay the whole incident.

The photographs have since returned to their place of origin. Piles of dead bodies, a woman being held at gunpoint, an old man on his knees, begging for his life, a bunch of terrified, half-naked women huddled together, with petrified children in tow, disfigured bodies lined up in front of burning huts, the boys of Charlie Company breaking for lunch next to a mound of freshly mutilated corpses, more dead bodies, more death. Damp and clumpy, they stared out from their flimsy photo frames.

Later, when we were sharing a cup of tea on a bench outside the museum block, my guide spoke about life under the shadow of “Vietnam’s Holocaust". You can try not to think about the past, she said, but some stories are too personal to forget. Her family, she said, survived another, less- known massacre in the hamlet of Truong Le, near Quang Ngai, known as the Khanh Giang-Truong Le Massacre. Before leaving for south Vietnam, I had come across an old report at the Military History Museum in Hanoi that included a detailed description of this slaughter.

The American army platoon had arrived at the village early in the morning on 18 April 1969, almost a year after My Lai. The soldiers summoned women and children out of their mud houses and burnt down the village. Three hours later, they returned to kill 41 children and 21 women. Only nine villagers survived. My guide’s grandmother had been one of them.

I asked if anyone from Charlie Company had ever returned to My Lai, guilt-ridden or otherwise, and she raised her eyebrows and sighed. Kenneth Schiel was the only member of the Charlie Company who visited the museum as a participant in an Al Jazeera television documentary commemorating the 40th anniversary of the massacre. Like others from Charlie Company, he was charged with murder but was acquitted.

The museum now organizes lonely screenings of this documentary in its small, dark projector room for tourists who happen to pass by. That day, it was just the two of us in that room.

The documentary features an interview with Pham Thanh Cong, the director of the museum and a survivor of the massacre. In the film, he describes the terrible event as he remembers it. Cong was 11 years old. It was about 7 in the morning when the American helicopters landed in the village. The entire family huddled together in a shallow bunker. The soldiers ordered them out. The family was then pushed back in. The soldiers threw a hand grenade after them and fired a round of bullets. Cong suffered scalp and torso wounds and had a bullet lodged in the leg. He passed out. When he woke up, he found himself buried under a heap of corpses: his mother, his three sisters and his six-year-old brother.

Outside the exhibit room, a daunting black granite wall dominates the museum foyer. The names and ages of the dead are engraved on it in dull gold. The museum’s count of the dead, no longer in dispute, is 504. Twenty-four families—three generations—obliterated. Among the dead were 17 pregnant women and 173 children, 56 of them infants.

The black granite wall underlines another important fact: My Lai wasn’t the only massacre that day.

Another village about a mile to the east, known to the Americans as My Khe 4, was also attacked. The museum lists the names of the 97 murdered at the My Khe 4 settlement. Clearly, what happened at My Lai was part of a pattern rather than an aberration, and there was an ugly context to that pattern.

By 1967, the south Vietnamese provinces of Quang Ngai, Quang Nam and Quang Tri had become strongholds of the National Liberation Front, known to Americans as the Viet Cong. These provinces were quick to assert their independence from the American puppet regime in Saigon. The punishment came swiftly, in the form of defoliating chemicals. American warplanes drenched all the three provinces in Agent Orange (chemical defoliant) and scorched them with napalm. Quang Tri was declared a “free-bombing zone". It was here that the American army regularly deliberated the infamous “kill ratios" that encouraged its soldiers to shoot on the slightest suspicion of collusion.

***

We walked along the small paddy squares around the monument. The sky was clouded over in patches in the late afternoon glow, a light breeze had subdued the heat, the air felt a little like rain. The paddy fields around the monument are where the village once stood. The modest squares of the still-visible foundations of houses stand as grim witnesses to their past. There’s a solemn plaque on every plot listing the names of those murdered from each household. The blood has dried, the voices have fallen silent; today, on the same winding paths, the sun shines.

We walked along these. What were we looking for? Traces of bodies that fell to the ground? Imprints of the footmarks of those gun-bullied out of their houses before being shot summarily? While the machine guns spluttered, helicopters whirled and mothers wailed as houses went up in flames? A coconut tree with bullet holes, the skeletal remains of crude bunkers and a long ditch covered with undergrowth and rainwater are all that is left of that fateful morning of March 1968. Faithful as ever, grass has flourished around the ruins of the abandoned village.

The place where many of the villagers were shot dead. Photo: Hoang Dinh Nam/AFP
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The place where many of the villagers were shot dead. Photo: Hoang Dinh Nam/AFP

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Published: 08 Apr 2016, 08:53 PM IST
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