US soldier returns to My Lai on 40th anniversary, finds hope at the scene of a massacre
By BEN STOCKING, Associated Press Writer
MY LAI, Vietnam - Lawrence Colburn returned to My Lai on Saturday and found hope in the killing fields.
On the 40th anniversary of the infamous massacre, Colburn was reunited with a young man he once rescued from the rampaging members of Charlie Company, U.S. troops who slaughtered up to 500 unarmed Vietnamese villagers in one of the most notorious chapters of the Vietnam War.
On March 16, 1968, Colburn found 8-year-old Do Ba clinging to his mother’s corpse in a ditch full of blood and the bodies of more than 100 people who had been mowed down. Nearly all the victims were unarmed women, children and elderly.
“Today I see Do Ba with a wife and a baby,” said Colburn, a member of a three-man helicopter crew who intervened to stop the killing. “He’s transformed himself from being a broken, lonely man. Now he’s complete. He’s a perfect example of the human spirit, of the will to survive.”
Colburn, Ba and hundreds of others are gathering this weekend to remember the My Lai massacre, a grim milestone that shocked Americans and undermined support for the war, which ended in 1975 with the fall of Saigon to communist troops.
Buddhist monks in saffron robes led the mourners in prayer Saturday outside a museum that has been erected to remember the dead. An official memorial program will be held on Sunday.
Among those coming to pray was Ha Thi Quy, 83, a My Lai survivor who struggles with anger and depression four decades after the slaughter. Members of Charlie Company shot her in the leg and killed her mother, her 16-year-old daughter and her 6-year-old son.
Her husband later died of injuries from the massacre and another son had to have an arm and a leg amputated after suffering gunshot wounds that day.
Quy only survived because she was shielded beneath a pile of dead bodies.
She has no photographs of her loved ones, Quy said, because the troops burned her house down.
“The American government should stop waging wars like they waged in Vietnam,” Quy said. “My children were innocent, but those American soldiers killed them.”
To the villagers and many of the Americans who fought in Vietnam, all the My Lai anniversaries are important. But this year’s seems especially urgent to some of the Americans who have come to commemorate it.
The massacre reminds Colburn of the 2005 images of torture that emerged from the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
“We’re supposed to learn from the mistakes of history, but we keep making the same mistakes,” said Colburn, 58, who now runs a medical supplies business north of Atlanta. “That’s what makes My Lai more important today than ever before.”
On that morning 40 years ago, Colburn, a helicopter door gunner, flew over My Lai on a reconnaissance mission with pilot Hugh Thompson and crew chief Glenn Andreotta. After several runs over the area, they realized that unarmed civilians were being slaughtered by U.S. troops on the ground.
The members of Charlie Company had come on a “search and destroy” mission, trying to track down elusive Vietcong guerrillas, whose tactics had depleted the company’s ranks in the weeks leading up to the massacre.
But the U.S. troops began shooting in My Lai that day even though they hadn’t come under attack. Once the shooting started, it quickly escalated into an orgy of killing.
The angry and frustrated troops had found themselves in a bewildering war where it was impossible to distinguish friend from foe, said Stanley Karnow, an American historian who wrote a definitive account of the Vietnam War.
Their actions shocked the American public, who had preferred to think of U.S. troops as heroes making the world safe for democracy, Karnow said.
“But there is a human capacity for committing atrocities,” Karnow said in a telephone interview. “We saw that in Vietnam, and we’re seeing it in Iraq.”
Seymour Hersh, the journalist who exposed the massacre, also sees parallels between My Lai and the Abu Ghraib scandal, which he has reported on extensively. But he says the public furor unleashed by My Lai was far greater.
“It’s stunning how much impact My Lai had and how little impact Abu Ghraib had,” Hersh said by telephone from Washington. “We’ll have to leave it to historians to figure out why.”
Photos at the My Lai museum show children and old women lying in pools of blood and the faces of terrified old villagers moments before they were slaughtered. Soldiers wielding cigarette lighters casually set fire to the villagers’ thatch-roofed huts.
Thompson, Colburn and Andreotta, who later received government honors for their actions, arrived after the spasm of violence had escalated into a frenzied bloodbath.
Thompson landed the helicopter between the villagers and the marauding troops. While Colburn and Andreotta covered him, Thompson persuaded the members of Charlie Company to stop shooting.
Colburn and Andreotta, who died later in the war, found Do Ba in a ditch piled high with bodies and blood.
“He was still clinging to his mother,” Colburn said.
They took Ba to a hospital, and he later moved in with an aunt, who raised him in My Lai. When he turned 18, he moved to the former Saigon, now known as Ho Chi Minh City, where he works at an electronics factory.
He married three years ago and has a 14-month-old daughter.
He and Colburn were first reunited at the 2001 dedication of a new school in the village. At that time, Ba was single, haunted by memories of My Lai and eager to start a family.
The two hadn’t expected to meet each other this weekend.
“I’m very glad to see the man who rescued me,” Ba said, as the two men went to light incense at the graves of Ba’s mother, sister and brother, who were 31, 4 and 2 when they were killed. “He’s a good man.”
So much has changed since the day they first met, Ba said. The United States and Vietnam, former enemies, have become allies and developed a booming trade relationship.
“I’m glad the United States and Vietnam have become friends,” Ba said. “But I still feel hatred for the soldiers who killed my mother, my brother and my sister.”
US shame still stings 40 years after My Lai massacre
By Frank Brandmaier, Washington, March 15: The soldiers of the 1st Battalion, 11th US Army Brigade, arrived in the morning. Their mission was clear.
“The orders were to shoot anything that moved,” one US army officer told journalist Seymour Hersh, the investigative journalist who broke the story in 1969.
As the brigade pulled out three hours later on that fateful day, March 16, 1968, the village of My Lai in south Vietnam’s highlands was levelled. Not a living thing stirred. Blood-soaked bodies covered the ground - women, children, old men, dogs. Smoke from burning huts could be seen from afar. The bodies of young women bore evidence of sexual violation.
The number of dead ranged from 347 to 504, victims of a Charlie Company gone amok in blood lust. Not one shot had been fired at the infantry.
It would be another year and a half before the American public learned the truth - after a cover-up by the US Army.By that time, in November 1969, resistance and protests against the war were strong. The revelations about My Lai unleashed more outrage across the US and world.
For an entire generation of Americans, Europeans and Asians, My Lai stood for the image of the ugly American.
“That America and the Americans must stand in a larger dock of guilt and conscience for what happened at My Lai seems inescapable,” wrote the news weekly Time as the accounts unfolded.
In autumn 1969, millions demonstrated coast to coast, including 250,000 in Washington DC, in the largest anti-war protest in US history. But it would be another six years, in April 1975, before Americans finally fled Saigon in panic, boarding helicopters landing on rooftops.
The superpower lay in defeat, humiliated, outfought in a guerrilla war on the Cold War front by an enemy who commandeered little technology - with the exception of Soviet fighter jets.
During 10 years of war, the lopsided death toll was 58,000 Americans versus two to four million Vietnamese.
Looking back, one of the chief architects and defenders of the war, Robert McNamara, US defence secretary from 1961 to 1968, expressed sadness but not regret for the war in the 2003 documentary Fog of War.
In an interview with CNN, he called the 20th century the “bloodiest century in all of human history” with 160 million dead in conflicts.
“Is that what we want in the 21st century?” McNamara asked. “If we want to avoid it, we have to learn from our mistakes in this century. Vietnam was one of those.”
The deep psychological wounds of Vietnam are still raw. The war and US failure imprints the collective American psyche. Dozens of films, hundreds of books continue to plough the ground.
Every US military engagement abroad is accompanied by the warning, “No more Vietnam!” Just last year, Senator Edward Kennedy called Iraq “George Bush’s Vietnam.”
In the first Gulf War in 1990, it was widely reported that American commanders sent their soldiers into battle with the orders, “No My Lais - you hear?”
But in the second Iraq war, the worst fears have come to pass, with images of humiliation by US soldiers of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib, the stories of the massacre in Haditha, the allegations of torture of terrorist suspects at Guantanamo.
The rights organisation Human Rights Watch speaks of “My Lai in Iraq”.
“The shame of Haditha” would further erode the image of US military forces, Time magazine warned about the Nov 19, 2005, massacre of 24 Iraqi civilians shot and killed at close range by US marines in retaliation for the death of a marine lance corporal in a roadside bombing.
As Iraq sank further into chaos and the number of US dead from insurgent and terrorist attacks began to climb, the comparisons with Vietnam were unavoidable - even if the war, where nearly 4,000 US soldiers have died in five years, is a different war in many ways from 40 years earlier in South-East Asia.
This time around soldiers are being held accountable for their actions. Only one officer was convicted for the murder of 22 My Lai civilians - Lieutenant William Calley, who served three and a half years in jail.
In the Haditha case, three officers were reprimanded for faulty response while Staff Sergeant Frank D. Wuterich faces charges of unpremeditated murder of 18 civilians.
Last summer, historians were outraged by US President George W. Bush’s comparison of Vietnam to Iraq. Bush likened the dangers of withdrawing from Iraq to the “killing fields” that followed the US withdrawal from Vietnam.
The 2008 release of Pinkville, a new film about My Lai by director Oliver Stone - Platoon (1986) and Born on the Fourth of July (1989) - will no doubt bring up more comparisons to current US military actions.
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US soldier returns to My Lai on 40th anniversary, finds hope at the scene of a massacre
By BEN STOCKING, Associated Press Writer
MY LAI, Vietnam - Lawrence Colburn returned to My Lai on Saturday and found hope in the killing fields.
On the 40th anniversary of the infamous massacre, Colburn was reunited with a young man he once rescued from the rampaging members of Charlie Company, U.S. troops who slaughtered up to 500 unarmed Vietnamese villagers in one of the most notorious chapters of the Vietnam War.
On March 16, 1968, Colburn found 8-year-old Do Ba clinging to his mother’s corpse in a ditch full of blood and the bodies of more than 100 people who had been mowed down. Nearly all the victims were unarmed women, children and elderly.
“Today I see Do Ba with a wife and a baby,” said Colburn, a member of a three-man helicopter crew who intervened to stop the killing. “He’s transformed himself from being a broken, lonely man. Now he’s complete. He’s a perfect example of the human spirit, of the will to survive.”
Colburn, Ba and hundreds of others are gathering this weekend to remember the My Lai massacre, a grim milestone that shocked Americans and undermined support for the war, which ended in 1975 with the fall of Saigon to communist troops.
Buddhist monks in saffron robes led the mourners in prayer Saturday outside a museum that has been erected to remember the dead. An official memorial program will be held on Sunday.
Among those coming to pray was Ha Thi Quy, 83, a My Lai survivor who struggles with anger and depression four decades after the slaughter. Members of Charlie Company shot her in the leg and killed her mother, her 16-year-old daughter and her 6-year-old son.
Her husband later died of injuries from the massacre and another son had to have an arm and a leg amputated after suffering gunshot wounds that day.
Quy only survived because she was shielded beneath a pile of dead bodies.
She has no photographs of her loved ones, Quy said, because the troops burned her house down.
“The American government should stop waging wars like they waged in Vietnam,” Quy said. “My children were innocent, but those American soldiers killed them.”
To the villagers and many of the Americans who fought in Vietnam, all the My Lai anniversaries are important. But this year’s seems especially urgent to some of the Americans who have come to commemorate it.
The massacre reminds Colburn of the 2005 images of torture that emerged from the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
“We’re supposed to learn from the mistakes of history, but we keep making the same mistakes,” said Colburn, 58, who now runs a medical supplies business north of Atlanta. “That’s what makes My Lai more important today than ever before.”
On that morning 40 years ago, Colburn, a helicopter door gunner, flew over My Lai on a reconnaissance mission with pilot Hugh Thompson and crew chief Glenn Andreotta. After several runs over the area, they realized that unarmed civilians were being slaughtered by U.S. troops on the ground.
The members of Charlie Company had come on a “search and destroy” mission, trying to track down elusive Vietcong guerrillas, whose tactics had depleted the company’s ranks in the weeks leading up to the massacre.
But the U.S. troops began shooting in My Lai that day even though they hadn’t come under attack. Once the shooting started, it quickly escalated into an orgy of killing.
The angry and frustrated troops had found themselves in a bewildering war where it was impossible to distinguish friend from foe, said Stanley Karnow, an American historian who wrote a definitive account of the Vietnam War.
Their actions shocked the American public, who had preferred to think of U.S. troops as heroes making the world safe for democracy, Karnow said.
“But there is a human capacity for committing atrocities,” Karnow said in a telephone interview. “We saw that in Vietnam, and we’re seeing it in Iraq.”
Seymour Hersh, the journalist who exposed the massacre, also sees parallels between My Lai and the Abu Ghraib scandal, which he has reported on extensively. But he says the public furor unleashed by My Lai was far greater.
“It’s stunning how much impact My Lai had and how little impact Abu Ghraib had,” Hersh said by telephone from Washington. “We’ll have to leave it to historians to figure out why.”
Photos at the My Lai museum show children and old women lying in pools of blood and the faces of terrified old villagers moments before they were slaughtered. Soldiers wielding cigarette lighters casually set fire to the villagers’ thatch-roofed huts.
Thompson, Colburn and Andreotta, who later received government honors for their actions, arrived after the spasm of violence had escalated into a frenzied bloodbath.
Thompson landed the helicopter between the villagers and the marauding troops. While Colburn and Andreotta covered him, Thompson persuaded the members of Charlie Company to stop shooting.
Colburn and Andreotta, who died later in the war, found Do Ba in a ditch piled high with bodies and blood.
“He was still clinging to his mother,” Colburn said.
They took Ba to a hospital, and he later moved in with an aunt, who raised him in My Lai. When he turned 18, he moved to the former Saigon, now known as Ho Chi Minh City, where he works at an electronics factory.
He married three years ago and has a 14-month-old daughter.
He and Colburn were first reunited at the 2001 dedication of a new school in the village. At that time, Ba was single, haunted by memories of My Lai and eager to start a family.
The two hadn’t expected to meet each other this weekend.
“I’m very glad to see the man who rescued me,” Ba said, as the two men went to light incense at the graves of Ba’s mother, sister and brother, who were 31, 4 and 2 when they were killed. “He’s a good man.”
So much has changed since the day they first met, Ba said. The United States and Vietnam, former enemies, have become allies and developed a booming trade relationship.
“I’m glad the United States and Vietnam have become friends,” Ba said. “But I still feel hatred for the soldiers who killed my mother, my brother and my sister.”
US shame still stings 40 years after My Lai massacre
By Frank Brandmaier, Washington, March 15: The soldiers of the 1st Battalion, 11th US Army Brigade, arrived in the morning. Their mission was clear.
“The orders were to shoot anything that moved,” one US army officer told journalist Seymour Hersh, the investigative journalist who broke the story in 1969.
As the brigade pulled out three hours later on that fateful day, March 16, 1968, the village of My Lai in south Vietnam’s highlands was levelled. Not a living thing stirred. Blood-soaked bodies covered the ground - women, children, old men, dogs. Smoke from burning huts could be seen from afar. The bodies of young women bore evidence of sexual violation.
The number of dead ranged from 347 to 504, victims of a Charlie Company gone amok in blood lust. Not one shot had been fired at the infantry.
It would be another year and a half before the American public learned the truth - after a cover-up by the US Army.By that time, in November 1969, resistance and protests against the war were strong. The revelations about My Lai unleashed more outrage across the US and world.
For an entire generation of Americans, Europeans and Asians, My Lai stood for the image of the ugly American.
“That America and the Americans must stand in a larger dock of guilt and conscience for what happened at My Lai seems inescapable,” wrote the news weekly Time as the accounts unfolded.
In autumn 1969, millions demonstrated coast to coast, including 250,000 in Washington DC, in the largest anti-war protest in US history. But it would be another six years, in April 1975, before Americans finally fled Saigon in panic, boarding helicopters landing on rooftops.
The superpower lay in defeat, humiliated, outfought in a guerrilla war on the Cold War front by an enemy who commandeered little technology - with the exception of Soviet fighter jets.
During 10 years of war, the lopsided death toll was 58,000 Americans versus two to four million Vietnamese.
Looking back, one of the chief architects and defenders of the war, Robert McNamara, US defence secretary from 1961 to 1968, expressed sadness but not regret for the war in the 2003 documentary Fog of War.
In an interview with CNN, he called the 20th century the “bloodiest century in all of human history” with 160 million dead in conflicts.
“Is that what we want in the 21st century?” McNamara asked. “If we want to avoid it, we have to learn from our mistakes in this century. Vietnam was one of those.”
The deep psychological wounds of Vietnam are still raw. The war and US failure imprints the collective American psyche. Dozens of films, hundreds of books continue to plough the ground.
Every US military engagement abroad is accompanied by the warning, “No more Vietnam!” Just last year, Senator Edward Kennedy called Iraq “George Bush’s Vietnam.”
In the first Gulf War in 1990, it was widely reported that American commanders sent their soldiers into battle with the orders, “No My Lais - you hear?”
But in the second Iraq war, the worst fears have come to pass, with images of humiliation by US soldiers of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib, the stories of the massacre in Haditha, the allegations of torture of terrorist suspects at Guantanamo.
The rights organisation Human Rights Watch speaks of “My Lai in Iraq”.
“The shame of Haditha” would further erode the image of US military forces, Time magazine warned about the Nov 19, 2005, massacre of 24 Iraqi civilians shot and killed at close range by US marines in retaliation for the death of a marine lance corporal in a roadside bombing.
As Iraq sank further into chaos and the number of US dead from insurgent and terrorist attacks began to climb, the comparisons with Vietnam were unavoidable - even if the war, where nearly 4,000 US soldiers have died in five years, is a different war in many ways from 40 years earlier in South-East Asia.
This time around soldiers are being held accountable for their actions. Only one officer was convicted for the murder of 22 My Lai civilians - Lieutenant William Calley, who served three and a half years in jail.
In the Haditha case, three officers were reprimanded for faulty response while Staff Sergeant Frank D. Wuterich faces charges of unpremeditated murder of 18 civilians.
Last summer, historians were outraged by US President George W. Bush’s comparison of Vietnam to Iraq. Bush likened the dangers of withdrawing from Iraq to the “killing fields” that followed the US withdrawal from Vietnam.
The 2008 release of Pinkville, a new film about My Lai by director Oliver Stone - Platoon (1986) and Born on the Fourth of July (1989) - will no doubt bring up more comparisons to current US military actions.
My Lai survivors gather to pray for victims
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