Rough Guide to Vietnam - Jan Dodd [180]
In all, the Son My body count reached 500, 347 of whom fell in Tu Cung alone. Not one shot was fired at a GI in response, and the only US casualty deliberately shot himself in the foot to avoid the carnage. The 48th Battalion never materialized. The military chain of command was able temporarily to suppress reports of the massacre, with the army newspaper, Stars and Stripes, and even the New York Times branding the mission a success. But the awful truth surfaced in November 1969, through the efforts of former GI Ronald Ridenhour and investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, and the incontrovertible evidence of the grisly colour slides of army photographer Ron Haeberle. When the massacre did finally make the cover of Newsweek it was under the headline “An American Tragedy” – which, as John Pilger pointed out, ”deflected from the truth that the atrocities were, above all, a Vietnamese tragedy”.
Of 25 men eventually charged with murder over the massacre, or for its subsequent suppression, only Lieutenant William Calley was found guilty, though he had served just three days of a life sentence of hard labour when Nixon intervened and commuted it to house arrest. Three years later he was paroled.
It’s all too easy to dismiss Charlie Company as a freak unit operating beyond the pale. A more realistic view may be that the very nature of the US war effort, with its resort to unselective napalm and rocket attacks, and its use of body counts as barometers of success, created a climate in which Vietnamese life was cheapened to such an extent that a My Lai became almost inevitable. If indiscriminate killing from the air was justifiable, then random killing at close quarters was only taking this methodology to its logical conclusion.
Michael Bilton and Kevin Sim, whose Four Hours in My Lai remains the most complete account of the massacre, conclude that “My Lai’s exposure late in 1969 poisoned the idea that the war was a moral enterprise.” The mother of one GI put it more simply: “I gave them a good boy, and they made him a murderer.”
* * *
The south–central coast | North to Son My | Quang Ngai and around |
Son My Village
Turn right once you’re over the bridge at the top of Quang Ngai, and it’s 12km east to SON MY, the site of an infamous massacre of civilians by American soldiers in early 1968 that’s remembered at the Son My Memorial Park (daily 7am–5pm; 10,000đ) in the village’s sub-hamlet of Tu Cung. Pacing through this peaceful and dignified place, set within a low perimeter wall, you’ll be accompanied by a feeling of blanched horror, and a palpable sense of the dead all around you. Wandering the garden, visitors can see bullet holes in trees, foundations of homes burnt down, each with a tablet recording its family’s losses, blown-out bomb shelters and cement statues of slain animals. The path through the centre of the garden ends at a large, Soviet-style statue of a woman cradling a dead baby over her left arm while raising her right fist in defiance. Once you’ve seen the garden, step into the museum to view the grisly display upstairs, though be warned that it’s a disturbing place for anyone with a sensitive disposition. Here, beyond a massive marble plaque recording the names of the dead, family by family, and a montage of rusting hardware, a photograph gallery documents the events of March 16, 1968, from snaps of American helicopters disgorging GIs in the paddy outside the hamlet to the sordid aftermath of cold-blooded murder.
In stark contrast, the secluded My Khe Beach, 3km east of My Lai, consists of seven kilometres of powder-soft sand, backed by casuarinas, and is very good for swimming. Hamlets stand along the back of the beach, while fishing boats