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—John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

MS. QUY, HER FACE WRINKLED AND EYES TIRED, sat five feet away. She held her hat in one hand and ran her fingers over the chin strap with the other, fidgeting with it in a way that suggested a mind throwing up memories that needed an outlet. I had never looked into eyes like hers and I had never felt so compelled to say “I’m sorry” for something I didn’t do. But each time our eyes met they became a mirror, and I saw my nationality sitting squarely on my shoulders.

Just a minute before we shook hands, Ms. Quy had been gathering food for her pigs. Seeing me, a lone visitor across the small stretch of grass, she walked over to take a break from the sun. We were now on the steps of a tiny museum of photographs, but these grounds used to be the hamlet she called home until it was destroyed and her neighbors murdered on the morning of March 16, 1968. I looked toward a ditch less than a hundred meters away and then back at her. I knew that she had once been in that ditch for hours, covered by the corpses of her friends and neighbors, and was one of the very few to survive. Hesitant to ask the question now on my mind, fearing what raw emotions it could stir and how it would affect the seventy-eight-year-old woman hunched over before me, I asked anyway: “How do you feel about Americans today, Ms. Quy?”

The reflection in her worn-out eyes showed the faces of my countrymen who had once been here, most just a couple years out of high school. They wore uniforms, and they brandished guns and grenades that left scars still visible today on the trunks of palms and in the eyes of Ms. Quy. Most of these former soldiers—about one hundred fifty were involved in the operation—are now in their early sixties and have jobs and families in towns across America. Yet their shadowy forms still linger in the soul of Ms. Quy. At the nearby ditch 170 men, women, and children were cut down, according to the museum, and their blood and last gasps surrounded Ms. Quy as she lay with them, waiting for the Americans to leave before she dared crawl out. Somehow she survived. She was forty-two years old.

Having cast her stare into the grass, Ms. Quy answered: “I am still very angry. Very angry.” Shifting her stare to the bare wall next to us, she continued softly: “I feel angry, but I don’t know what to do with it.”

My Lai (pronounced “Me Lie”) is in the history books now, something American students may read about for a few minutes as they rush through their studies. For these distant readers, My Lai is an insignificant and perhaps irrelevant fact of history. It was an event long ago, far away, and having nothing to do with them. For Ms. Quy, however, My Lai was two children, her mother, her neighbors, her home. It was her innocence—or whatever she had left of it after living so long in a land convulsed by war. Like the Oklahoma characters in John Steinbeck’s novel, forced by brutal reality to say goodbye to the only life they knew, Ms. Quy was deeply scarred by her world’s collapse. There is no fresh start when you are forty-two years old and your neighbors and relatives are murdered around you. No wonder she stared at the wall.

At ten o’clock the previous night a bus had dropped me off in a dark dirt lot on the northern edge of the provincial capital Quang Ngai. A motorcycle taxi then brought me to the center of town, where I checked into a dank hotel room and settled in for a night’s sleep.

I had come to this part of Vietnam for one reason: to visit My Lai, thirteen kilometers away. I wanted to do this alone and on a motorbike; this way I would be free to explore the countryside at my own pace, wander down dirt paths to meet locals, and have ample time with my thoughts.

At 9:30 A.M.—after a long search for a place that would rent a motorbike—I pulled out of town. The road was paved and one stretch passed through the shade of pine and eucalyptus trees. Rice paddies and palms, homes and businesses lined it elsewhere. I passed bicycles and exchanged many smiles