The Best Travel Writing 2011 - James O'Reilly [108]
After half an hour I slowed and turned into a grassy yard, parking the bike in the shade of a tree. I cut the engine and gazed around. So this is the place, I thought. The grounds brought to mind a botanical garden. I thought of other places of slaughter that I had visited and how they have been preserved: Auschwitz, where Germans murdered Jews, has kept its buildings, railroad bed, and fence to remind the world “Never Again.” Deir Yassin, the Palestinian village on the edge of Jerusalem where Jewish forces murdered over one hundred people in April 1948, is not so well remembered and today, rather than being a memorial, is home to a mental hospital and fuel storage depot. I’ve seen other places as well, but I cannot recall ever being in one that both “remembered” and took pains to make the area beautiful. It was a wonderful combination.
I was alone for only a few moments when a bus of fifteen German tourists arrived. I sat near a coconut palm, waiting for the Germans to leave, and watched them blitz through the museum in an astonishing twenty minutes. Germans, with their own dark history, shook their heads at the photos of Americans making their dark history, and were being led by a Vietnamese guide who certainly wasn’t going to share any of the communists’ dark history. A part of me wished that the museum had devoted a section to remember Vietnam’s own war crimes. But I knew full well that this was, after all, My Lai. It was appropriate to remember the story of the people who lived and died here, and it was the American side that committed the atrocity. I would spend three and a half hours here, and once the Germans were gone I would remain the only visitor.
Most of the memorial is outdoors, but a small building displays photographs and artifacts. Photo captions read like this:
“US soldiers looking for air raid shelter of villagers to murder them.”
“The US soldiers reaching up every house of the villagers to murder.”
“US soldiers shooting farmers on the way from the village to the rice field.”
“American People holding demonstration to protest against Johnson’s government for the latter’s directing the aggressive war against Vietnam.”
I doubted the accuracy of some of the descriptions. The caption stating that Americans were protesting Johnson, for example, was beneath a picture of Americans calling on Nixon to stop bombing Cambodia. Most Americans would expect these captions to describe the military of an authoritarian regime, not their own army, but despite the inaccuracies and occasional overstatement, the photos described a true story. The Vietnamese say that 504 villagers, ranging in age from one to eighty-two, were killed here; some U.S. sources put the figure lower, but not by much. Whatever the number, the photos of the dead are sometimes incredibly graphic. You can imagine what a high velocity bullet does to a woman’s head at close range, or what bodies look like after they have been burned. Perhaps even more difficult is to see a picture of terrified women and children moments before their executions. The last faces they saw were not those of some vague “evildoers;” they were the faces of American men, many of whom probably loved their country, ate apple pie and steak, and watched the NFL. The faces they saw teach Americans that barbarism, far from being something found only in the dungeons of Baghdad or in the mountains near Kandahar, can come from Anytown, USA, too. Ask Ms. Quy and she’ll tell you.
Driving home the tragedy of My Lai even further were several photos of individual American soldiers who participated in the killing, taken after they returned to civilian life. The museum included a photo of the only American casualty at My Lai, a private by the name of Herb Carter, who suffered what is believed to have been a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the foot. The final photographs drew attention to two Americans who saved lives in My Lai—Hugh Thompson, a twenty-five-year-old helicopter pilot, and Lawrence Colburn, a nineteen-year-old helicopter gunner. They are respected, honored