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I sat on the floor beside the photos of Thompson and Colburn and took some notes. As I wrote, a young boy, barefoot and wearing well-worn shorts and a t-shirt, squatted quietly beside me. I, too, was silent, taking just a moment to smile and nod at him before turning my attention back to my notepad. The boy stared back and forth between the words I was hurriedly scribbling and the photos of Thompson and Colburn. I was struck by his quietness, and pleased to share the muggy building with someone like him. At some point he reached over and ran one finger up and down the outside of my busy hand, feeling the veins. He then felt the hairs on my arm and tapped on my kneecaps. Still in silence, he walked behind me to feel the padding of my backpack and continued his circle to feel the bracelet on my wrist. The silence only broke when, my notes complete, I turned to ask his name. “Linh,” he replied in a whisper, as if he knew it would be in poor taste to speak loudly among the horrible photographs watching us.

While Linh had been warming me with his gentle touch and silence, I had copied the following words that describe the moments immediately after Thompson put down his chopper between several fleeing civilians and the soldiers pursuing them:

If the Americans began shooting villagers, Thompson said, Colburn should turn his machine gun on the Americans. “Open up on ’em—blow ’em away,” Thompson urged him. Colburn turned his gun around to face the GIs, though he was unsure whether he’d be able to open fire [on fellow Americans]. Concerned for their own safety, Colburn wasn’t sure it was a good idea to land in the middle of a combat zone. The pilot confronted the lieutenant in charge [Calley]. He said he wanted to help get the peasants out of the bunker. [Calley] told him the only way to do this was with hand grenades. Thompson shouted that he personally would get them out and told the lieutenant to stay put. With that he went across to the bunker and gingerly coaxed the civilians out.

Thompson later flew over the ditch where more than a hundred lay dead. He saw a young boy moving among the bodies and sat the chopper down to pick him up, and then flew him to the hospital in Quang Ngai. Ms. Quy would have been somewhere down in that pile as well, scared and wise enough to remain quiet and still.

My friend Linh vanished as quietly as he had appeared, and I walked outside to the steps alone and leaned on a wall. While watching the old woman I would soon come to know as Ms. Quy, a voice as soft as Linh’s caused me to turn around. Chung, a twenty-five-year-old museum guide wearing a conical hat, a gentle expression, and speaking the English she learned so well in university, wanted to know if she could help with anything. I told her I was fine, just spending some time with my thoughts. She stood quietly for a minute, observing me watch the woman across the way. “That is Ms. Quy,” she eventually said, “one of the survivors.” Suddenly looking upon the old woman with new eyes and interest, I asked Chung some questions about her. When later Ms. Quy walked over to visit and rest, Chung would serve as our translator. Linh would also join us, popping up from behind a bush, and Chung would stun me by saying, “This is Ms. Quy’s grandson.” That simple sentence would affect me more than anything else all day, because this child who had kept me company came so close to never existing. But he exists, and I can still feel his touch on my hand.

Chung walked with me to the ditch and then to the foundations of several destroyed homes. She said the museum receives an average of thirty visitors a day. I would meet some of them through the visitor book in the reception room as I came to the end of my visit. I took special interest in the words left by Americans, folks like Jennifer Adams of New London, Connecticut, who visited a week before me:

I can honestly say that I am 100% ashamed to be an American. It is beyond my comprehension how my country could partake in the massacre and not punish any of the men who took part in this.