My Lai massacre remembered, but others forgotten

Mar 15, 2008, 18:42 GMT

Hanoi - Dozens of yellow-robed Buddhist monks gathered in the hamlet of My Lai, in Quang Ngai province, on Saturday to pray for the souls of the civilians massacred by US troops 40 years ago Sunday, at the height of the Vietnam War.

'Today we held a Buddhist mass for the dead,' said Pham Thanh Cong, director of the My Lai Museum, which commemorates the massacres in exhaustive detail on many of the sites where they occurred. 'Tomorrow comes the official state ceremony.'

Hanoi is staging a weekend-long ceremony to mark the massacres, in which a company of US Army soldiers, unable to find any of the Viet Cong guerrillas they had been ordered to clear from the village, instead killed up to 504 defenceless men, women and children.

But while the massacres at My Lai are recorded in Vietnamese history books, and at the My Lai Museum, most of the atrocities committed during the Vietnam War go largely unremembered.

From February to September 1967, the US Army's 'Tiger Force' commando unit murdered hundreds of civilians, mainly in Quang Ngai province, according to research compiled by Army investigators in the 1970s, and verified by reporters Michael Sallah and Mitch Weiss in 2003.

No memorial commemorates the victims of Tiger Force, and the massacres the unit committed do not figure in Vietnamese history texts.

In 2006, Nicholas Turse, then a graduate student at Columbia University, found that declassified documents showed US military investigators had verified 320 reports of atrocities committed by US troops in Vietnam, not including the massacres at My Lai. Investigators had failed to corroborate some 500 other reports.

The reports which turned out to be true included massacres of dozens of civilians in Quang Nam province in late 1967 by B Company of the Army's 1st Battalion, 35th Infantry, 4th Infantry Division.

There is no memorial to the victims of B Company. Nor is there any memorial to the five Vietnamese civilians murdered in 1969 by a team of US Navy commandos, including former US Senator Bob Kerrey, to prevent their position being given away.

And there is no memorial in the central Vietnamese city of Hue to the over 2,000 people executed for political reasons by the Communists while they held the city during the Tet Offensive in early 1968. The bodies were discovered when the city was retaken by US and South Vietnamese forces.

To this day, the Vietnamese government denies the massacres ever took place.

Vietnamese war historians, when asked for information on victims of American atrocities besides My Lai, say their side compiled no documentation on such war crimes. The North Vietnamese considered the entire US presence in Vietnam to be illegitimate, and drew little distinction between intentional killings of civilians, as at My Lai, and the unintentional killing of civilians in bombing campaigns.

Vietnam's desire for improved relations with the US also discourages investigation into wartime atrocities. The US is Vietnam's number one export market, and the two countries enjoy an increasingly warm diplomatic relationship.

The former War Crimes Museum in Ho Chi Minh City was renamed the War Remnants Museum in 1993, shortly before relations between the US and Vietnam were normalized.

On the US side, recognition of atrocities besides My Lai has been stymied by the deep political divisions brought on by the war.

The US military rarely pursued charges against those accused of atrocities. The cases against the soldiers in Tiger Force were dropped in the 1970s despite substantial evidence compiled in years of research by Army investigators.

The Army initially whitewashed the massacres at My Lai. The case was only reopened in 1969 after US soldier Ron Ridenhour wrote letters to the US Congress with details of the atrocities, and reporter Seymour Hersh broke the story in the press.

The senior officers who had ordered the US soldiers into My Lai were exonerated. Only Lt. William Calley was ever convicted in the case, and he served just four and a half months in prison.

Many American veterans of the Vietnam War who did not witness atrocities have rejected charges of widespread war crimes. Even many who came to oppose the war, such as Tom Leckinger, Vietnam country representative of the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation, find the atrocities hard to comprehend.

'I just can't get my head around the idea that guys stood there and watched this happen,' said Leckinger. 'In my unit, somebody would have stopped it.'

My Lai is likely to return to the news next year, when Oliver Stone's film 'Pinkville' which features the massacre, is scheduled for release.

Unsurprisingly for a Hollywood film, Stone's movie focuses on one of the few Americans who behaved honorably at My Lai. Helicopter pilot Hugh Thompson saw the massacres taking place from the air, attempted to halt the killings, and used his aircraft to rescue roughly a dozen Vietnamese civilians. He received a medal for his actions in 1988.