Posted on 03/16/2008 12:08:55 PM PDT by Borges
MY LAI, Vietnam - Lawrence Colburn returned to My Lai on Saturday and found hope at the site of one of the most notorious chapters of the Vietnam War.
On the 40th anniversary of the massacre of up to 500 unarmed Vietnamese villagers, the former helicopter gunner was reunited with a young man he rescued from rampaging U.S. soldiers.
On March 16, 1968, Colburn found 8-year-old Do Ba clinging to his mother's corpse in a ditch full of blood and the bodies of more than 100 people who had been mowed down. Nearly all the victims were unarmed women, children and elderly.
"Today I see Do Ba with a wife and a baby," said Colburn, a member of a three-man Army helicopter crew that landed in the midst of the massacre and intervened to stop the killing. "He's transformed himself from being a broken, lonely man. Now he's complete. He's a perfect example of the human spirit, of the will to survive."
Colburn, 58, now runs a medical supplies business north of Atlanta. He, Ba and hundreds of others are gathering this weekend to remember the My Lai massacre, a grim milestone that shocked Americans and undermined support for the war, which ended in 1975 with the fall of Saigon to communist troops.
Buddhist monks in saffron robes led the mourners in prayer Saturday outside a museum that has been erected to remember the dead. An official memorial program will be held on Sunday.
Among those coming to pray was Ha Thi Quy, 83, a My Lai survivor who suffers from anger and depression four decades after the slaughter. Soldiers from the Army's Charlie Company shot her in the leg and killed her mother, her 16-year-old daughter and her 6-year-old son.
Her husband later died of injuries from the massacre and another son had to have an arm and a leg amputated after suffering gunshot wounds that day.
Quy only survived because she was shielded beneath a pile of dead bodies.
"The American government should stop waging wars like they waged in Vietnam," Quy said. "My children were innocent, but those American soldiers killed them."
Seymour Hersh, the journalist who exposed the massacre, said he sees parallels between My Lai and a more recent story that he has he reported on, the 2005 images of torture from the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. But he says the public furor unleashed by My Lai was far greater.
"It's stunning how much impact My Lai had and how little impact Abu Ghraib had," Hersh said by telephone from Washington. "We'll have to leave it to historians to figure out why."
On that morning 40 years ago, Colburn flew over My Lai on a reconnaissance mission with pilot Hugh Thompson and crew chief Glenn Andreotta. After several runs over the area, they realized that unarmed civilians were being slaughtered by U.S. troops on the ground.
The members of Charlie Company were a "search and destroy" mission, trying to track down elusive Vietcong guerrillas, whose tactics had depleted the company's ranks.
The company's soldiers began shooting in My Lai that day even though they hadn't come under attack. It quickly escalated into an orgy of killing.
Thompson landed the helicopter between the villagers and the marauding troops. While Colburn and Andreotta covered him, Thompson persuaded the members of Charlie Company to stop shooting.
The angry and frustrated troops had found themselves in a bewildering war where it was impossible to distinguish friend from foe, said Stanley Karnow, an American historian who wrote "Vietnam: A History."
Their actions shocked the American public, who had preferred to think of U.S. troops as heroes making the world safe for democracy, Karnow said.
Colburn and Andreotta, who died later in the war, found Do Ba after the shooting stopped.
"He was still clinging to his mother," Colburn said.
Ba's aunt raised him in My Lai. When he turned 18, he moved to the former Saigon, now known as Ho Chi Minh City, where he is married with a 14-month-old daughter and works at an electronics factory.
He and Colburn were first reunited at the 2001 dedication of a new school in the village. At that time, Ba was single, haunted by memories of My Lai and eager to start a family.
So much has changed since the day they first met, Ba said. The United States and Vietnam, former enemies, have become allies and developed a booming trade relationship.
"I'm glad the United States and Vietnam have become friends," Ba said. "But I still feel hatred for the soldiers who killed my mother, my brother and my sister."
I have a dim memory... I was four and looking at the LIFE magazine with the now well-known full-page color photo of the ditch full of grotesquely sprawled bodies. Mom just said some American soldiers went crazy and killed a bunch of people.
That sufficed at the time. Later on, of course, I learned the rest of the story.
Any mention of the NVA massacre in Hue? No? Gee, I wonder why...
I wonder how survivors of the Hue Massacre are doing...or are there any survivors at all?
Aww shucks, you beat me to it...
More drivel from the left.They make sure everything that happens in Iraq has a connection to Vietnam.
What the US did at My Lai cant be compared to Abu Grab. Nobody died at Abu Grab. Sure, some terrorists were treated harshly, but they werent killed outright.
My Lai was a terrible incident in a confusing war. The troops were poorly lead and trained. The US Army of that era is no more. The men and women fighting today are of the highest quality.
The left still thinks in terms of the 60s, perhaps because like a aging high school football star who never did anything of importance afterwards, still wants to relive past glories thru the unwitting youths of today.
It is a quite pitiful, isnt it?
You don't need to be a historian to understand that there's a difference between "hundreds of people killed for no good reason" and "a few guys with panties on their heads".
—many a Demotraitor seems to have a problem making that sort of distinction-—
My neighbor is a woman who was driven from Vietnam in 75 (along with 2 million others) because she was partially Chinese, and her family owned more than 1 pig. They spent 3 weeks aboard a wooden raft, had people drowned, were robbed by pirates, and spent 2 years in refugee camps - and are still glad they left. What a lovely bit of propoganda Colburn is for the Communists in Vietnam. The American left is a perpetual gift which keeps on giving to the regime in Vietnam.
A clown and balloons and free hot dogs for the kids?
Well said.
Lieutenant Calley did not have command of his men. A first Sargent made the decision such that it was. My Lai was also called “Pinkville” by some. There had been sniping from this area with American casualties.
The biggest loss of the day was General Orin Henderson. He went on to be commandant of West Point, but when this blew up it ended his career. He was a fine man, military officer and had led the Americal to outstanding performance with limited American losses.
With Senator Kerry's testimony before the US Senate, the backing of the antiwar left including Senator Ted Kennedy and with a hostile press this one glaring error was puffed to represent the US Military's contribution to the war.
Because one was an atrocity. The other was a frat prank.
It's interesting how the Left loves to focus on the small transgressions of the West, but manages to ignore the pogroms of their Leftist icons like Pol Pot, Mao Tse Tung, and Josef Stalin. Not to mention Fidel Castro. One hundred dead at My Lai is a tragedy. Fifty million dead (conservatively) in the Ukraine and Georgia, the villages of China, and Laos, Cambodia, and Thailand ... well, that's just too much to get their brains around ...
What was done at My Lai was unequivacbly immoral and wrong. To distract from that central point by glibly bringing up ‘well the NVA killed people too” is besides the point. So did Pol Pot. So did Ghengis Khan. Our troops were and are better than the enemy. So looking back, knowing that they, who were there to protect that fledgling nation from a communist takeover, started murdering unarmed innocent civilians, we need to remember what happened and condemn it unconditionally so it won’t be repeated by our guys.
I am not glossing over the tragedy. If anyone glosses over anything, it is our media who paint the NVA and VC as a paragon of virtue.
“The troops were poorly lead and trained. The US Army of that era is no more. The men and women fighting today are of the highest quality.”
The army was superbly trained, it had high quality soldiers and was probably the finest army we had fielded up to that time.
You neglected to mention that we were bugger-eating morons.
Please post some examples to convince the non-believers.
Ok, are you telling me that those troops were better trained than those we field today?
Well trained and lead troops dont commit war crimes. They should be able to show restraint and show that they are better people that those they are fighting.
I wasnt there, I was too young to have served. But I do a lot of reading and follow what goes on today.
On this , we have to agree to disagree.
That statement is irrational. Abu Ghraib had huge impact, as did My Lai. But Abu Grahib was about five orders of magnitude less in reality.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.