1,000 Attend Event Honoring My Lai Victims

An honor guard carried wreaths to a concrete memorial showing My Lai’s victims--some dying and others comforting the dying--during a ceremony today marking the 30th anniversary of the Vietnam War massacre.

A loudspeaker blared a commentary: “In just two hours, American invaders killed 407 people in this hamlet alone. The American invaders left the village with blood and fire and mass graves.”

A crowd of more than 1,000, including former U.S. and Vietnamese soldiers, solemnly remembered the day when American troops came to the tiny hamlet and began killing anything that moved.

“We are here to pay respects to the dead and the living,” said Richard Lee Francisco, an American construction worker who lives with his Vietnamese wife in Danang, a two-hour drive away.

The event included a groundbreaking ceremony for a nearby peace park where children can roam among trees and brooks.

Just a stone’s throw away, life went on as it has for generations, in war and peace: Farmers cultivated rice paddies or used water buffalo to plow their small plots.

Some of the rice is being harvested now, placed in wide, flat baskets to dry. Other paddies are still green, weeks from being ready.

Dozens of journalists have flocked to My Lai, where the population has swelled from 8,000 in 1968 to more than 12,000 today, even though the area was further devastated by the war in the years after the massacre.

The 6-acre memorial has gotten a face lift in the past couple of weeks. The aging photos on the walls of the museum have been replaced with fresh prints. A new black plaque is replacing the fading one that lists the victims’ names. Gray concrete statues showing victims in agony have a coat of bronze-like paint.

On Sunday, groups of students from schools in the region walked through while about 300 members of the provincial Ho Chi Minh Communist Youth League came to light hundreds of joss sticks after a moment of silence for the victims.

Emotions quickly bubbled to the surface as Nguyen Chung, 61, talked about the massacre. His voice choked, and he constantly wrung his shaking hands in a traditional prayer ritual.

“Every day, I remember. I usually keep it in my heart, but the emotion grows as their death day grows near,” he said of his father and daughter, who was 6 when she was killed.

All around him, a feast was laid out: part for his family, part for the spirits of the dead. A couple of dishes were designated for “wandering spirits”--those who have no relatives to pray for them. In My Lai, several entire families were wiped out.

A single strand of white Christmas lights was strung over an altar. Nearby, a pile of fake paper money, burned in hopes that ancestors can use it in the afterlife, was little more than ashes.