The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus Volume 5 | Issue 6 | Article ID 2451 | Jun 04, 2007

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Anatomy of US and South Korean Massacres in theVietnamese Year of the Monkey, 1968

Heonik Kwon

Anatomy of US and South KoreanMassacres in the Vietnamese Year ofthe Monkey, 1968

Heonik Kwon

Summary: What happened in My Lai inMarch 1968 is remembered in theoutside world as one of the most tragicepisodes of the Vietnam War. Howeverthis was not an isolated event and shouldbe considered in relation to other similarincidents of mass civilian killings. Thisessay investigates the Vietnam War’shistory of village massacres, includingthose by US forces and South Koreanforces, and how these catastrophic eventsare remembered in the af fectedcommunities.

On the twenty-fourth day of the firstlunar month of 1968, the Year of theMonkey, Ha My, a smal l coasta lsettlement of Quang Nam Province incentral Vietnam, suffered the shatteringtragedy of surrendering an entire villagepopulation to a crime of war. This wasthe time of the Tet Offensive, whenpractically the entire countryside insouthern and central Vietnam became a“free-fire zone,” meaning that any objectswithin it were designated as legitimatetargets of destruction in response to thenationwide assaults by the communist

forces against the urban areas controlledby South Vietnam and its allies. A monthafter this incident, a similar tragedyhappened in the neighboring province ofQuang Ngai , la ter known to theinternational community as the My LaiMassacre.

These two incidents were only a smallpart of the gigantic human catastrophethat devastated Vietnam in the secondhalf of the 1960s. A systematic masscivilian killing by ground troops sweptacross a vast area of the central region,and indiscriminate bombing of populatedareas became routine. The massacres inHa My and My La i were c lose lyconnected, and their connectedness wasat once regional and global in scope. Twokey military allies to the former SouthVietnam, the United States and theRepubl ic o f Korea (ROK) , wereresponsible for the atrocities. Themassacre in Ha My is among numerousincidents of mass killing in centralVietnam perpetrated by the South Koreanexpeditionary forces from 1966 to 1969and little noticed by internationalhistorians of the war. It took place onFebruary 25, 1968, according to theWestern calendar, shortly after the FifthU.S. Marine regiment had handedsecurity responsibility for the village areato their Korean colleagues.[1]

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My Lai also suffered devastation relatedto a changeover of troops. On March 16,1968, three platoons of Task ForceBarker closed in on the area of My Laifrom three directions and forced thevillagers to assemble at three locations.Just before this operation that resulted inhundreds of civilian casualties, “the areacircled in red ink under the special dutyof Brigade 2, South Korean Marine fromJanuary 1967 to December 31, 1967 washanded over to Task Force Barker,Brigade 11, Americal Division from theabove mentioned time.”[2]

The connectedness of these incidents wasnot limited within the dynamic theater ofa territorial war but had a globaldimension. This was not merely becausethe guilty were international actorscoming from East and West. The crimeswere inseparable from the bipolargeopolitical structure and the interstatenetwork dominant at the time that we callthe Cold War. The structure is whatbrought the two (and other) internationalactors together in the name of a crusadeagainst communism and the network iswhat ultimately drove the minor actor,which some earlier observers called“America’s rented troops,” to be moreactive in violent village pacificationoperations than the dominant onewithout attracting attention from theinternational community.[3]

ROK military-political leader Park Chung-huiand US President Kennedy

discuss US support for South Korea’s economicdevelopment plan and

South Korea’s military support for US actionsin South Vietnam

during their meeting in Washington D.C.,November 1961.

US President Johnson and ROK President Parkdiscuss

rising tensions between North and South Koreaand military progress

in South Vietnam during their meeting inHonolulu, April 1968.

The civilian massacres during the

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Vietnam War may be divided into twodistinct, though related, patterns. In onetype of killing that was widespread, thescale of violence was relatively limitedand the victims were predominantlyelders and small children. The massacresin two neighboring villages of Ha My, HaGia and Ha Quang, fall into this category,as do numerous other incidents thatoccurred in Quang Nam in 1968 andQuang Ngai in 1966. The circumstancesof these killings, although they vary,demonstrate one commonality. In Ha Giaand Ha Quang, by the time the masskillings took place most villagers hadbeen relocated to refugee camps called“strategic hamlets” or had moved tourban slums. Those who remained in thev i l lage were main ly e lders whomaintained the rice paddies andvegetable plots in the absence of theirfamilies.

In 1966, in the Binh Son district of QuangNgai province, local militiamen wereconsolidated with expeditionary units ofthe regular North Vietnamese forces.This large fighting force relied partly onthe scattered, barely populated villagesfor food and information. In a number ofcases that I investigated, the remainingelders had either children or closerelatives working in the local partisanforce, and thus they stayed on to keep intouch with them as well as supply themwith food. After a successful actionagainst the enemy, the militia in QuangNgai temporarily evacuated the area andencouraged villagers to do likewise. Theyknew that post-ambush retaliatory actsagainst civilians had become routine by

the summer of 1966. Many village elderswere unable to evacuate the village eventemporarily, however, either becausethey had nowhere else to go or they hadnever gone beyond the boundary of theirvillage before and were reluctant toleave. In the case of Ha Gia, a neighbor ofHa My, some of the elderly victims wereold Viet Minh activists and longtimesupporters of the nationalist movementagainst the French. Their children andgrandchildren were moving back andforth between the village and the refugeecamp, whenever the situation allowed, tohelp on the family farm. In most cases ofwhat Noam Chomsky calls “the 43-plusM y L a i s o f t h e S o u t h K o r e a nmercenaries,” the search-and-destroymissions conducted by America’s closestallied troops attacked these relativelysmall groups of villagers.[4]

The other type of civilian massacre isrelated to the first but neverthelessdiffers in one crucial aspect. In 1972, theAmerican Quaker aid workers DianeJones and Michael Jones collectedinformation on mass killing of civilians,particularly the incidents committed byROK (Republic of Korea) forces in QuangNgai and Quang Nam provinces. Theyreported that more than one hundredcivilians were reported killed in thirteenof more than forty-five incidents in whichROK soldiers were said to have killedgroups of more than twenty unarmedcivilians.[5] The massacres in Ha My andMy Lai belong to the category of thethirteen large-scale killings, as do theincidents in Thuy Bo, Phong Nhat, andPhong Nhi of Quang Nam; Phuc Binh of

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Quang Ngai; five villages in Binh Dinhprovince; and many more.[6] If thesituation in a village remained stable, thevillagers in the refugee camps usuallybegan to v is i t their homes morefrequently and to extend the duration oftheir visits. Ha My villagers did this, andso did the people of My Lai toward theend of 1967. Their returns were oftenfacilitated by the presence of strongSouth Vietnamese or other allied forcesin the surrounding area. The U.S. militaryinstallation in My Khe, south of My Lai,and the ROK Marines in the Con Ninhbase in Ha My contributed to theimprovement of security in each area.When they thought their villages weresecure, the refugees petitioned the SouthVietnamese administration, or wentdirectly to the foreign military authority,in the hope of obtaining permission formore extensive visits to or temporaryresettlement in their homeland. If theseappeals were unsuccessful, the villagerscould mobilize resources to bribe thecamp authority and other Vietnameseofficials to allow them to leave the camp.When some villagers escaped the refugeecamp in this way, their escape stirredother villagers. When two or threefamilies successfully returned to theirnatal village, others watched for andanalyzed carefully any information fromthe village. When family elders andcommunity leaders came to theconclusion that their village was safe, thistriggered a mass return to the village.This happened in Ha My in December1967 and in My Lai shortly before then.

When villagers began to resettle, local

allied troops often assisted theirresettlement with food and buildingmaterials. Ha My villagers receivedassistance from the ROK Marines in thisway, and the returnees to My Laiconsidered the U.S. soldiers in My Khe tobe friends. This relationship explains whysome Ha My villagers believed that theroundup on the day of the massacre wasfor food distribution. In Phong Nhi ofQuang Nam, the villagers and the locallybased U.S. Marines maintained a closerelationship throughout 1966–1967.Thirty-six families from this village hadmembers who were soldiers in the SouthVietnamese army, and ten of these men,according to a surviving veteran stillliving in the village, were working underthe Combined Action program to protectthe local area jointly with a group of U.S.Marines. This did not prevent the villagefrom being completely ransacked by aseparate, mobile action of pacification inMarch 1968.

Inside the refugee camps, there wereSouth Vietnamese police informers aswell as covert civilian agitprop activistsloyal to the communist side. The formerdisseminated information about violentsituations in the rural area and instigatedfear; the Vietcong (VC) activists foughtt h i s p s y c h o l o g i c a l w a r w i t hcounterinformation.[7] Both forms ofinformation were often exaggerated andunreliable. The VC encouraged therefugees to return to their village and tostop, according to a widely disseminatedwartime adage, “eating the enemy’s foodand grabbing America’s leg.” A covertlydelivered communique asserted that

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villagers should join other safe villages, ifthey were not able to return to their ownvillage, to help the partisan forces andalso to demonstrate their will againstforced displacement. When this failed topersuade anxious villagers, the messagebecame more blunt—“My Lai has manyshelters and plenty of food. Move yourfamily to this good place”—as a formercovert civilian activist at Quang Ngairecalled.

This war of false information instigatedconfusion and insecurity among displacedvillagers. In the highly unstable militarysituation after the Tet (Lunar New Year)offensive in the first quarter of 1968,safety of any rural village was a fantasy.The pattern of war-making was changingrapidly on both sides and at great speed.The machinery of war was becomingincreasingly centralized on both sides ofthe frontier, and the fate of a givenlocality was increasingly unpredictable ina strategic shift “to direct the brunt ofthe revolutionary war onto the cities,towns, market places, and the leadingdepartments of the enemy.”[8] At thesame time, countermeasures urged, “Wemust win the race to the countryside, goon the offensive, re-establish security inthe rural areas, and restore the [Saigon]government ’ s p resence i n thevi l lages.”[9] In the midst of thisgeneralized uncertainty, some placeswere considered to be relatively safe, andthese places attracted temporary settlersfrom other villages. People of “returnvillages” were proud of their privilegeand often provoked envy in people fromother, less fortunate villages. This luck,

however, could turn into devastatingmisfortune. The apparent relative safetyof a village frequently led to tragedy ofgreater proportions. The “safe village”and the “return village” could turn into asite of mass death when the identity ofthe village suddenly shifted and itbecame a “VC village” circled in red onthe battle map. This shift in identity wasabrupt, unknown to the inhabitants,outside their control, and often, in fact,outside the control of the armedcombatants on both sides.

Memorial in My Lai dedicated to 504 victimsof the 1968 massacre, including 135 victims

from the Tu Cung village.

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Memorial in Ha My to 135 victims of the 1968massacre.

Completed in December 2000, the monumentwas dedicated

to the village by a group of ROK Vietnam Warveterans.

A brief history

There were three military installations inthe vicinity of Ha My. One of them, calledCon Ninh, changed hands several times.Before it was temporarily abandoned in1954, a French battalion camped insideits tall barb-wired wall, hidden from viewby a wide stretch of pine trees. When itprospered, Con Ninh was a fairlycosmopolitan place where the French ateFrench food, Algerians cooked their spicymeals, Moroccans baked their tasty

bread, and local Vietnamese conscriptsprepared fish-sauce meals and bakedFrench bread, and fried flying fish for theFrench officers. Catholics, Muslims, andancestor worshippers conducted worshipceremonies separately, and some localconscripts debated the strength of thegods and deities in each belief accordingto the proportional number of casualtiesin each culturally distinctive group ofcombatants. This French battalionconducted mopping-up operations in thesurrounding villages, and murderedseveral groups of civilians during thefinal phase. Rhetorically, it was a defenseagainst communist expansion; in reality itwas a colonial reconquest.[10]

I n M a r c h 1 9 6 5 , t h e f i r s t U . S .expeditionary force, the Third MarineAmphibious Force, landed at Da Nang.The marine battalions quickly began topacify surrounding villages. This activitytypically consisted of surrounding avillage in the early morning; droppingleaflets from the air that instructed thevillagers to assemble and go through ascreening procedure; and advancing intovillages to locate any undergroundtunnels, hidden arms, or food caches. Theidentification of Vietcong militia was aprimary objective of this pacificationactivity. The activity may have appearedrational and workable to militaryplanners, but, on the ground, it wasunrealistic, and the screening procedurewas generally based on hunches.Jonathan Schell, reporting from centralVietnam, described this work. He quotesan experienced foreign interrogator whosta ted , “The V .C . organ izes an

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assoc ia t i on f o r everyone—theFarmers’Association, the Fishers’Association, the Old Grandmothers’Association. They’ve got one foreverybody. It’s so mixed up with thepopulation you can’t tell who’s a V.C. Ourjob is to separate the V.C. from thepeople.”[11] Beginning in the dry seasonof 1965–1966, the U.S. Marines began tomove southward to occupy the Hoa Vangand Dien Ban districts (south of Da Nang)and to transform this area into a “whitebuffer zone,” clear of Vietcong influence.They took control of the old French ConNinh base on the seashore of Ha My inthe spring of 1966.[12]

By this time, Ha My and other villages inthe environs had developed complexresistance networks. When a NorthVietnamese regular army unit assaultedthe provincial capital, Hoi An, withartillery fire in early 1965, local guerillaunits, formed mainly by the villagers,launched an offensive against SouthVietnamese positions and the suburbanresidence and offices of governmentofficials.[13] Two years before, Ha Myvillagers had been at the forefront of thesynchronized mass protests against thedevelopment of strategic hamlets. If acommunal decision in favor of politicalaction was made at that time in ameeting at the village’s communal house,it was very difficult to reverse. Peopleaware of this irreversibility then startedto focus on how to minimize risk. If thestakes were high, in the sense that thepressure on the village’s honor wasstrong, influential people in the villagewere sometimes obliged to volunteer for

more risky activities. The village mendiscussed with their relatives the survivalof their families in the event of arrest ordeath, and village women formed theirown anxious circles, sharing the grimprospect and discussing strategies forsurvival without their men.

The situation in each village was swiftlyconveyed to other communes andvillages. The party activists wereinformed via a complex chain of co socach mang, or “the infrastructure ofrevolution,” which refers to the covertcivilian activists in the occupied zones.The collected information was relayed tothe provincial revolutionary committeethrough an equivalent organizationalnetwork at the interdistrict level. Basedon historical affinity, however, Ha Myand other villages nearby had a strongnetwork of their own, and they continuedto share information and resources. Thework of this cross-village networkremained largely independent of thepolitical authorities. Peoples fromdifferent villages collaborated andcommunicated through kinship andmarriage connections, and theseconnections changed in strength andimportance depending on fluctuations inwar activity. This intervillage network,giao hieu, was originally a type of ritualnetwork and a web of relationships thathad developed among communitytemples.[14] A lineage group in aparticular village was related to otherlineage groups in adjacent villagesthrough a common historical, legendarybackground. Related lineage groups heldjoint ancestral rites and took turns

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holding these important rites. Theseinterlocal rites have been vigorouslyrevived since the late 1990s. The openingspeech by a lineage elder on the occasionof an intervillage ancestral rite traced thehistory of the rite in three distinctivestages—the prewar ritual prosperity, thedestruction of family and village templesduring the French and American Wars(The Vietnamese call what the outsideworld cal ls the Vietnam War the“American War” in distinction to theearlier war against France.), and thecontemporary restoration of intervillagesolidarity. As for the second period, hesaid:

Rooted out of our ancestral land, thepeople of Ha Gia and the people ofCam An (another neighboring villageof Ha My) were herded into amiserable life in concentrationcamps. Across the barbed wire andthe minefields, our ancestors wereleft unattended, their places bombedand burned down, their tombsbulldozed, their dignity humiliated.Remember our life in the camp. Inthat inhumane condition, we couldnot even contemplate holding a ritesuch as the one we are holding today.We did not have enough food to feedour children, we had to cross theminefield week after week to collectwild vegetables, and we could notoffer the miserable rationed bread toour ancestors. We were displacedand deprived of our r ights toworship. Our people did not give in.Patriotic villagers joined hands tofight the oppressors, and I dare saythat our family was always ahead ofothers in this struggle. Men of yourvillage and men of our village shared

the same underground tunnels andendured humiliation and hungertogether. Women of your village andwomen of our village shared the littlefood they had and provided shelterfor each other. Our ancestors,although once humiliated andunattended, must be proud of thishistory of harmony and mutualsupport among their descendants.We may rebuild the temples if theyare broken; we cannot do so withfamily feelings. Once broken, theycannot be mended. Today, we gatherhere to remember and renew ourfamily feelings.[15]

In July 1964, communist cadres in thearea of Ha My held a general meeting atthe communal house of Ha Gia. Themeeting inaugurated the village-levelstructure of the National Front for theLiberation of South Vietnam, and leadersurged the construction of “fortressvillages” and “combat villages.”[16] Aprolific exchange and movement ofpolitical cadres and combat units tookplace during this period between districtsand provinces, and the seafront area ofHa My became an important location forshipping combat personnel to theregrouping areas in the province ofQuang Ngai. Several hundred men weretransferred to Quang Ngai via this route,and they fought in the fierce battles of1966 in the districts of Binh Son and TuNghia, as well as Son Tinh, where My Laiis located. Those who remained in theirhomeland received guidelines: “Obtainhigher efficiency in hiding combat forces.Combine legal and illegal struggles.Employ legal actions to mobilize thevillage mass.”[17]

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When a directive for a legal politicalstruggle, such as the mass action duringthe Buddhist crisis (1963–1966), wasrelayed to the village revolutionarycommittee, the news circulated alongfamily lines as well as among villageelders.[18] The impatient activists urgedthe villagers to act more promptly andmore decisively. Opposing voices alsoexisted, and arguments rose betweenclose friends, relatives, and lifetimeneighbors. Police informants lived in thevillage alongside the people they werespying on. In the second half of the1950s, the Cao Dai sect in Ha Gia and HaMy made a tacit alliance with the SouthVietnamese Nationalist Party and foughtthe VC networks from within the village.By this time, the South Vietnameseadministration had classified the villagepopulation according to three categories:Group A (illegal people: old resistancefighters and supporters of the GenevaAgreement); Group B (semi-illegalpeople: relatives and friends of Group A);and Group C (legal and faithful people:suppor te r s o f t he governmentprograms).[19]

With in the v i l lage rea l i ty , th i sclassification system was hard tomaintain. A single family often had both“legal” and “illegal” people, makingGroup B a phantom category. Moreover,if an individual wished to remain onancestral land and survive the war, hehad to be in both Group A and C (seebelow). “Defend the village,” or “Trubam,” was one of the main slogans of theresistance war from 1960 to 1965, and itwas intended as a protest against the

relocation to, and concentration ofvillagers in, the fortified strategichamlets. The ABC classification, whichdid not reflect village reality, could workonly in the concentration camps. Instrategic hamlets, the refugees had to sitthrough daily evening classes such as“Essential Lessons in How to Catch theCommunists,” and people classified asmembers of Group B were closelywatched.

By the time the U.S. Marines took up aposition at the Con Ninh base in 1966,partly to prevent the use of Ha My Beachfor subversive activities and traffic, fiercebattles were taking place in the Bo BoHills, Duy Xuyen, Phi Phu, and elsewherein the inland region on the western sideo f R o u t e 1 , V i e t n a m ’ s m a i ntransportation artery. On the road’seastern side, where Ha My is located,tensions were still low, and civiliancasualties reflected that. One earlymorning in June 1967, U.S. troops at ConNinh ambushed twelve fishermen, whichwas reported by the news media of theNational Liberation Front,[20] and therewere other small-scale incidents invarious communit ies . However,systematic mass civilian killing was as yetunfamiliar to lowland Quang Nam in1966–1967.

The situation was very different in QuangNgai. As early as 1966, the ROK Marineswere sweeping through rural areas to theeast and north of the provincial capital,Quang Ngai. The Republic of Korea(ROK) sent three divisions to the combatzones in central Vietnam: a total of312,853 men over a twelve-year period

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beginning on September 22, 1963,primarily in the years 1966 to 1969.[21]In Quang Ngai and Binh Dinh, ROKtroops were met by well-prepared localpartisan forces mixed with regular NorthVietnamese sold iers . Part isanstransferred from other provinces, and themarines suffered high casualties. Inresponse to their losses, the marinescleared village after village in whatturned out to be a nearly completedestruction of civilian life in most ofQuang Ngai, including the districts ofSon Tinh, Tinh Hoa, and Binh Son.[22]Miraculously, My Lai escaped this roundof violence, partly because of its relativeproximity to Quang Ngai City, but mostlybecause a small U.S. military installationwas located in the immediate vicinity.This pattern of violence in Quang Ngai in1966 was repeated in Quang Nam twoyears later.[23]

In December 1967, U.S. forces handedover their Con Ninh base to the ROKmarine brigade with the totemic name ofthe “Blue Dragons,” as part of a generalchangeover of troops south of Da Nang.Two battalions of the ROK Second MarineDivision set up bases along the road fromCam An to Dien Hai on December 4,1967, establishing their armored unit inBen Kien. Apart from the towns of DaNang and Hoi An, the rural area was bythis time largely VC-controlled, in thev i e w o f t h e S a i g o n - U . S . w a radmin is t ra t ion . The new t roopdeployment south of Da Nang had thestrategic objective of pacifying a longcorridor of villages from Ha My Beach inthe east to the Bo Bo Hills in the west.

The objective was to disconnect the VCfighting forces between Da Nang and HoiAn and block their supply lines. By thistime, communist authorities werepreparing a general uprising and militaryoffense, which would be known as the TetOffensive. Villagers were encouraged tocontribute food, cash, and medicine inpreparation for the coming battles.Several hundred “volunteers” carriedfood and weapons from the coastal areato VC mountain bases across the Ky LamBridge. Insurrection units were secretlybrought into Da Nang and Hoi An.

At 2:40 p.m. on the Lunar New Year’sDay (January 31, 1968, the Year of theMonkey), the combined forces of theregular army and local guerilla unitslaunched a coordinated assault on thetown of Hoi An from four directions andsubsequently occupied the town’speripheries and two military bases.[24]The National Liberation Front honoredthe commune of Dien Duong, whichincludes the village of Ha My, for takingpart in the Tet Offensive. In response, theother side swiftly began clearing outvillages located in this military corridor.At least six large-scale civilian massacrestook place during the first three monthsof 1968, beginning at Truong Giang (inDien Trung commune) and Duy Xuyen inthe west, and including An Truong (inDien Phong commune) and Phong Nhiand Phong Nhat (in Dien An commune) inthe middle, and ending at Ha My (in DienDuong commune) and Cam Ha on theeastern coast.[25] Two secret reportsmade by the district communist cells tothe provincial authority recorded

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nineteen incidents of mass killing duringthis short period.[26] The tragedy ofmass killing had already been witnessedin Quang Ngai in 1966.[27]

On the twenty-fourth day of the firstlunar month in 1968, the ROK Marinesleft their tanks and armored vehiclesoutside the boundary of Xom Tay, HaMy’s subhamlet number two, at 9:30 a.m.and marched into the village from threedirections. By 10:00 a.m. the villagerswere assembled at three different sites,including the Nguyen family home andthe open space between two subhamlets.At the open space, the commandingofficer ordered a desk to be placed facingthe crowd. Seated at the desk, he madewhat felt like, according to the survivors,an unusually long and passionate speechof instruction; the Vietnamese interpretersummarized it for the villagers. Therewere no heavy arms in sight; soldierswere running around busily. A survivor,Nguyen Thi Bon, said she thought thesoldiers were going to give out food andsweets; she had seen this routine before.She was trying to imagine what the day’sgift would be. Another survivor, Ba Lap,heard someone whispering, “What if theykill us?” “Don’t be ridiculous. Don’t saythat. You’re calling bad luck,” she heardfrom someone else; “They came to giveus food. Believe me. Believe it.”

It happened just past 10:00 a.m. Theofficer finished his speech, turned hisback to the crowd and began to walkaway. Several steps away from thevillagers, he made a swift hand gesture.This gesture triggered the M60 machineguns and the M79 grenade launchers,

which were hidden in the bushes.Soldiers began firing at the villagers, andfragmentation grenades exploded onanyone who tried to escape from thisliving hell. Bon felt village mothers fallingon her and her little sister. Ba Lap saw agrenade coming toward her and she fellon her children. Then she felt nothingand saw nothing, except the distantgreen sweet potato field she begancrawling toward. Bon remembers that itwas quiet and pitch dark, and hard tobreathe underneath the bodies. She triedto move and, hearing her baby sister cry,stopped. Her sister kept crying, and shefeared the soldiers might hear her. Bonheard a rapidly speaking foreign voice,then quiet again, and then the detonationof a hand grenade. The assault went onfor two hours. At the other killing site,seventy villagers were squeezed into themain altar room of the Nguyen family’sresidence. Some villagers thought thesoldiers were going to hand out food. Theowner of the house was not convinced,and he hid behind the ancestral altar withthree of his grandchildren. The killingbegan as soon as machine gun fire washeard from the open site. By noon, 135villagers were dead: only three weremales of combat age; three were unbornchildren; and four were unidentified. Therest were village women, elders, teenagegirls, toddlers, and infants.

In the My Lai area of Quang Ngai, therehad also been a changeover of troops, inDecember 1967. In the early morning ofthe seventeenth day of the second lunarmonth of 1968, helicopters carryingCharlie Company of Task Force Barker

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landed near the perimeter of the KheThuan subhamlet of Tu Cung—the areamarked as “My Lai 4” on the militarymap. This was the first major militaryaction to take place after the SouthKorean expeditionary forces handed overthe area. The village had experiencedsearch missions before by differenttroops, including South Vietnamese andnung (ethnic minority) troops.[28] Thistime, however, some of the villagerssensed a difference in the atmosphereand asked the women and children tohide in underground shelters. The fewvillage guerilla fighters in Khe Thuandashed toward the village hill in order tobetter assess the situation. The house-to-house search began, and pigs andbuffaloes were killed first.[29] By thetime Charlie Company left, 135 Tu Cungvillagers were left dead at three differentsites, including the open field betweensubhamlets Khe Thuan and Khe Dong.

The night after the massacre, a few localpartisan fighters came back to My Laiand helped the survivors to bury thevictims. The survivors used bamboobaskets to collect the fragments of thebroken bodies of their relatives. Theburial process was slow and the bodiesq u i c k l y b e g a n t o d e c o m p o s e .Untouchable, most of them had to beburied where they were and en masse.When U.S. Army investigators reachedthe deserted village in November 1969,they would find mass graves at threedifferent sites, as well as a ditch full ofdecomposed bodies.[30] At Ha My,survivors and their relatives fromneighboring villages brought straw mats

to wrap the bodies of the dead. They laythe bodies in the shallow holes dugaround the killing site and marked eachgrave with a small stone or a stick. Laterin the afternoon, the soldiers returnedand the survivors ran away in panic. Thetroops brought two D-7 bulldozers, whichthey used to flatten the houses, destroythe shallow graves, and obliterate theunburied bodies. This assault against thecorpses and graves is remembered as them o s t i n h u m a n e a s p e c t o f t h eincident,[31] and it has complicated theprocess of family commemoration. Thewounded villagers of My Lai werebrought to the village marketplace onRoute 521 by people who had been in themarketplace, and from there they weretaken by horse-drawn cart to the GeneralHospital of Quang Ngai. The sole survivorof the Do family remembers this journeymore vividly than any other event of thattime. He remembers especially how theowner of the horse refused to carry himfor anything less than five hundred dong(Vietnamese currency). The woundedsurvivors of Ha My were brought to aGerman medical ship in the port of DaNang. On his desperate run for help tothe Lepers’ Clinic in Hoa Hai, Bon’sfather came across an American convoy.The American officer immediatelyradioed for a rescue helicopter to helpthe wounded children. He was notifiedthat on Sunday no helicopter was goingto fly for civilian passengers. Themembers of the American convoy werefurious; they turned their armored carrieraround and set out for Da Nang with thewounded. Ba Lap of Ha My, who hadsurvived the bullets and shrapnel, was

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taken to the German medical ship, whereher leg was amputated. She had lost achild at the massacre, and arrived at thehospital with her surviving child. Later,whenever she recalled the Year of theMonkey, she would speak of the horrorshe experienced in the floating hospitalas being more terrifying than herexperience in the village. In the ship, BaLap heard a rumor that the hospital staffwas dumping dead Vietnamese bodiesinto the sea. Her daughter was dying inthe intensive care unit, and Ba Lapbecame hysterical at the thought oflosing her in such a way. She crawledalong the hospital corridors, dragging hermutilated body, and grabbed at the leg ofanyone she could find. She begged formercy and protested what was, to her,the most heinous crime against humandignity—the abandonment of a humanbody to the voracious flying fish.Eventually, a Vietnamese nurse escortedher back to her bed and informed herthat her child had died, reassuring herthat the rumor was false and she wouldbe given the child’s body.

After the massacre, Ha My and My Lairemained largely unoccupied until theend of the war, in 1975. One of theorphan boys of Ha My went to Da Nangto bake French bread for the GIs; a fewadults tried to get into the refugee campsin a neighboring district, only to berefused entry on the grounds that theywere allegedly from a VC-controlled area.Thus their many years of life as livingwandering ghosts began. Having losttheir base as well as their families, thefew remaining village guerilla fighters

joined other partisan groups operating inneighboring areas. Their comradeswelcomed them. The survivors of thePhong Nhi and Phong Nhat massacrebrought the corpses of their children tothe military checkpoint on Route 1 inpro tes t . They might have beenencouraged to do so by VC activists, fortheir action followed the familiar patternof post-massacre public protests.[32] Thedecomposed bodies of the children had tobe buried there, where they were lying.The Phong Nhat survivors are reluctantto recall this part of the tragedy; instead,what they remember vividly is the simplefact that, each time they pass thecrossroad, they know their children areburied on the roadside. No official inquiryfollowed their angry protest. Instead, twocivilian officials handed out a smallamount of cash and a large quantity ofwhite cotton.

After these incidents, a rumor spreadacross the refugee camps, “A dead DaiH a n [ K o r e a n ] k i l l s d o z e n s o fVietnamese.” At the same time, a newslogan rose among the guerilla fighters:“Xe xac Rong Xanh phong thay Bach Ho,”or “Eliminate the Green [Blue] Dragon,make many corpses of the White [Fierce]Tiger.” The local South Vietnamesesoldiers were disturbed by the rumor thata number of the Phong Nhi and PhongNhat victims were families of activeARVN (Army of Republic of Vietnam)soldiers. The army kept the incidentssecret on their side, and there was nowar correspondent in the area who couldhave taken an interest in the activities ofnon-American forces. The crimes

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committed by America’s close allyattracted no investigative journalists likeSeymour Hersh, either. The refugeescarried the rumors with them, however,and some reached the ears of Americanaid workers. Meanwhile, Vietnamesepolice officers and their covert agentsdisseminated the rumor widely in therural population. According to a formerpolice officer of the Republic of Vietnam,whom I interviewed, she had suppliedROK marine officers with informationabout how VC forces had reacted tocivilian massacres. She recalled in 1997that she had informed the officer, whohad taken her as his lover, that massivecivilian killing was indeed breaking thewill of the civilian population. The localpartisan forces were rapidly losingpopular support, according to her, andbecoming hesitant to operate in theoccupied zones, and the panic-struckvillagers were moving back to the city’sslums. The local guerrilla forces avoidedskirmishes with the Blue Dragon for awhile, and in the following months thelatter saw a definite drop in the numberof their casualties.[33] In 1969–1970, aspartisan forces gathered strength andbegan to launch daring assaults againstenemy fortifications, making themincreasingly defensive and vulnerable,civilian killings diminished and became asmaller feature of the war’s landscape.Then, the war in the region became amore “normal” war, what militaryhistorians call conventional war, foughtbetween two parties of combatants.

In 1972–1973, the vicinity of Ha Mybecame a fierce battlefield for four

battalions of the South Vietnamese armyand the combined force of a regularNorth Vietnamese army and local guerillaunits. The Saigon forces built two airbases on the ruins of Ha My, and thismade the place a prime target. Thecommunist forces took over the area onMarch 28, 1975. Pham Van Thuong, aneminent veteran of Ha My and Ha Gia,notes in his handwritten essay on villagehistory:

This was a victory of the thirty-yearresistance against the aggressors.Our village bred the strongestguerilla force in the region, and itp layed an impor tant ro le inconnecting the town of Hoi An, therevolutionary base of Vinh Dien, andthe city of Da Nang. Our village wasa strong base for our revolutionaryCommunist Party cells and animportant support base for ourarmed forces. The people of ourv i l l a g e c o n t r i b u t e d t o t h erevolutionary campaigns in materialand human resources. . . . In the anti-French war, our people fought theenemy fiercely and successfully.Thanks to their heroic efforts, therevolutionary rule in the villagedeveloped steadily and controlled thewhole area, thereby enablingrevolutionary organizations tomushroom across villages despite theenemy’s systematic terror anddestruction. Rice cultivation,education, the tax system, culturalproduction—all developed at thehighest speed during this period. Theearly years of the anti-Americanstruggle were a testing time for us.The village revolutionary movementwas devastated, and, at times, it

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seemed that the struggle was at anend. However, people’s hatred ofoppression rose even higher.Undergoing the difficult stages ofhistorical development, the villagersfought heroically. We defeated theforces of aggression assembled fromall over the world. Their modernweapons failed to break us, althoughwe had only bare hands. Our strongwill and belief finally overcame thetest and obtained great merit. Ourcommune [Dien Duong] honors 1,240martyrs and 332 war invalids. One inevery four family units has warmartyrs, three in four entertainrevolutionary merit. Our communehas been awarded the followinghonors by the government:

The Title of “Hero of the People’sArmed Forces”

The Flag of “Bravely killing the U.S.aggressors”

The Flag of “Destroying the enemytanks”

The Flag of “Attracting the youth tojoin the resistance”

5 First-Class Liberation Medals

7 Second-Class Liberation Medals

8 Third-Class Liberation Medals

152 Heroic Fighter [titles]

135 Heroic Mother of Vietnam [titles]

191 Gold Certificate of Honor and377 Glorious Families with

Gold Certificates

[The list continues.][34]

Of the massacre survivors displaced fromthe village, some failed to survive thewar. Of those who survived the war, somedid not survive its aftermath. Whensurviving villagers returned to theirhomeland in 1975–1976, the place wasunrecognizable. They were shocked tofind that they could now see the ocean,as the pine forest that had divided theirland from the sea had been destroyed.Moreover, the land was littered with theremains of weaponry. Before the villagecould become a relatively safe place inthe 1980s, the stray ammunition andhidden antipersonnel mines claimed morelives; the mines occasionally still claimvictims today. And a number of villagers,young and old, continue to suffer theenduring effects of the defoliants anddioxin that were heavily applied in andaround the village by the U.S. waradministration in the hope of eliminatingpotential niches for VC agents andgeneral ly exposing the area forsurveillance.

Those who returned had to rebuild homesand farms. The state administration ofunified Vietnam encouraged an all-outmobilization for economic reconstructionand, equally, an all-out struggle againstbackward cultural practices. Familyancestral burial grounds were in ruins,and the remains of war dead had to becleared from the farmland where theyhad been hastily buried. The unidentifiedremains were simply moved elsewhere;the village administration organized theremoval of the Monkey Year massacrevictims. The many hopelessly entangled

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skeletons were taken to the sand dunesor to the distant bamboo forest andburied there. This hasty, collectivereburial precluded any accompanyingtraditional rituals. The reburial of thevictims was improper, in the view ofmany ordinary Ha My villagers, and it hasbeen a source of great shame and painfor the survivors. While these massgraves were evacuated as village landwas prepared for agricultural production,the i nd i v idua l t ombs o f f a l l enrevolutionary combatants took their placeat the center of the village. The latter wasto become a prime symbol for thenation’s unity and for its victorious pastand prosperous future.

Memorial for revolutionary martyrs, with theinscription

“Your ancestral land will remember yoursacrifice.”

Local cemetery for fallen revolutionarycombatants.

Man and machine

Why did massacres occur in certainplaces and not in others? Fierce localresistance created the impression thatthe inhabitants of an entire area were theenemy. Sniper fire, land mines, andambushes provoked anger, and thefailure to locate the real enemy frustratedsoldiers and administrators. For the localpeasant militiamen, sniper fire and boobytraps “worked,” since the enemy convoysusually withdrew if they suffered one ortwo casua l t i e s . W i thou t theseinterventions, foreign troops simply keptmarching forward. To conduct an ambushnear a settlement was a dangerous task,however, for it could provoke retaliatoryacts against villagers. It was unclear tomost local peasant militiamen how andwhen their small attacks, which normallymade the enemy retreat, could makethem react differently. The massacre inHa My, however, was not an act of ragebut a premeditated act of violence thatresulted from rational military planningthat had been conducted with a concrete

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objective. Nor was the massacre anisolated incident caused by a breakdownin the command structure, as the generalinquiry concluded about the My Laiinc ident . [35] The inc ident wascoordinated, planned, and conducted aspart of an effective military strategy.Seymour Hersh concludes from hisinvestigation of the My Lai massacre andits aftermath that “My Lai 4 was out ofthe ordinary, but it was not isolated.”[36]The same is true of the massacre in HaMy. Given the many s imi lar andsimultaneous incidents of mass deaththat occurred along the corridor, it isvery difficult to explain them away ascoincidences.

The historian Marilyn Young writes that,for the American public, My Lai was allthe more terrifying because the eventseemed inexplicable. James Olson andRandy Roberts have concluded thatcompared to the brutal simplicity of whathappened in My Lai, why it happened iscomplex and remains a mystery.[37] Forthe survivors of Ha My, the suddenmetamorphosis of young foreign lads intoa group of red-eyed monsters on thatfateful day in 1968 is still a dark,unintelligible mystery. It is like a knot onthe rope of history that becomes tighterthe more you pull.

In 1967, Ha My villagers were evacuatedto the refugee camps of Hoi An and thetown slums of Da Nang. Life in therefugee camps, where there was simplynot enough food or space for them, wasunbearable. A family of seven to ninewould squeeze into a shack with acement floor measuring three meters

square under an unshaded tin roof. Amidthe miserable and unsanitary livingconditions, as widespread dysentery andother epidemics killed children and theweak, village elders petitioned theVietnamese authorities and the ROKcombat authority to permit their returnhome. The petition letter argued thatnone of the displaced villagers supportedthe VC, and put forward the villagers’love of their native land as the mainreason for their desire to return.

It is not clear whether the villagers weregranted permission to return to Ha My,but they returned there at the end ofDecember 1967. For the next threeweeks, foreign soldiers from thefortification on the sand dune betweenthe village and the sea assisted theresettling villagers with food and buildingmaterials. In return, village womenoffered the soldiers baskets of greenchilies and other local produce. When asearch-and-destroy mission set fire to athatched roof, some soldiers from thebase came to help put out the fire. Theimage of two foreign soldiers, one with acigarette lighter and the other with abucket of water, arguing with each otherin their foreign tongue, remains one ofthe most cherished war memories in HaMy. When the bucket-holding manaccidentally threw the water onto theZippo-holding man and the bucket ontothe burning house, people remember thateveryone laughed, even the desperatehome-owner. These fragmentedmemories of small gifts being exchangedand the help in extinguishing the firehave made some villagers unable to

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accept the hypothesis that the troops whocarried out the atrocity were the sametroops who had helped them before themassacre. They believe there was achange in troops at the base immediatelybefore the massacre, or that the soldiersfrom the base did not participate inransacking the village on that day. Thereis no hard evidence to support this belief,apart from the survivors’ testimony thatthe killers were complete strangers. Buttheir belief is resolute.

The petition’s statement that there wereno VC supporters in the Ha My villagewas probably not true. Likely, a networkof relationships connected the villagersacross the visible “normal” village lifea n d t h e h i d d e n , u n d e r g r o u n drevolutionary activities. However, thiswas a network of bone and flesh; andwart ime kinship, no matter howunconventional it might have been forcedto become during wartime, does notcollapse to the political-militaryclassification of un-uniformed combatantsand the fantastical definition of thegeneric, faceless enemy.[38] Civilians canassist and harbor combatants as civilians.They can do so out of coercion or out ofsympathy or out of family and communalobligation. That does not validate thei d e a l i z e d i m a g e o f a p e o p l e ’ swar—“People are the water, and ourarmy the fish”—nor does it justify theslogan of village pacification, “Pump outthe water and catch the fish.” Thepresence of a lawful target within adefined space does not justify thedefinition of the entire space as anextension of that specific target. The act

of wantonly destroying the space on thebasis of that unlawful definition iscriminal. It is against nature as well aslaw to pump out the water in order tocatch the fish.

The victims of the massacre were clearlyand categorically unarmed civiliannoncombatants. First, they tolerated theVietcong in their village, if there reallywere any, because these VC activistsbelonged to their community. Second, ifin fact they hid and supported theseactivists, they did so out of respect forthe values and customs of communal lifeand not necessarily in following thedoctrine of the people’s war. Even in theCold War’s arid environment of totaldestruction, there dwelt moral realities ofhuman kinship. At the heart of the crimeagainst humanity, if it has a heart, lurksthe insanity of taking the enemy’spropaganda as reality and making war onthe basis of a profoundly superstitiousbelief in that fantasy. As Olson andRoberts write, “As in all wars, soldierslearned from other soldiers, and myths,rumours, oft-repeated tales, andsuperstitions became firmly held andscientifically proven axioms. The mostcommon belief was that any Vietnameseman, woman, or chi ld might be aVietcong operative.”[39]

The Ha My survivors believe that thekillers were strangers. This belief doesnot explain why the crime took place, butit does suggest at least how the crimecould have been prevented. The beliefassumes that, even in an extremecondi t ion o f to ta l war , you candistinguish the face of a killer from the

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face o f a fore ign so ld ier . I f theVietnamese could do it, why not theforeigners? Why couldn’t they distinguishthe face of their foe from the face of atoddler? When a soldier from CharlieCompany describes his so-called mentalprocess of turning civilians into theenemy—“Who is the enemy? How can youdistinguish between the civilians and thenon-civilians? . . . The good or the bad?All of them look the same”—what does hemean? If an armed, educated professionalsoldier cannot distinguish the same fromthe different in the way that a villageschoolgirl can, what can we say about themodern army?[40]

Evidence suggests that locally basedtroops did harm local civilians. Otherevidence indicates that locally basedtroops refrained from harming localcivilians.[41] There was a coordinatedmovement of troops across villages anddistricts during and after the 1968 TetOffensive.[42] A locally based trooprelegated the task of clearing theimmediate area to a collateral unit in aneighbouring commune or district. In thissystem of exchange, the same soldiercould set fire to a house in one place andhelp rescue a similar-looking house onfire in another place. I believe that manysoldiers of the Vietnam War sufferedfrom being the pendulum in the war’scold clockwork, and that they struggledwith the memory of that cruel oscillationin their postwar lives.[43] From am e c h a n i c a l p o i n t o f v i e w , t h ependulum—that is, the soldier—was onlya functional piece of a much morecomplex machine. It had its own

dynamics but it could not control itsmovement, and it had to keep swingingbetween two extreme points until themachine ran out of power. The survivorsof Ha My seem to refuse to see thismechanistic truism. “Yes, they were thesame people,” the old partisan leadersaid; “we knew that.” “No, they were notthe same people,” Ba Lap protested; “youwere not there. You didn’t see them. Isaw them.” Ba Lap refused to efface thememory of the soldier with the waterbucket, to let this positive memory becorrupted by the bright shiningmovement of a faceless robotic soldier’ssingle oscillating identity. If this is a stateof denial, it is not a denial of truth but arefusal to reduce humanity to truth.[44]

ROK soldiers helping elderly Vietnamesevillagers evacuate.

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ROK soldiers helping children evacuate.

Eighty or twenty percent?

In 1974 James Trullinger, a formeremployee of the U.S. Agency forInternational Development in Vietnam,conducted a unique project of empiricalresearch on wartime village life, in MyThuy Phuong, seven miles southwest ofHue. He stayed in this village until thevery end of the war, in March 1975.Among the many valuable facts hegathered about the war on the villagelevel were those concerning the 1968 TetOffensive: “For the estimated 5 percentof the people who were Governmentsupporters, Tet of 1968 intensified hatredof the [National Liberation] Front, and forsome planted seeds of doubt concerningAmerican dependability as an ally. The 10to 15 percent who were politicallyuncommitted remained so, but weredeeply impressed by the Front’s strength.And My Thuy Phuong’s Front supporters,an estimated 80 to 85 percent of thepeople, were left with proud memories of

the boldest strikes yet against theGovernment and its ally.”[45]

“Eighty percent VC” is indeed how someVietnamese villagers, even today, presentthe wartime reality of their village. Iheard this from two old resistance warveterans in Ha My in 1995, and thenheard it again from two survivors in KheThuan subhamlet (in My Lai) a few yearslater. “The village was strong at thattime. Eighty percent VC, at least,” saidthe man in My Lai. If 80 percent of thevillage population was VC, and 80percent of the village population wasmassacred in the same year, this makesat least 60 percent of the victims VC. Inboth instances, however, my informantswere invoking the idea of “80 percentVC” without reference to their owncommunity. The informant in Khe Thuanwas describing what he knew about KheThuan’s neighboring communities, KheDong and Khe Thuong. The aged veteranin Ha My was saying “80 percent VC”with regard to Ha My’s neighboringvillage Ha Gia, and this he did in contrastto Ha My, where only 20 percent of thepopulation at most was VC, according tohim. I asked some residents in KheThuong hamlet about the place’s alleged“80 percent VC” historical identity. Theyagreed with people in Khe Thuan that theAmericans mistook the non-VC Tu Cung(My Lai 4)—in which Khe Thuan and KheThuong are subunits—for the VC-strongarea of Truong Diep (My Lai 3). Thisunderstanding, dominant among thepeople of My Lai, makes the massacre ofMy Lai doubly tragic, for the violence fellupon the wrong place. However, my

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informants in Khe Thuong stronglycontested the idea that their communityhad been a VC stronghold during thetime of the massacre. One of them wasparticularly angry and said, “That is purenonsense. In my village there was no VC.In theirs they know very well that theywere all VC at that time.” His wifereminded him of his paternal uncle, fromthe same hamlet, who was a localpartisan fighter. Turning his face angrilytoward her, he said, “OK. Maybe 80percent for them and 20 for us. Maybe,but not the other way around, absolutelynot.”

A former village chief of Ha My arguedthat there was not a single revolutionaryactivist among the victims of the 1968massacre—they were all simple villagers,he said. Since 1995, when we first met,he has told me numerous stories thatcontradict his initial contention. He waswell aware of the history of revolutionaryactivism of Ha My, in fact, more awarethan most other former veterans. Heintroduced me to the village guerrillafighter who underwent the unimaginableexperience of hearing the staccato noiseof the machine guns and the screams ofthe villagers from his undergroundhideout during the two hours of the HaMy massacre. This man knew that hiswife and children, as well as his parentsand grandparents, were among thevictims. The village chief was proud, aswere other village leaders, of the HeroVillage title awarded to Ha My (and HaQuang and Ha Gia) in 1989, and at publicgatherings he used to speak of thevillage’s long, exceptional contribution to

the nation’s history. He knew the namesof the Monkey Year massacre victimswho earned titles of revolutionary honor,and he was a close relative of some of thevillage civilian activists who perished inthe massacre. He helped to write thelocal history of the women’s struggle, inwhich the women of Ha My in particularappear to have played an exceptionalrole, and he collected historical factsabout Ha My’s distinguished place in thehistory of the Communist Party’sorganizational activity in the region. Whyhe asserted that there were “no VCamong the victims” was a mystery to me.

Looking back, however, it appears thatwhat the former village chief said was nota falsification of historical fact. Thepolitical identity of wartime Ha Myd e p e n d e d p a r t l y o n w h a t t h eidentification was for. Had I been aninvestigator from the provincialDepartment of Information and Culturedispatched to the village to collect datafor a government publication on the localhistory of revolutionary struggle, theelder’s description might have beenentirely different. In fact, the localhistory project conducted in Ha My andelsewhere in 1999–2000 focused on thevillage’s role in the wartime political-military campaigns, and it affirmed thatmany of the cited heroes of the anti-French campaigns were included in thelist of victims of the Monkey Yeartragedy.[46] In this context, thedescription “80 percent VC” can easilyshift to become a statement addressingthe collective historical identity of theself rather than others.

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The former village chief is himself aveteran of the revolutionary war and hasclose relatives who worked as part-timepeasant fighters within the village. Hisfamily provided these village fighterswith food and shelter in difficult times;the fighters cultivated the land andhelped build shelters in more peacefultimes. These peasant men moved to theunderground tunnel (or the village pond)when the situation was intense, but atewith their wives and children and livedlives that appeared normal on quiet days.This family had a neighbor who had beena laborer-soldier for the French army. Heremained “neutral” throughout the war.The village communist cell did not trusthim; he was too old for the Saigon army.He cultivate rice and sweet potatoes onquiet days and ran away to the bushwhenever the Saigon or allied forcescame to the village. His family paid “tax”to the resistance war committee, just likemany other village households at thetime, and helped the partisan forces withfood and labor. Most villagers did so, andit seemed natural to him that he shoulddo it too. This man’s neighbor had fivechildren, all too young to join the army oneither side. One woman’s late husbandhad been an off icial in the SouthVietnamese administration. She couldn’tcontribute much to the communist side,because she was very poor, and shehoped to evacuate to a city if possible.But she did help other villagers cultivatethe communal land. The harvest from thisland was shipped to the westernmountain regions to feed the youngvolunteers from the north who werecamped in the f o res t . Ano ther

neighboring family, the Tran family, weredevout members of the local Cao Daitemple. Some of them had moved to thetown of Hoi An and, unlike othervillagers, did not return to the village in1967 but managed to settle outside therefugee camps, partly with the assistanceof friends in the religious sect. The townrecruited the husband as an absenteevillage chief of Ha Gia and trusted him toreport to the authorities the identities ofVC-supporting villagers. It is unclear howsincerely he performed his duty duringthis time.[47] However, he regularlyrelayed information about the movementsof Saigon and allied troops to hisrelatives who remained in the village. Onat least two occasions, this informationproved vital in saving human lives.

In this complex situation of war on avillage level, “80 percent VC” and “20percent VC” were indeed both realisticestimates. The truth of this illogical dataand the collapse of the apparentlyenormous difference between twoquantitative estimates are central to anunderstanding of the historical reality ofthe war in the village. The truth of 80 or20 percent, and “No VC” or “All VC,” forthat matter, depended on whom theinformation was addressed to. The formervi l lage chief o f An Bang hamletsucceeded in saving its two hundredvillagers from the imminent threat ofmass death by swearing to the foreignofficer that there was not a single VC orVC supporter there. Shortly afterward,his sister joined a group of villagersgathered to welcome a delegation ofparty officials from the provincial

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authority. The man from the provinceasked the village women, “Are you alldiligent workers for the glorious victoryof our revolutionary war?” The villagewomen said, in one voice, “Yes, Uncle, allof us. Yes, Uncle, our whole village.”[48]

The identity of a community could shiftbetween two opposite ends of thepolitical spectrum depending on thesituation and depending on the identity ofthe force that intended to classify it. Self-identity in this context oscillated acrosst h e f r o n t i e r o f C o l d W a r a n dcommunicated with both regimes. Itshifted from one to the other side of thefrontier as the frontier itself movedbetween night and day and from seasonto season. The brutal force of bipolarpolitics influenced subjective identity andimposed upon it the cruel zero-sumtheory. While the bifurcating systempursued the logic of zero-sum, peopleresponded with the opposite logic ofbeing both none and all. Whereas thesystem insisted on the homogeneity ofspace and the immutability of identity,the l ived rea l i ty o f the war was“contradictory space” or “dialecticalspace,”[49] and identity in this realitywas not an unchanging idem but amutative entity whose transformabilityoffered the only possibility for thepreservation of life.

The village men, who fought in the fieldsof village war, oscillated betweendisplacement from and placement in theirnative land. Apart from the few full-timeguerrilla fighters who were removedentirely from the obligation of cultivation,most of these peasant fighters were also

responsible for agricultural productionand only occasionally mobilized toparticipate in a large battle beyond theboundary of their village. When thepeasant fighters shook hands withuniformed regular soldiers, endured longtedious speeches by the political officers,and then ran swiftly home on moonlessnights, it is not clear whether they werestill soldiers. Back in their village, theyreceived directives from the VC liaison,gathered in twos or threes to discuss theorder, and shared their wisdom andexperience—about an offensive againstthe local military installation, about aparticularly unsympathetic village chief,and about installation of booby trapsdesigned to stymie search-and-destroymissions. The successful installation of abox of explosives within the enemy’s ConNinh base by three Ha My vil lagepartisan fighters is well known in thearea. When they installed it, they wereclearly combatants and had the spirit ofcombatants. At certain times, theyfarmed as ordinary villagers, and in lesspeaceful times, they took the waterbucket and the carbine and hid in theunderground shelter or in the old bombcrater filled with rainwater. When thesefighters transformed back to farmers, it isnot at all clear whether they were stillcombatants and considered themselvesas such. When they hid underground,collected the food bundle, removed thecamouflage of buffalo refuse, and ate thesticky rice brought from home, it is clearthat they were not eating like othervillagers and that they were not reallyordinary villagers. However, when theyfinished the meal, lay down on the mat,

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and began to think about the newducklings, the abdominal problems of thebuffalo, and watering the vegetableplot—it is again unclear whether we caneasily call them combatants of a war.These people were Vietcong fighters, andthey were not. They were ordinaryfarmers and civilians, and they were not.Their identity shifted as they themselvesshifted from the battlefield to village lifeand back to another battlefield again andagain. They did not necessarily carrytheir village identity to the battlefield,and their fighter identity was not alwayscarried to their deceptively quiet villagesocial life. They were both soldiers andpeasants, yet they could also be neither.

When a young village woman of Ha Giawas being dragged away by ROK soldiersin the dry season of 1967, she begged thesoldiers to stop, saying, “No VC. No VC.”The soldiers had found a carbine behinda false wall in her house. When herhusband found the courage to come tothe army base to make a plea for his wife,he said to the guardsman, “No VC. NoVC.” When he said it, it is possible thathe really meant it. It is possible that theman was not a VC when he emerged fromunderground the previous morning andenjoyed the rare treat of a siesta in hisown bed in his own home. It is possiblethat he was no longer a faithful workerfor glorious victory when he was coaxedout of the suffocating undergroundshelter to spend the afternoon with hiswife. When he left home to check thebamboo fish trap, and his wife wasgathering the ban chang (riceflourtortillas) left to dry on a mat, it is possible

that neither of them had anything to dowith either side of the war, at least forthat sun-drenched afternoon. The old VietMinh activists in Ha My and My Laistayed put in the village, worked on therice paddy, and gave rice to the villageguerillas. It is possible that they did so asvillage elders, not necessarily becausethey remembered the doctrine of “Tinhquan dan nhu ca voi nuoc” (People arethe water, and our army the fish). Noneof these old French War veterans, apartfrom a few exceptional cases, wererecognized as war martyrs by thegovernment after the war, nor were theyconsidered revolutionaries by thevillagers before the massacre. In villagelife, it is possible that people paid tax tothe revolutionary authorities becausethey knew that peasants had paid tax foras long as they had existed. And it is alsopossible that people hid weapons more infear of the mortal consequence of notdoing so than because of any ferventcommitment to the revolutionary wardictum “Each inhabitant [is] a soldier,each village a fortress.”

The paid , uni formed, fu l l - t ime,professional soldiers did not accept thefact that people could fight without auniform, as a villager rather than asoldier. They did not understand the factthat, when these people fought, many ofthem fought simply to survive rather thanto win . Because so ld iers d idn’ tunderstand this complexity, they couldhave seen the woman clearing the bed,where her VC husband slept, as VC, herchildren breaking coconut shells at theback of the house as VC, their house and

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their chickens and buffalos as VC, thetombs of their ancestors and the templethey worshipped as VC, and the entireworld they lived in and relied on asentirely VC. Perhaps the soldiers couldn’tsee otherwise, since for them the meatthey ate, the house that sheltered them,the temple they worshipped, and theentire world they belonged to belonged toone single inseparable complex—thearmy.

The cruel history of the Cold War is not athing of the past in the villages thatsurvived the war. The historical identityof the village still fluctuates in the violentmemory of night and day, and betweenthe hero and victim identities thattogether perpetuate this irreconcilablecontradiction. In this double historicalmemory, Ha My and My Lai were bothVC and “No VC” villages. Each harbored80 percent cach mang (revolutionaries)and 20 percent Vietcong subversives.Pride and stigma, and honor and terror,tail one another and keep alive themagical realism in which a village is bothVC and “No VC.” Likewise, the collectiveidentity of the victims of the villagemassacres remains unclassifiable. Thevictims were “simple villagers,” and theywere not. They were “heroic defenders ofthe native land,” and they were not.

Pictures and names of war dead displayed inthe back of a Buddhist pagoda, Quang Nam.

Graves of the Vietnam War fallen soldiers,National Cemetery of South Korea.

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Noi Buon (The sorrows of war), silk paintingby renowned Vietnamese artist, Ly Truc Dung.

Just as their political identity could not besettled within the Cold War’s zero-sumcoherence, the moral identity of theMonkey Year victims continued to beunsettling in the domain of family ritualremembrance. A generation after themassacre, beginning in the early 1990s,the reburial of the improperly buriedvictims of war became one of the mainpreoccupations in My Lai and Ha My. In amass exodus of the war dead to newplaces, the memory of mass death wasrevitalized too, and people inventedcreative new ways to deal with the griefof unjust death.

Heonik Kwon , Reader in SocialAnthropology at the University ofEdinburgh, held a research fellowship atthe Economic and Social ResearchCouncil on comparative Cold War culturalhistory focusing on Vietnam and Korea.He is the author of After the Massacre:Commemoration and Consolation in HaMy and My Lai (University of California

Press, 2006) and The Ghosts of War inVietnam (Cambridge University Press,2007).

He contributed this article to JapanFocus. Posted June 15, 2007.

See two other important articles onIndochina war atrocities on Japan Focus:

Taylor Owen and Ben Kiernan, BombsOver Cambodia: New Light on US AirW a r(http://www.japanfocus.org/products/details/2420)

Greg Lockhart, The Minefield: AnAustralian Tragedy in America’s VietnamW a r(http://www.japanfocus.org/products/details/2447)

Notes:

[1] Ministry of Defense Institute ofMilitary History, The Vietnam War andthe Korean Army, vol. 3 (Seoul: Ministryof Defense Institute of Military History,Republic of Korea, 2003), p. 412.

[2] Quoted from Quang Ngai GeneralMuseum, A Look Back upon Son My(Quang Ngai: Quang Ngai GeneralMuseum, 1998), p. 12.

[3] Robert M. Blackburn, Mercenariesand Lyndon Johnson’s “More Flags”: TheHiring of Korean, Filipino, and ThaiSoldiers in the Vietnam War (Jefferson,NC: McFarland, 1994).

[4] Noam Chomsky, preface to JohnDuffett, ed., Against the Crime of Silence

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(New York: Clarion, 1970), pp. xiv–xv.

[5] Frank Baldwin, Diane Jones, andMichael Jones, America’s Rented Troops:South Koreans in Vietnam (Philadelphia:American Friends Service Committee,1974).

[6] Toi Ac Xam Luoc Thuc Dan Moi CuaDe Quoc My o Viet Nam (Cr imescommitted by America during herneocolonial invasion of Vietnam) (Hanoi:Nha xuat ban chinh tri quoc gia, 1975),pp. 30–52, 58–113.

[7] Vietcong, or VC, is the term by whichAmericans referred to the National Frontfor the Liberation of South Vietnam, acommunist-led alliance of a dozenpolitical and religious groups, formed in1960.

[8] Ho Khang, The Tet Mau Than 1968Event in South Vietnam (Hanoi: The Gioi,2001), p. 31.

[9] Marvin E. Gettleman, Jane Franklin,Marilyn B. Young, and H. Bruce Franklin,eds., Vietnam and America: The MostComprehensive Documented History ofthe Vietnam War (New York: Grove,1995), pp. 390–91.

[10] Dalloz, La guerre d’Indochine,1945–1954 (Paris: Seuil, 1987), pp.115–202.

[11] Jonathan Schell, The Real War (NewYork: Pantheon, 1987), p. 114.

[12] Dau Tranh Cach Mang Cua Dang BoVa Nhan Dan Xa Dien Duong, 1930–1975(The revolutionary struggle of the

Communist Party and the people of DienDuong Commune,1930–1975), (Tam Ky:Nha xuat ban Tam Ky), pp. 123–24.

[13] Ibid., pp. 135–39.

[14] To Lan, “Special Relationshipsbetween Traditional Viet Villages,” TheTraditional Village in Vietnam (Hanoi:The Gioi, 1993), pp. 295–96, 301–4.

[15] From the written text of the speechdelivered in February 1999, copied in myfield notes.

[ 1 6 ] S e e P i k e , V i e t C o n g : T h eOrganization and Techniques of theNational Liberation Front of SouthVietnam (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1966),pp. 224–25.

[17] Dau Tranh Cach Mang Cua Dang BoVa Nhan Dan Xa Dien Duong, pp.106–7.

[18] The Buddhist crisis originated onMay 8, 1964, in the central Vietnamesecity of Hue, when government troopsfired into the crowd that gathered toprotest the government order thatbanned the display of banners on theBuddha’s anniversary.

[19] Dau Tranh Cach Mang Cua Dang BoVa Nhan Dan Xa Dien Duong, p.106. TheGeneva Peace Accords, signed by Franceand Vietnam in 1954, ended the firstIndochinese War (French War) andordered the temporary partition of thecountry at the seventeenth parallel. Theagreement included an agenda accordingto which national elections would be heldin 1956 to unify the country, which didnot happen.

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[20] Giai Phong, June 1, 1967.

[21] By 1969, about fifty thousand SouthKorean troops were engaged in combat inVietnam. There were an additional fifteenthousand c iv i l ian laborers andtechnicians. Their participation in thewar contributed significantly to theeconomic takeoff of South Korea as anAsian industrial force. See Se Jin Kim,“South Korea’s Involvement in Vietnamand Its Economic and Political Impact,”Asian Survey 10, no. 6 (1970): 519–32;Carl E. Meacham, “Money for Men,” NewRepublic (October 9, 1971): 7–9. For theU.S. administration, their participationwas crucial not only for justifying the warby internationalizing it but also for easingthe burden on the U.S. ground forces.See Yu-Mi Moon, “The Participation ofKorean Troops in the Vietnam War”(Ph.D. diss., Seoul National University,1994), pp. 68–83; Robert M. Blackburn,Mercenaries and Lyndon Johnson’s“More Flags”: The Hiring of Korean,Filipino, and Thai Soldiers in the VietnamWar (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1994),pp. 31–66; Stanley Larson and JamesCollins, Allied Participation in Vietnam(Washington, DC: Department of theArmy, 1985).

[22] See Jonathan Schell, The MilitaryHalf: An Account of Destruction in QuangNgai and Quang Tin (New York: Alfred A.Knopf, 1968).

[23] For brief accounts of massacres inthe province of Quang Ngai, see Di TichThang Canh Quang Ngai, pp. 206–8,211–14; Dai Cuong, Lich Su Viet NamTap III (History of Vietnam, vol. 3)

(Hanoi: Nha xuat ban giao duc, 2001), pp.207–8.

[24] Dau Tranh Cach Mang Cua Dang BoVa Nhan Dan Xa Dien Duong, pp. 138–39.

[25] Lich Su Dang Bo Quang Nam DaNang, pp. 182–85, 240–47; Chu CamPhong, Nhat Ky Chien Tranh (Diary of awar) (Hanoi: Nha xuat ban van hoc,2000), pp. 18–26, 125–39; Dang BoHuyen Duy Xuyen Xuat Ban (TheCommunist Party of Duy Xuyen District)(Da Nang: Nha xuat ban Da Nang, 1964),pp. 85–87.

[26] Ho So Toi Ac Cua Linh Pac ChungHy (The crimes of the soldiers of PacChung Hy [the president of South Korea,1961–1979]), report from BK25 to VK25,A85 on March 25, 1968, Quang NamProvince, Archive Da Nang; Ve Cuoc DanTranh Chong Bon Nam Trieu Tien CuaDong Bac Dien An Thu Thang Loi (Victoryin the struggle against the Koreanmercenaries by the people of Dien An),report from PK25, So 5 TB/VP on March1, 1968, Quang Nam Province, ArchiveDa Nang. A government newspaper ofNorth Vietnam reported the incidents inApril of that year: “To Cao Toi Ac Da ManCua My Va Tay Sai o Quang Ngai, QuangNam (We denounce the savage crimes ofthe Americans and their henchmen inQuang Ngai and Quang Nam),” NhanDan, April 17, 1968.

[27] Di Tich Thang Canh Quang Ngai, pp.206–14; Bao An Dat Va Nguoi (Defendingthe land and the people) (Da Nang: Nhaxuat ban Da Nang, 1999), pp. 162–63.

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[28] The U.S. special forces trainedthousands of recruits from ethnicminority groups at Hoa Cam, south of DaNang, in the early 1960s. See JohnPrados, The Hidden History of theVietnam War (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee,1995), pp. 74–76.

[29] See Michael Bilton and Kevin Sim,Four Hours in My Lai (New York:Penguin, 1992), chs. 4 and 5.

[30] Hersh, My Lai 4, p. 75.

[31] As recorded by a village elder in“Xom Tay, Dat Va Nguoi,” “The blood [ofthe victims] covered our land, and theirbodies were not properly buried. Therewas no funeral for them. . . . The enemyburned down the entire village andflattened the graveyards. The tombs ofour ancestors were desecrated, and theenemy assaulted the dead bodies [of thevictims] and mass-buried them in thehope of concealing their crime. Suchcriminal acts are unheard-of in humanhistory.” For the traditional Vietnameselaws against the desecration of tombs,see Gustave Dumoutier, Rituel funerairedes Annamites (Hanoi: Schneider, 1904),pp. 254–60.

[32] Another common form of politicalprotest was to block the roads withancestor altars and perform ceremoniesto hold up troop movements. This tacticwas used mainly against the governmenttroops. See James W. Trullinger, Villageat War: An Account of Conflict in Vietnam(Stanford: Stanford University Press,1994), p. 125.

[33] The official accounts by the ROKArmy claim 4,687 ROK casualties inVietnam and 41,400 enemy casualties.

[34] This extract is cited from his originaldraft manuscript written for inclusion inDau Tranh Cach Mang Cua Dang Bo VaNhan Dan Xa Dien Duong. Part of theessay was edited out of the printedversion (Tam Ky: Nha xuat ban Tam Ky,2003). The list of heroic entitlements,however, is included in the book (pp.175–76).

[35] W. R. Peers, The My Lai Inquiry(New York: W.W. Norton, 1979), pp.229–45; United States Department of theArmy, “Report of the Department of theArmy Review of the Prel iminaryInvestigations into the My Lai Incident,”in Joseph Goldstein, Burke Marshall, andJack Schwartz, eds. , The My LaiMassacre and Its Cover-up: Beyond theReach of Law? (New York: Free Press,1976), pp. 20–372; James S. Olson andRandy Roberts, My Lai: A Brief Historywith Documents (Boston: Bedford Books,1998), p. 24; Telford Taylor, “WarCrimes: Son My,” in Jay W. Baird, ed.,From Nuremberg to My Lai (Lexington,MA: D. C. Heath and Company, 1972), p.265.

[36] Seymour M. Hersh, Cover-Up: TheArmy’s Secret Investigation of theMassacre at My Lai 4 (New York:Random House, 1972), p. 268. Also Biltonand Sim, Four Hours in My Lai, p. 14.

[37] Marilyn Young, The Vietnam Wars,1945–1990 (New York : Harper -Perennial, 1991), p. 244; Olson and

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Roberts, My Lai, p. 25; Tim O’Brien, “TheMystery of My Lai,” in David L. Anderson,ed., Facing My Lai: Moving beyond theMassacre (Lawrence: University Press ofKansas, 1998), pp. 171–78.

[38] Olson and Roberts, My Lai, p. 10.

[39] Ibid., p. 16. Townsend Hoopes, theundersecretary of the U.S. Air Force from1967 to 1969, blames the cultural gap forthis error of mistaking civilians forcombatants: “Americans could not get tothe heart of local politics in Vietnam,because the Vietnamese would not permitthe necessary intimacy, and because itwas beyond U.S. capability to provideenough operatives with the knowledgeand skill to break through the formidablebarriers of language and culturaldifference.” The Limits of Intervention,pp. 70–71.

[40] Olson and Roberts, My Lai, p. 16. Onthe dynamics of depersonalization inatrocious mass violence, see TzvetanTodorov, Facing the Extreme: Moral Lifein the Concentration Camps (London:Phoenix, 2000), pp. 158–78.

[41] See Neale, The American War inVietnam, p. 130.

[42] On the general situation after theTet Mau Than event of 1968, compareRonald H. Spector, After Tet: TheBloodiest Year in Vietnam (New York:Free Press, 1993), and Ho Khang, TheTet Mau Than 1968 Event in South

Vietnam (Hanoi: The Gioi, 2001).

[43] See the intriguing analysis ofposttraumatic stress disorder symptomsby Allan Young, “Bodily Memory andTraumatic Memory,” in Paul Antze andMichael Lambek, eds., Tense Past:Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory(New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. 99.Also Allen Young, The Harmony ofIllusions: Inventing Post-Traumatic StressDisorder (Princeton: Princeton UniversityPress, 1995), pp. 124–28.

[44] On the state of denial, see StanleyCohen’s States of Denial: Knowing aboutAtrocities and Suffering (Cambridge:Polity Press, 2001).

[45] Trullinger, Village at War, p. 129.

[46] Personal communication with HaPhuc Mai, the director of the Da NangWar Museum, who advised the project.

[47] On the role of Cao Dai in the politicsof war, see Jayne Werner, PeasantPolitics and Religious Sectarianism:Peasant and Priest in the Cao Dai inVietnam (New Haven: Yale UniversitySoutheast Asian Studies, 1981).

[48] Interviews with the family of thewartime village chief in An Bang, inDecember 1997.

[49] Henri Lefebvre, The Production ofSpace (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1991), pp.292–96.