
Note: Some of the photographs below are disturbing.
Leaving Tam Quan, we biked a few miles to what was in some respects the most significant stop on our tour: Son My, the district that was the site of the My Lai massacre. (Click on this link for a detailed Wikipedia history.) On March 16, 1968, soldiers from two U.S. Army battalions attacked a number of hamlets in pursuit of Viet Cong (VC) guerrillas with orders. Colonel Oran Henderson of the 11th Brigade told his officers to “go in there aggressively, close with the enemy and wipe them out for good.” The orders, as transmitted downward, resulted in the command to consider anyone in the villages as VC members or sympathizers. Over the course of the next few hours, soldiers destroyed everything in the villages—homes, livestock, food supplies; killed somewhere between 347 and 504 civilians, including women, children and the elderly; and conducted an unknown number of sexual assaults.
The following are photographs from the memorial museum and the surrounding area.
The museum’s heroes:
The museum’s villains:
Some actions, some victims, and some survivors:
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Outside the museum and in nearby fields, there are mass graves, as well as the foundations some of the houses that the soldiers destroyed.
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