- Title: Survivors of Vietnam's My Lai massacre remember military atrocities 50 years ago
- Date: 15th March 2018
- Summary: LOI BURNING INCENSE STICKS (SOUNDBITE) (Vietnamese) MY LAI MASSACRE SURVIVOR, VO CAO LOI, 66, SAYING: "Some of the Viet Cong came to assist us to bury the dead. They helped families with no survivors. And people that survived, buried their own. I remember a man whose wife and three kids were killed in front of their home. He dug a hole and buried them right where they lay because he did not have time to bring them to the cemetery." LOI STANDING WITH HIS FAMILY MEMBERS LOI'S NIECE, LUONG THI TRANH, 58, SHOWING HER SCAR (SOUNDBITE) (Vietnamese) MY LAI MASSACRE SURVIVOR, VO CAO LOI, 66, SAYING: "Last week, a U.S. carrier visited Danang port for the first time and that is a very good sign. Nobody wants war. We want nations to be equal and united in peace with each other. The U.S. and Vietnam are moving in the right direction" DANANG CITY, VIETNAM (MARCH 14, 2018) (REUTERS) LOI'S COFFEE SHOP VARIOUS OF LOI SITTING AND READING A BOOK TITLED (Vietnamese): "OBAMA - THREE DAYS IN VIETNAM" A PAGE WITH A PHOTO OF OBAMA AND VIETNAMESE PRESIDENT TRAN DAI QUANG MAKING A JOINT STATEMENT VARIOUS OF LOI TENDING TO FLOWERS AT HIS COFFEE SHOP RICE BEING PREPARED LOI AND HIS WIFE, THU BA, IN THE GARDEN OF HIS COFFEE SHOP
- Embargoed: 29th March 2018 11:26
- Keywords: My Lai massacre Vietnam War anniversary 50 years ago unarmed Vietnamese civilians mass murder U.S. military
- Location: QUANG NGAI PROVINCE AND DANANG CITY, VIETNAM
- City: QUANG NGAI PROVINCE AND DANANG CITY, VIETNAM
- Country: Vietnam
- Topics: Conflicts/War/Peace
- Reuters ID: LVA008873P4XZ
- Aspect Ratio: 16:9
- Story Text: It took Pham Thi Thuan a while before she could muster the courage to fetch water from across the ditch where 170 of her neighbours, most of them women and children, were killed by U.S. troops during the Vietnam War.
Her father was also one of the victims, "I wanted to yell at him to lay down and maybe they won't shoot again, but they noticed him and shot half of his head away."
Fifty years ago, on March 16, 1968, 504 people were killed by American soldiers in Son My, a collection of hamlets between the central Vietnamese coast and a ridge of misty mountains, in an incident known in the West as the My Lai Massacre -- the worst recorded U.S. war crime committed in Vietnam.
Survivors and U.S. veterans arrived at the My Lai Massacre memorial in Vietnam's Quang Ngai province on Thursday (March 15), a day before the 50th anniversary of the massacre.
Vo Cao Loi was 16 when he saw American helicopters buzz low over his family's house on the clear, sunny morning of the massacre. It was not unusual, Loi said. American troops often passed through the area in the U.S.-backed South Vietnam.
Loi's mother gave him a bag filled with rice and spare clothes and told him to hide. He watched beneath coconut trees by a river as U.S. troops dragged women and children out of their houses and shot them to death.
Loi's mother, older sister and her five-month-old son had been killed by a grenade tossed into the shelter within which they had been hiding to escape the carnage above ground. They lost their lives together with eighteen extended members of Loi's family in the massacre.
There were not enough people left in the village to move the dead to the cemetery, Loi said, so the Viet Cong helped him bury his family in the grounds of their home. Loi joined the Viet Cong after the massacre and fought in the jungle until the end of the war in 1975.
He and his wife now run a coffee shop in a leafy courtyard in Danang filled with photos of trips to France with his children, and a book documenting former U.S. president Barack Obama's trip to Vietnam in 2015.
The My Lai massacre ceremony falls just one week after a port visit by a U.S. aircraft carrier to Danang -- a landmark event amid warming ties between the former foes. After all, as Loi reflected on the atrocities committed decades ago, "nobody wants war." - Copyright Holder: REUTERS
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