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A saviour returns to find hope at massacre site

— PHOTO: AP

Massacre survivor Do Ba performs rituals at his family’s grave site while his saviour Lawrence Colburn looks on, in My Lai on Saturday.

MY LAI (Vietnam): Lawrence Colburn returned to My Lai on Saturday and found hope in the killing fields.

On the 40th anniversary of the infamous massacre, Mr. Colburn was reunited with a young man he once rescued from the rampaging members of Charlie Company, U.S. troops who slaughtered up to 500 unarmed Vietnamese villagers in one of the most notorious chapters of the Vietnam War.

On March 16, 1968, Mr. 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 persons 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 Mr. Colburn, a member of a three-man helicopter crew who 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.”

Mr. Colburn, Mr. Ba and hundreds of others are gathered over the 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.

The massacre reminds Mr. Colburn of the 2005 images of torture that emerged from the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

“We’re supposed to learn from the mistakes of history, but we keep making the same mistakes,” said Mr. Colburn (58), who now runs a medical supplies business north of Atlanta. “That’s what makes My Lai more important today than ever before.”

On that morning 40 years ago, Mr. Colburn, a helicopter door gunner, flew over My Lai on a reconnaissance mission with pilot Hugh Thompson and crew chief Glenn Andreotta. After several runs over the area, they realised that unarmed civilians were being slaughtered by U.S. troops on the ground.

The members of Charlie Company had come on a “search and destroy” mission, trying to track down elusive Vietcong guerrillas, whose tactics had depleted the company’s ranks in the weeks leading up to the massacre.

But the U.S. troops began shooting in My Lai that day even though they hadn’t come under attack. Once the shooting started, it quickly escalated into an orgy of killing.

The angry and frustrated troops had found themselves in a bewildering war where it was impossible to distinguish friend from foe.

Their actions shocked the American public, who had preferred to think of U.S. troops as heroes making the world safe for democracy. Seymour Hersh, the journalist who exposed the massacre, also sees parallels between My Lai and the Abu Ghraib scandal, which he has reported on extensively. But he says the public furore unleashed by My Lai was far greater.

Mr. Thompson, Mr. Colburn and Mr. Andreotta, who later received government honours for their actions, arrived after the spasm of violence had escalated into a frenzied bloodbath.

Mr. Thompson landed the helicopter between the villagers and the marauding troops. While Mr. Colburn and Mr. Andreotta covered him, Mr. Thompson persuaded the members of Charlie Company to stop shooting.

Mr. Thompson and Mr. Andreotta, who died in the war later, found Do Ba in a ditch piled high with bodies and blood.

“He was still clinging to his mother,” Mr. Colburn said.

They took Ba to a hospital, and he later moved in with an aunt, who raised him in My Lai. The two hadn’t expected to meet each other this weekend.

“I’m very glad to see the man who rescued me,” Mr. Ba said, as the two men went to light incense at the graves of Mr. Ba’s mother, sister and brother, who were 31, 4 and 2 when they were killed. “He’s a good man.” — AP

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