I woke up this morning to find in my feed an obituary for William Calley, the only U.S. soldier convicted over his involvement in the My Lai massacre, which saw American troops kill hundreds of Vietnamese civilians in 1968.
According to the Washington Post, Calley "was convicted of murdering at least 22 noncombatants and sentenced to life at hard labor, after a military jury rejected his defense that he was just following orders. Amid appeals, he ultimately served about three years, much of it under house arrest."
He reportedly died several months ago, at the age of 80, after living in relative obscurity for decades.
While the obituary examines Calley's life in detail, including his troubled childhood, it doesn't mention any of his victims by name. It does, however, include the standard American journalese line that "information on survivors was not immediately available." This is, of course, a reference to Calley's own relatives, not any of the people who escaped the killing at My Lai.
And that's where this story gets a little bit personal for me, because I once tracked down and interviewed, at length, one of the survivors of the massacre.
His name is Duc Tran Van and he lives in Germany, where I was an AP correspondent from 2012 to 2023. You won't find the story online because AP refused to run it. It was one of the very few articles I ever got pushback on. The editors involved gave me various explanations for why an exclusive piece with pictures that was ready to go and very relevant to our readership shouldn't be published. One features editor, who no longer works for AP, told me: “My Lai has been written about and it’s such a well-worn story that there’s not a rational (sic) for going forward.”
End of story.
Not quite. The memory of interviewing a man who almost five decades earlier had witnessed U.S. troops killing his family and neighbours won't go away. Duc sent his sons out of the house so they wouldn't see his tears as he recounted to me what happened in My Lai on March 16, 1968.
I remember that Duc's story didn't fit neatly into either the official Vietnamese account of the massacre or the dominant narrative coming from the U.S. anti-war movement. It could be that this was too challenging for some editors. Other articles, including a more straightforward AP piece marking the 50th anniversary of the killings, did get published.
One of Duc's biggest wishes was to meet Calley. He hoped for answers to some of the questions that had plagued him for most of his life. We'll never know for sure now what Calley thought about what happened at My Lai, but for what it's worth, here is one survivor's account that I think deserves to be read:
Haunted by his memory of a Vietnam massacre, survivors seeks to set history books right
REMSCHEID, Germany _ Nothing about the nondescript row house in this blue collar German town hints at the dark memory that lies inside.
It's down in the basement, between the bric-a-brac of family life, that Vietnam-born Duc Tran Van keeps the images that remind him of the My Lai massacre 6,000 miles and 46 years away.
"My mother and my sisters were preparing rice for breakfast when the helicopters arrived,” he recalls on a hot Sunday afternoon in May. Duc has sent his three sons out on a bike ride _ he doesn’t want them to see their father cry.
"We started hearing screaming. It wasn't the first time the village was attacked but my mother sensed that this time was different and so she grabbed an emergency bag.”
The 1968 killing of hundreds of civilians by U.S. soldiers marked a turning point in the Vietnam War, strengthening opposition in the United States against the conflict. But public debate about the incident has faded away, partly due to the silence of most of the survivors and soldiers involved.
Duc, too, tried to hide away the memory of losing his mother and three sisters, until a trip to Vietnam in 2007 reopened old wounds.
Now he is campaigning to ensure that the record of what happened on March 16, 1968, is correct, including in Vietnam. Duc has found an ally in Ron Haeberle, a U.S. Army photographer whose pictures of the massacred helped bring it to public attention in the first place.
"My impression is that he’s really determined to correct history," Haeberle said in a telephone interview from his home in Cleveland, Ohio.
One of Haeberle’s pictures shows a six-year-old Duc lying on a dirty road shielding his baby sister. In another, their mother’s corpse is seen, a gaping wound in her head.
The pictures, along with 18 others Haeberle smuggled out of Vietnam, documented the killing of dozens of men, women and children in a way that made it impossible for U.S. officials to deny a massacre had taken place. After the end of the war they were used for propaganda purposes by Vietnam’s communist regime.
But for decades Vietnamese authorities misstated who was on the photographs and what they showed, said Duc. After he complained, some of the descriptions at the official My Lai museum were changed, but others remain incorrect, he said.
To Duc the mistakes reflect a broader indifference by U.S. and Vietnam authorities toward the survivors. Trade has boomed since the two countries re-established diplomatic relations, giving the government in Hanoi little incentive to antagonize its former ally by bringing up the massacre or siding with survivors demanding compensation.
"Vietnam is very cautious of harming its relationship with the United States," said Duc.
The lack of debate in Vietnam about what happened also bothers him. After seeing his mother fall wounded from a gunshot (“I never saw her again”) Duc ran more than 4 miles to the next village, where his grandmother lived. When he arrived, carrying his infant sister, none of the villagers including one of his uncles wanted to help him.
"Maybe they were afraid. I was covered in blood and coming from a Vietcong village," said Duc. Although the communist guerrilla wasn’t present in My Lai at the time of the American assault, its members - including his father - had been there previously, a fact that didn’t fit well with Vietnam’s subsequent portrayal of the incident.
Appeals for survivors in financial difficulty to receive government help have also met with hostility from the authorities, and private donations haven’t reached their intended recipients, claims Duc.
Meanwhile, the 52-year-old, who has lived in Germany since 1983, has tried to reach out to some of the other American soldiers present that day, including William Calley, Paul Meadlo and Ernest Medina. Calley, who was the only U.S. soldier convicted over the killings, publicly expressed his remorse for what happened five years ago, but has ignored requests to meet with survivors like Duc.
"To this day I don't know who killed my mother,” said Duc. “It's not about revenge. I just want to know how he would react when he meets a survivor.”
Haeberle fears time is running out to answer some of the open questions about My Lai and lesser-known incidents where U.S. soldiers killed Vietnamese civilians.
"To me there’s so many stories that are locked up in that village," he said. “These people are getting older and the stories are going to die with them.”
