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My Lai brings lessons in forgiveness
March 12, 1998
by Mike Boehm
Thirty years ago, US soldiers committed one of the most horrific crimes
in American military history -- the massacre of some 500 Vietnamese civilians
at My Lai.
Today I have the honor of attending the groundbreaking ceremony for the
My Lai Peace Park. As an American veteran of the Vietnam War and as a
representative of the Quakers in Madison, Wis., I have spent the last
few years working with the Women's Union and the People's Committee of
Quang Ngai Province to establish a revolving loan fund for the poor women
of My Lai and to prepare for the groundbreaking ceremony.
The Peace Park, inspired by the Vietnamese-American Peace Park under construction
north of Ha Noi, will initially cover 4.5 acres near the existing My Lai
War Memorial. It is designed, in the words of our Vietnamese counterparts,
as "a place for children to entertain and a place where people can meditate
over the past with its suffering and losses and also to hope for a better
future."
The My Lai Peace Park would not have been possible without the amazing
generosity and forgiveness of the Vietnamese people.
Last September, I spent most of an airplane flight from Da Nang to Ha
Noi speaking to Phan Van Do, my Vietnamese interpreter, about our previous
four days in My Lai. At one point, the subject of the American soldiers
who committed the massacre came up in our conversation. I told him the
story of Varnado Simpson, which I had recently read in "Four Hours in
My Lai" (Viking, 1992) by Michael Bilton and Kevin Sim. By Simpson's own
account, he killed at least 25 people that day. For years he has lived
with all his doors and windows locked and shuttered. He takes dozens of
pills that don't seem to help. He is afraid to go to sleep at
night because he has nightmares of the people he killed at My Lai coming
back to kill him. He's tried to kill himself three times.
Then I told Do about Simpson's son. The 10-year-old boy was playing in
the front yard when two teenagers across the street got into an argument.
One of them pulled out a gun and started shooting. A bullet hit the young
Simpson in the head. "I was in the house," said Simpson. "And I came out
and picked him up. He died in my arms. And when I looked at him, his face
was like the same face of the child that I had killed. And I said, 'This
is the punishment for me killing the people that I killed.'"
Do looked at me with shock and sorrow in his face and then turned away
from me and looked out the window of the plane in silence. After a while,
he turned back and asked quietly, "Was that his only son?" I said "yes"
and he turned back to the window for the rest of the flight.
I told Do the story about Varnado Simpson and his son because many Vietnamese
people, including Do, believe Americans could kill and just walk away
with no psychic, emotional or spiritual scars. I didn't expect such a
reaction of sorrow and compassion.
I put myself in Do's place and I wonder if I would have said, "Good, he
deserved it" or "What goes around comes around." Instead, what I felt
from Do that day, and what I see again and again from Vietnamese people
is a level of understanding that is almost incomprehensible. I wonder,
can we Americans give ourselves a chance to know these people, whose humanity
we rejected and then ignored for so long?
If we can, then we , too, might reach a new level of understanding.
Mike Boehm is the project chair of the My Lai Peace Park Project in Madison,
Wis. He is currently visiting Vietnam for the dedication of a My Lai Peace
Park, scheduled to coincide with the 30th anniversary of the My Lai massacre
on March 16.
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