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catman
Joined: 18 Jul 2004
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 Posted: Sun Mar 16, 2008 1:19 pm Post subject: 40th anniversary of the My Lai massacre |
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U.S. soldier returns to My Lai
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Lawrence Colburn returned to My Lai and found hope at the site of one of the most notorious chapters of the Vietnam War.
On the 40th anniversary of the massacre of up to 500 unarmed Vietnamese villagers, the former helicopter gunner was reunited Saturday with a young man he rescued from rampaging U.S. soldiers.
On March 16, 1968, 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 people 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 Colburn, a member of a three-man U.S. Army helicopter crew that landed in the midst of the massacre and 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."
Colburn, 58, now runs a medical supplies business north of Atlanta. He, Ba and hundreds of others are gathering this 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.
Buddhist monks in saffron robes led the mourners in prayer Saturday outside a museum that has been erected to remember the dead. An official memorial program will be held on Sunday.
Among those coming to pray was Ha Thi Quy, 83, a My Lai survivor who suffers from anger and depression four decades after the slaughter. Soldiers from the Army's Charlie Company shot her in the leg and killed her mother, her 16-year-old daughter and her 6-year-old son.
Her husband later died of injuries from the massacre and another son had to have an arm and a leg amputated after suffering gunshot wounds that day.
Quy only survived because she was shielded beneath a pile of dead bodies.
"The American government should stop waging wars like they waged in Vietnam," Quy said. "My children were innocent, but those American soldiers killed them."
Seymour Hersh, the journalist who exposed the massacre, said he sees parallels between My Lai and a more recent story that he has he reported on, the 2005 images of torture from the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. But he says the public furor unleashed by My Lai was far greater.
"It's stunning how much impact My Lai had and how little impact Abu Ghraib had," Hersh said by telephone from Washington. "We'll have to leave it to historians to figure out why." |
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Ya-ta Boy
Joined: 16 Jan 2003
Location: Established in 1994
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| Posted: Sun Mar 16, 2008 4:24 pm Post subject: |
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| "It's stunning how much impact My Lai had and how little impact Abu Ghraib had," Hersh said by telephone from Washington. "We'll have to leave it to historians to figure out why." |
I'm surprised to hear Hersh said that. My personal opinion is just the opposite. [/quote] |
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bacasper
Joined: 26 Mar 2007
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| Posted: Mon Mar 17, 2008 3:51 am Post subject: |
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| Ya-ta Boy wrote: |
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| "It's stunning how much impact My Lai had and how little impact Abu Ghraib had," Hersh said by telephone from Washington. "We'll have to leave it to historians to figure out why." |
I'm surprised to hear Hersh said that. My personal opinion is just the opposite. |
[/quote]
Here's something else Hersh said:
Kids sodomized at Abu Ghraib, Pentagon has the videos - Hersh by Gryn
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2004/7/14/193750/666
Wed Jul 14, 2004 at 08:33:32 PM PDT
(From the diaries -- kos)
Seymour Hersh says the US government has videotapes of boys being sodomized at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
"The worst is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking," the reporter told an ACLU convention last week. Hersh says there was "a massive amount of criminal wrongdoing that was covered up at the highest command out there, and higher."
This is a summary of Hersh speaking at the ACLU 2004 America At A Crossroads conference according to EdCone.com (via Oliver Willis). I verified by watching the video myself (it starts at 1:07, the "worse stuff" part starts at 1:30).
There's more bad stuff in here, read Ed Cone's summary.
I'll try transcribing some of the more important bits.
[my transcription from 1:31 - 1:32]
Some of the worse that happened that you don't know about, ok. Videos, there are women there. Some of you may have read they were passing letters, communications out to their men. This is at Abu Ghraib which is 30 miles from Baghdad [...]
The women were passing messages saying "Please come and kill me, because of what's happened". Basically what happened is that those women who were arrested with young boys/children in cases that have been recorded. The boys were sodomized with the cameras rolling. The worst about all of them is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking that your government has. They are in total terror it's going to come out.
It's impossible to say to yourself how do we get there? who are we? Who are these people that sent us there?
Chilling. |
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igotthisguitar
Joined: 08 Apr 2003
Location: South Korea (Permanent Vacation)
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| Posted: Mon Mar 17, 2008 7:08 am Post subject: |
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Didn't Colin Powell have a direct hand in trying to "cover-up" the Mai Lai Massacre?
Apparently he gained a lot of "credit" for being a good soldier & ... following orders. |
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