2/8/2005
Market Leninism brings golf course to My Lai
James Pringle
My Lai, Vietnam: A golf course near My Lai, scene of the notorious massacre? A resort beach hotel in what was once a heavily-fortified Vietcong base area on the South China Sea? Tennis courts, villas, swimming pools and fancy restaurants? It may be unwelcome to purists, but bunkers may soon not just be home-made shelters where villagers took refuge during the Vietnam War.
My Lai, where up to 504 unarmed and unresisting old men, women and children died at the hands of US troops on March 16, 1968, is becoming a tourist zone instead of a war zone.
Officials in Quang Ngai Province, where 70 per cent of villages were once destroyed by American aerial bombardment, artillery fire and the Zippo lighter, have become among the most forward-looking and open-minded in terms of the Communist Party’s official push for renovation, development and tourism, diplomatic sources say. "Market Leninism" is being put into effect in what was once South Vietnam’s most hardcore Vietcong region.
My Khe, the future resort, and My Lai are neighbouring hamlets in Son My village, where troops of the Americal Division operated that day. The first platoon of Charlie Company, embittered by earlier deaths of buddies by snipers and landmines went on a killing rampage here. It was commanded by America’s best-known war criminal, Lieutenant William Calley.
He was found guilty of murdering 22 "Oriental human beings," but endured little punishment, though he remains the perfect exemplar of the banality of evil.
Ninety villagers were also killed at My Khe, three miles from here, by Bravo company, but investigators got nowhere.
It’s there that an illustrated billboard depicts the future resort and golf course, complete with the kind of bunkers familiar to golfers. There are still tin-roofed shacks serving fish, but bulldozers are already working, and the first clearing of land has begun.
Further north along the coast, an international airport nears completion at the former US airbase at Chu Lai, and high-tech factories operate in a new industrial zone. Posh homes are being built for foreign executives. Not all the plans, if one looks at other areas of Vietnam, may reach fruition, but that won’t be for want of trying.
Does all this planned conspicuous consumption offend the survivors of the worst American atrocity of the Vietnam War? No, in My Lai they welcome it. Why not, they ask, when the village remains poor, with jobs scarce for young people in Quang Ngai?
Vietnam hopes for 3.2 million foreign visitors this year, and My Lai wants in on the action. "Yes, we are happy at the prospect of more foreigners coming," said Pham Thanh Cong, 48, My Lai museum director, and one of only five survivors of the massacre.
At age 11, he was concealed under the corpses of his mother, sisters and 7-year-old brother after Calley’s soldiers, average age 20, opened fire. "We want them to see the tragedy that occurred, but also to enjoy themselves in Vietnam," he said. "New development creates employment, and helps improve peoples’ lives."
At present, 12,000 foreigners a year visit My Lai, along with 50,000 Vietnamese tourists. What happened here will never be forgotten. Cong currently supervises new construction "to make the village look as it did before the American soldiers came." Workmen are even recreating bunkers — the old, shell-proof kind.
Otherwise, My Lai has changed little since that terrible day. Water wells where murdered villagers were stuffed remain unused, and another survivor, Ha Thi Quy, 80, shares inconsolable memories, as she shows her friends’ burial place in the green ricefields. Cong says that, after recalling events for visitors, he often can’t sleep, seeming to hear explosions, and people crying out in a haunted landscape.
In My Lai’s memorial book, Dothie Payne, USA, is uncompromising toward fellow Americans who transgressed here, writing, "Do not forgive, Lord, for they know what they do — they know."
The people of My Lai have not laid the past aside, and they do not want ever to see serving American soldiers here again, they say. But all other Americans are welcome, as is everyone else who comes in peace. And if they bring their golf clubs, that’s fine too.
By arrangement with the International Herald Tribune