Forty Years On My Lai Remembered

.

Hanoi - Dozens of yellow-robed Buddhist monks gathered in the hamlet of My Lai, in Quang Ngai province, on Saturday to pray for the souls of the civilians massacred by US troops 40 years ago Sunday, at the height of the Vietnam War.

'Today we held a Buddhist mass for the dead,' said Pham Thanh Cong, director of the My Lai Museum, which commemorates the massacres in exhaustive detail on many of the sites where they occurred. 'Tomorrow comes the official state ceremony.'

Hanoi is staging a weekend-long ceremony to mark the massacres, in which a company of US Army soldiers, unable to find any of the Viet Cong guerrillas they had been ordered to clear from the village, instead killed up to 504 defenceless men, women and children.

But while the massacres at My Lai are recorded in Vietnamese history books, and at the My Lai Museum, most of the atrocities committed during the Vietnam War go largely unremembered.more