This year marks the 47th anniversary of a war crime committed by US Army soldiers in the Vietnamese village of Song My. This event, shocking in its cruelty, in many ways became a catalyst for anti-war sentiment in American society. Journalist Myron Hersh was one of the first to report on this tragedy. Lenta.ru offers an abbreviated version of it new article in The New Yorker magazine, in which Hersh talks about both the massacre itself and what became of its participants.
In the village community Milay (in Russian historiography, the name Songmi is more common - approx. "Tapes.ru") has a large ditch. On the morning of March 16, 1968, it was littered with dozens of corpses of women, children and the elderly - all of them were shot by American soldiers. Now the ditch seems to me even wider than in the photographs sent 47 years ago from the crime scene - time and soil erosion have taken their toll. During the Vietnam War, next to the ditch were located rice fields, but now they have been paved with convenient paths to make it easier for tourists to get to these stones and ravines - modest silent witnesses of that terrible massacre. The massacre in My Lai marked a turning point in this infamous war: a detachment of Americans (Charlie Company) received false intelligence that Viet Cong forces were stationed in the village. But they found only civilians there. This did not prevent the soldiers from opening fire on unarmed people, burning their houses, and raping dozens of women. One of the commanders who led the massacre was Lieutenant William Lowes Kelly, who had been expelled from college in Miami before the war.
By early 1969, many of the Charlie Company soldiers had been sent home. At that time I was a thirty-two-year-old journalist. It didn't fit in my head how these guys - almost boys - could commit such an atrocity. I started looking for them, writing letters to them. Oddly enough, many willingly answered, shared the details of those events, as well as thoughts on how they should live on - after what they had done.
During the investigation, some soldiers admitted to being at the scene of the crime, but said they refused to obey Kelly's orders and did not kill innocents. The soldiers also pointed to Private Paul Midlo, who shot the villagers almost side by side with Kelly. True or not, it is now difficult to judge, but many of the Charlie Company gave the same testimony: Midlo and the rest of the soldiers, on Kelly's orders, fired several bursts into the ditch, and then threw grenades into it. A prolonged cry came from the pit, and a boy of two or three years old, covered in blood and mud, with difficulty climbed up over the corpses and ran to the rice field. The mother must have covered him with her body and he was unharmed. According to eyewitnesses, Kelly ran after the child, grabbed him, threw the boy back into the ditch and shot him in cold blood.
Photo: Joe Holloway, Jr. /AP/Fotolink/East News
The next morning while patrolling the area, Midlo stepped on a mine and lost his right leg. One of the soldiers told me that before the helicopter arrived for the wounded private, Midlo cursed his commander and shouted: “You made us do it! The Lord will punish you!”
"Just put him in the damn helicopter!" Kelly was angry.
But Midlo's cries did not subside until the very transfer to the field hospital.
Private Midlo grew up in western Indiana. After talking to probably every telephone operator in the state and spending a lot of dimes on calls from street phones, I finally found the family of this soldier in the town of New Goshen. Paul's mother, Myrtle, answered the phone. I introduced myself as a reporter who writes about Vietnam and asked if I could visit her son and ask him a couple of questions. She said, "Well, try it."
The Midlo family lived in a small wooden house on a poor poultry farm. As I pulled up to their house, Myrtle came out to meet me. She said hello and said Paul was inside. His mother didn't know if he would talk to me at all. He told her almost nothing about Vietnam. And then the woman uttered a phrase that most accurately described this hated war to me: “I sent to fight good boy and they made a killer out of him."
Paul Midlo agreed to talk. He was only 22 years old. Before being sent to Vietnam, he managed to get married, and now they already had two children: a son of two and a half years old and a newborn daughter. In spite of severe wound Paul had to work in a factory to support his family. I asked him to show his wound and talk about the rehabilitation period. Paul took off his prosthesis and began the story. Very soon he reached the events in Milay. Midlo spoke as if he was trying to regain confidence in himself and his words. He got a little flustered when he talked about how Kelly had ordered the villagers to open fire. Paul did not try to justify his actions in the Milay community, he only said that these murders “do not lie in my heart”, because “a lot of our guys were killed in the war. It was just revenge."
Midlo recalled all his actions in horrifying detail. “We thought that the Viet Cong were there, and it was necessary to clear the village. When our detachment reached the place, we began to gather people ... into large groups. Forty or forty-five local people were standing in the middle of the village ... Kelly ordered me and a couple of other guys to guard them, and he left.
According to Paul, the lieutenant returned ten minutes later and told him, “Get rid of them. I want you to kill them." Kelly, being three or four meters from a group of unarmed Vietnamese, was the first to open fire. “Then he ordered us to shoot. I started shooting, but the other guys didn't. And we [Midlo and Kelly] killed all those people together."
Midlo confessed that he personally killed fifteen people from that group.
“We have been ordered. We thought we were doing the right thing. I didn't even think about it then."
There was one witness from Charlie Company who told me that Kelly's order shocked Midlo. When the commander left the soldiers to guard the civilians, Paul Midlo and his comrade "talked to these people, played with their children and even treated them to sweets." When Kelly returned and ordered the people to be killed, “Midlo looked at him dumbfounded, as if he could not believe his ears. He asked again: "Kill?"
“When Kelly repeated the order,” recalls another soldier, “Midlo opened fire and began firing at the locals along with him. But then Paul started crying."
Mike Wallace of CBS radio was interested in this interview and Midlo agreed to tell his story on television. I spent the night at his house, and the next morning, together with Paul and his wife, I urgently flew to New York. I also learned from Paul that he spent several months in treatment and rehabilitation at a military hospital in Japan, and when he returned home, he did not tell anyone about what happened in Vietnam. Shortly after his return, his wife was awakened by loud crying from the nursery. She rushed there and saw that her husband had grabbed their son by the arms and was shaking violently, holding him up.
A young Washington lawyer, Jeffrey Cowen, told me about the incident in the village of Milay. He had little information, but he said that a certain soldier went crazy and began to kill Vietnamese civilians. Three years before that, I had worked at the Pentagon, where I was assigned by the Associated Press, and often interacted with officers returning from the war. They all spoke as one about the murders of innocents. local residents.
I was hooked on Cowan's tip and ran into a young colonel one day. He was wounded in the leg in Vietnam and was promoted to the rank of general while he was in treatment. After that, he worked in the office, carried out paper assignments for the benefit of the army. When I asked him about it unknown soldier, he glared angrily and pounded his knee hard with his fist, "That guy, Kelly, never shot anyone higher than this place!"
So I learned his name. In the library, I managed to unearth a short article in The Times about a certain Lieutenant Kelly, who was accused of murdering an indeterminate number of civilians in South Vietnam. The search for Kelly was not easy - the US Army concealed his location, but I managed to find out that he lived in apartments for a senior officers Fort Benning, in Columbus, Georgia. And then I had access to classified indictments that found Kelly guilty of the premeditated murder of 109 "Asians."
Kelly didn't look like a bloodthirsty monster at all. He was a thin, nervous young man - he was about twenty-five at the time - with pale, almost transparent skin. He tried his best to look like a tough warrior. After a few beers, Kelly began to tell me how he and his soldiers had become embroiled in a fierce firefight in the village of Milay. We talked all night. At one point, Kelly apologized and went to the bathroom. Through the half-open door, I saw that he had vomited blood.
In November 1969 I wrote an article about Kelly, Meadlo and the village massacre. Life and Look publications were not interested in it, then I turned to the small anti-war publishing house Dispatch News Service. At that time, the situation escalated, and unrest shook the country. Richard Nixon won the election in 1968 thanks to a promise to end the war. But in fact, he tried to win it with massive attacks and bombings. Nothing changed in 1969 - 1,500 people died every month. american soldiers like the year before.
War correspondents, through their reports and photographs, made it clear that the Vietnam War was morally unsound, conducted strategically incorrectly, and had nothing at all to do with what they claimed. official authorities in Saigon and Washington. On November 15, 1969, just two days after the publication of my first article on the My Lai Massacre, over a million and a half people marched against the war in the streets of Washington. Harry Haldeman, Nixon's right-hand man, wrote a couple of notes that were not made public until eighteen years later. It was said that on December 1, 1969, when the wave of discontent caused by Midlo's revelations reached its peak, Nixon resorted to "dirty tricks" to discredit the evidence of the main witness of the massacre in the village of Milay. And then in 1971, when the court found Kelly guilty of the massacre of innocent civilians and sentenced him to life hard labor, Nixon intervened in the case, and the sentence was commuted to House arrest. Three months after the president's resignation, Kelly was released from custody, and for all subsequent years he worked in his father-in-law's jewelry store. Kelly also gave paid interviews to journalists willing to pay for his revelations. In 2009, in a speech to the Kiwanis Club, he said, "Not a day goes by that I don't regret what I did in Milay." But former lieutenant he immediately added that he was just following orders and "probably stupid." He is now seventy-one years old. He was the only one of all the officers tried for the massacre in Milay.
In March 1970, a military commission called fourteen more officers to account, including generals and colonels. They were charged with murder, dereliction of duty, and conspiracy to cover up the truth about the massacre. But only one officer, with the exception of Kelly, stood trial and was found not guilty.
A few months later, in the midst of anti-war protests in student campuses I gave a speech at McAlister College in Saint Paul, Minnesota, calling for an end to the war. Hubert Humphrey, former vice president under Lyndon Johnson, was then a college political science professor. He lost to Nixon in the 1968 election in part because he could not rid himself of the stigma of Lyndon Johnson's henchman who started the Vietnam War. After my speech, Humphrey wanted to talk to me. He said: “I have no complaints against you, Mr. Hersh. You're just doing your job and doing it pretty well, I must admit. But to all these snotty kids that jump around and yell: “Hey, Lyndon Johnson, tell me, don’t be shy, how many children did you kill today?”, I want to say ... ”Here his face turned red, and his voice grew louder with each phrase and almost broke into a cry: "I want to say - you all go to hell!"
Photo: UIG Art and History / East News
I first visited My Lai (as the village was called by the US military and known locally as Song My) just a few months ago with my family. Back in the early 70s, I asked permission from the government South Vietnam visit the village, but at the time the Pentagon was conducting internal investigations here, so civilians weren't allowed in. In 1972, as a journalist for the Times, I visited Hanoi in North Vietnam. In 1980, five years after the "fall of Saigon," I returned to Vietnam to do more interviews for a book and a few reports for the Times. I thought that I had already collected all the information about the massacre in Milay, that I knew if not everything, then a lot. I was wrong.
My Lai Village is located in the center of Vietnam near National Highway 1, the road connecting Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh (formerly Saigon). Pham Thanh Kong, director of the My Lai Museum, one of the few survivors of the massacre. When we first met, this stern, stocky man, now in his sixties, limited himself to common phrases and did not share his memories and experiences. He said the Vietnamese were "a very friendly people" and there was not a hint of sarcasm or accusation in his voice. “We have forgiven but not forgotten,” Kong said. Later, when we were sitting on a bench near a small museum, he began to talk about that terrible massacre. At that time he was only eleven years old. When the American helicopters landed, Kong with his mother, brother and sisters hid in a silo. The soldiers first ordered them to leave, and then, pushing them back, opened fire on them and threw a grenade into the pit. Kong was wounded three times - in the head, in the right side and in the leg. He lost consciousness and woke up already in a mountain of corpses among the bodies of his mother, three sisters and a six-year-old brother. The Americans apparently thought he was dead. As the soldiers flew out of the village, Kong's father, along with a few survivors, came to bury the dead, and they found the surviving boy.
A little later at dinner, he said: "I will never forget this pain." And his job will never let him do it. Kong said that a few years ago, a veteran named Kenneth Scheel visited the museum - he was the only one from Charlie Company who visited Milay after those terrible events. Sheel arrived with Al Jazeera journalists who were filming a documentary to mark the fortieth anniversary of the massacre. Shil was drafted into the army after graduating from high school in a small town in Michigan. After an investigation, he was accused of killing nine civilians, but he was acquitted.
The documentary captures Kong's conversation with Sheel. Kong was told to come American veteran the Vietnam War, which has nothing to do with the massacre in the village. Shil evasively answered reporters: “Did I shoot? I will say this - I shot until the moment I realized that it was all wrong. So I can’t say for sure whether I opened fire on these people.” When it became clear that Shil did participate in the massacre of fellow citizens of Kong, his mood to talk with the Vietnamese faded. Shil constantly repeated that he wanted to "apologize to the people of My Lai", but did not give out any more details. “I keep asking myself why did this happen? I dont know".
Then Kong directly asked: “How did you feel when innocent citizens were killed? That was hard?" Sheel replied that he was not among the soldiers who opened fire on the civilians. To which Kong said: "Then you can be one of those who entered my house and killed my relatives."
The entry in the museum contains the end of their conversation. Sheel said, "All I can do is apologize." Kong, whose voice was filled with pain, kept asking him questions, eliciting the details of the crimes. And Shil just kept saying, "I'm sorry, I'm sorry." Kong asked if the piece went down the soldier's throat when he returned to base, and then Shil began to sob. "Please don't more questions! he sobbed. "I can't take it." Shil then asked if Kong would like to join them for a memorial service for the victims of the My Lai massacre.
Before leaving the museum, I asked Kong why he was so ruthless and adamant with Sheel. My interlocutor frowned and said that he did not want to ease the pain of a participant in those events, who, moreover, refuses to take responsibility for what he had done. After the massacre in the My Lai community, Kong lived with his father for some time, but he was a member of the Viet Cong, and he was killed by American soldiers in 1970. Kong was taken in by relatives from the nearest village, where he helped them take care of the cattle, and after the war he was able to return to school.
173 children, including 55 infants, were executed. Sixty old people died. The museum has information about another important fact: The massacre took place not only in the community of Milay (also known as Milay-4), but also in a neighboring settlement called Mikhe-4. It was about a mile to the east, on the shore South China Sea, and was attacked by another platoon of American soldiers - Bravo Company. The museum has data on 407 victims in Milay-4 and 97 victims in Mykhe-4.
One thing is clear: what happened in Milay 4 was not an isolated case or an exception; so did Bravo Company, albeit on a smaller scale. Like the Charlie company, it was part of the Barker group. These attacks were the most significant operation carried out that day by the combat battalions of the American Division, to which the Barker group belonged. At the same time, the leadership of the division, including the commander, Major General Samuel Koster, periodically flew to the battle area, controlling the process during the day.
Chaos was going on everywhere. In 1967, a terrible war was already underway in the provinces of Quang Ngai, Quang Nam and Quang Tri in South Vietnam; they were known to maintain their independence from the government in Saigon, and also supported the Viet Cong and North Vietnam. Quảng Tri Province was heavily bombed. In addition, American combat aircraft watered all three provinces with various defoliants, among which was "Agent Orange".
End of the first part
A retired American military doctor who served in Vietnam kept the hand of a Vietnamese soldier at home for 47 years, which he himself amputated. Almost half a century later, he returned what was left of her to that same person. For this, a US citizen even flew to Vietnam himself.
(Total 6 photos)
1. In 1966, Dr. Sam Axelrad brought a Vietnamese hand home to Houston. It is difficult to say what made American doctors remove the skin and muscles from the amputated limb, and connect the bones with wire. However, it is obvious that not every veteran has such a strange "trophy".
2. Anyway, on July 1, 2013, the doctor handed over the remains of the hand to the "rightful owner". Nguyen Quen Hung, now 73, said he lost a limb in October 1966. An elderly Vietnamese man said that the Americans wounded him near the city of Ankhe, where he now lives.
3. The bullet hit the hand, but the 27-year-old soldier managed to escape from the enemy. For some time he swam away from his pursuers, then hid in a warehouse where rice was stored. He hid there for three days, but he was spotted from a helicopter.
The wounded Vietnamese was taken to an American military hospital, where Dr. Axelrad took care of him. He decided to amputate his shot arm. “When the Americans grabbed me, I felt like a fish on a cutting board,” Nguyen Quen Hung admitted. “They could have killed me and saved me.” After the operation, he recovered for eight months, and then helped American doctors for another six months.
“He probably thought we were going to put him in a POW camp. Of course, he did not expect us to take care of him,” recalls Dr. Axelrad, who went into private practice after the war. He also explained why he kept the Vietnamese soldier's hand. According to the doctor, all these years she was for him a kind of reminder of a good deed.
4. It is worth noting that for a long time Axelrad kept the bones of a Vietnamese soldier in his military backpack. He did not even dare to get into this backpack, but in 2011 he realized that the limb needed to be returned. He came to Vietnam without knowing anything about the fate of the soldier he once operated on. He did not know if this man was alive or where to look for him. That trip did not bring him the desired result, but the American met a local journalist who wrote an article about lost hand. Nguyen Quyen Hung's relatives saw this article and contacted the journalists, who helped arrange a meeting with Axelrad.
5. Khan said he was very happy with this outcome: amputated arm and a surgeon's certificate will help him receive a pension as a war veteran.
6. “All my documents were lost during the war, and the state denied me a disability pension. I hope that my hand will serve as proof enough for them,” he said, also adding that he wants to be buried along with his once lost limb.
(1964-1975) claimed the lives of 3 million Vietnamese soldiers and civilians, as well as 60 thousand American troops.
We got out of the car after long way through Vietnam. The border zone of Myong Khen, after 7 km Laos. But today it's too late to pass the border post - 23:40, and you should sleep. In a dark city, among the empty hostels, they chose one of the cheapest.
Your passport, please, asks the person at the reception.
My passport, - and then I realize that he is nowhere but in another hotel, 600 km from here, and all this road, all this hitchhiking and tedious road through the mountains will have to be done again. There are 2 days left until the end of the visa. The clock is midnight. March 8. Happy holiday to you women, do not lose your passport!
My friends sympathized with me. Vietnam was the fifth country of our stay after Nepal, India, Thailand, Cambodia - and all this time I pressed on them so that they checked passports, keys. But in the end, this absurdity happened to me. I remember how I left the hotel in the city of Chinese merchants Hoi An, crossed the road with a backpack and sat in a cafe opposite for 4 hours, drinking cup after cup of fragrant Vietnamese coffee and developing a route. And then she just left without picking up her passport from the hotel. I forgot.
Morning in Myong Khen. I have 600 km of road to Hoi An and back. In this mountain village, monotonous goods are laid out on the shelves - mostly cookies from neighboring Thailand, some snacks, glue, ropes from China. In the morning market, fruits, vegetables, herbs, rice noodles. Buying food here turned out to be a whole performance: prices for us are inflated by 2-3 times, when you set your reasonable, they laugh the whole company, then they sell something and laugh after it again. Among the locals, our appearance caused an unhealthy stir: everyone from his house shouted “hello!” to us, but the conversation did not develop further, because their knowledge of English ended there. Some shouted “hello!” for persuasiveness. several times, holding hands. A border village, and the appearance of Europeans is more surprised than in all of Vietnam. It's like a UFO has landed. What would aliens do if they actually landed here...
I decided to take buses with transfers - hitchhiking was no longer due to time constraints. A red bus pulled up to Vinh. It’s good that a sign with the official price is attached to the side - 120 thousand dong, so you won’t have to bargain endlessly. The driver nodded his head and seemed to indicate that he was leaving in two hours. It seems to be. But twenty minutes later, shamelessly, in shoes, he entered our hotel room, demanding advance payment for the fare. He showed something with his fingers. My friends and I silently escorted him out and closed the door behind him. Gopnik.
Two hours later, my friends sent me to the bus - they paid the driver 120 thousand dongs, but for some reason he already demanded 200 from me. I got on the bus, then another passenger came in. The driver and the conductor smiled at me all over. When we passed several mountain villages, the conductor sat in a chair in front of mine, turned around and began to demand to pay up to 200 thousand dongs. The answer was my "No". To which he began to fold his fingers into primitive designs, alluding, as it obviously seemed to him, to sex. The behavior of the monkey even more reminded me of the gopniks of provincial Russia in the 90s and caused a fit of rage. Having switched to the sign language available to the "interlocutor", I showed him the only finger, as a solution to the problem, stood up and demanded my money. The bus stopped. The driver and conductor were taken aback. They did not want to give money. I went to the conductor and took out the contents of his shirt pocket - my money was not there. The conductor's smile faded from his face, he sat rooted to the spot. Yes, socialist Vietnam- not criminal Cambodia, it is unlikely that I would have gone through such numbers “on hijacking a bus”. I took a mobile phone from the conductor that was lying nearby, began to demand money and open the doors. He did not have to refuse for long, after a couple of minutes I tapped my mobile phone on the glass of the bus, making it clear that I could break it in response to the antics of the gorilla. The conductor gave the money, I phoned him. The driver tried to apologize, but then opened the bus doors. I went out on a bright afternoon. The road to the hotel was waiting for me on foot through several mountain villages. Maybe this happened because I am wearing shorts, it's all about them, but here no one wears shorts, only pants. Ordinary denim shorts, never paid attention to them anywhere before special attention. No, it's not about the shorts, it's about the people. The idea to throw a stone at the bus came to me too late, they had already driven far away. I just showed them the same “fuck”, but the new villagers were already shouting “hello!” several times and waved their hands.
Two hours later I sat in new bus to Vinh. And again, the fare was clarified. The driver was young. a nice guy. The conductor entered later, along with passengers, mostly peasants from the village, ready with sacks. Women silently sat in the corners of the salon, men loudly discussed something with each other. But no one, when they saw me, did not hide their surprise, laughter, some even pointed a finger. We drove through several villages along the Lam River. Here it is narrow mountainous, but closer to Vinh it expands and flows into the sea. Several peasant peasants sat around me, without hesitation they began to examine me, one began to pinch my hair on his hands, showing his almost hairless hands. For them, I still continue to be an unprecedented circus beast. One of the peasants began to loudly prove something to me in Vietnamese. I turned away and looked out the window. An impudent conductor with a scar near his right eye came up and, with a smile that meant nothing but stupidity, showed that I had to pay up to 200 thousand dong. The peasants eagerly looked in our direction, waiting for the performance. It became clear that this was not an accident, but ordinary chauvinism. Yes, I have White color skin, I lead a different lifestyle and I even have some funds for free travel. Apathy seized me, I continued to look out the window, not reacting in any way to his grown smile. So many kilometers with them still ahead ... The bus was barely moving along the dusty road. The conductor shouted and demanded something for a long time, then sat down next to him, explained something to the village public, finished, threw plastic bottle out the window, right in front of my nose. A minute later, he fell on me, slamming me into the glass, taking a defiantly relaxed pose. Stuff like this makes me angry. I elbowed him in the side and pushed him away from me. Amazed, he did not understand my behavior, he needed a reason. To portray such a thing, so that a primitive patriarchal society would no longer have any questions for me. pointed him to wedding ring with the most serious look. His face darkened, he sat down, people turned away, no one else tried to sit with me. Heh, the ring purchased for Russian realities works flawlessly here too.
The bus passed more and more cities, at stops I tried to buy something to eat and drink, but for me all prices were immediately multiplied by 2. Having abandoned attempts, I returned to my now always empty place for two. Among other passengers, more and more intelligent young people appeared, students, probably. Almost at the door of the bus, the guy dropped off the smiling girl from the motorcycle. They had a last laugh, and she began to climb the steps. I immediately liked her friendly face, there were almost no seats left on the bus, the girl sat next to me. We drove for an hour in silence, it was getting dark, the light fell beautifully on rice terraces in the mountains. Then the girl offered water and chewing gum. In English? Yes, she speaks English.
Hien took it out of the bag different flowers from large trees, she said that today she went specially to photograph them from Vinh. She put a transparent one on my knee White flower and congratulated on March 8. This holiday is also popular in Vietnam, as well as in the USSR, like the history of the USSR, like Lenin, like Ho Chi Minh City.
Hien, showing the face of Ho Chi Minh City on a beautiful banknote, invited me to the museum of the socialist leader in Vinh. Not knowing Ho Chi Minh here is like not knowing Lenin. I told her a ridiculous story about a forgotten passport, about the fact that there was no longer even time to stop - the visa was running out. She had friends in Hoi An, who promised to pick up her passport and hand it over by bus to Da Nang; in Da Nang, other friends seemed to agree to hand it over by bus to Vinh. I just had to wait a day.
Upon arrival in Vinh, Hien caught a taxi and we went to her house. Before that, during the entire trip, I never managed to get deep into the Vietnamese environment. Unlike the Arabs, the Asians seemed too reserved and even reserved.
A small taximeter car drove us through ornate narrow streets densely built up with one-story residential buildings with cozy patios. These houses are often inhabited big families, renting such housing for a foreigner is quite problematic - Vietnam populous country, almost 90 million - in a small area along the ocean, the indigenous people themselves need to be accommodated somewhere. If the wealthy townspeople decide to expand their living space, they most often complete the floor from above.
In Hien's house, all the rooms are united by a courtyard, in which flowers grow all year round and there are motorcycles. Vietnam has almost no urban public transport- so the majority of the population uses scooters and generic Honda motorcycles. A friendly dog ran out to meet us, followed by Hien’s mother, a good-natured woman of about 60. Despite late time, the cries of the baby were still heard in the house, brother Hien and his wife put him to bed. None of her family spoke English, but all members greeted me warmly. We dined on steamed rice and herbs lightly boiled in various sauces, potatoes and steamed turnips served here as an accompaniment to rice, not as a separate side dish. There was also the sesame rice cake that the Vietnamese eat with salty-sour ginger sauce, vegetable stew, soy tofu, and fried fish. In view of strict vegetarianism, I refused fish, the rest I ate with great pleasure. Her family was a little surprised by my diet of herbs and vegetables, in their opinion, Russians eat only meat and potatoes, they don’t gorge on the rest. That the Vietnamese - I am also always surprised when I find myself at the same table with some Russians, how much they eat, move little, drink a lot of vodka and explain everything by the cold and hardness of life. Everything in such Russians comes from somewhere outside, even their own weight. She explained everything to the Vietnamese family simply about herself and the Russians: “I`m another Russian”.
Hien's room is small, somewhat ascetic, with whitewashed walls, a bed with a bamboo mat instead of a mattress. On the computer desk- big yellow flower sunflowers and a book about a traveler walking through the desert. I laughed: "Nothing is accidental." Just last year, I crossed the deserts of the Arab countries. We covered ourselves with light blankets and wished each other good night.
Hien, like me woke up at 7am without an alarm. She took a shower, offered me coffee, and then said it was time for work. Three months ago, a 28-year-old girl left her job as a designer in a tailoring workshop, she did not like the chef. And now she has opened and is developing a cafe. Says to arrange own business it was difficult, a lot of bureaucratic red tape, thank you friends helped. The difficulty of starting and doing business in Vietnam is also evidenced by world rankings, where a country with a red flag occupies approximately 90th place in terms of business-friendly. Hien said that only by working for herself can she manage time. We walked to the cafe, it was a couple of streets from her house, also in a quiet side street, not far from the central avenue. There was a padlock on the gates of the cafe, through the bars you could see cutlery and napkins scattered from the evening on the tables, it was already 8 o'clock in the morning - the most suitable breakfast time for the Vietnamese, the staff was not there yet. Hien's motorcycle was also locked in the cafe.
“The cafe should already be open, but they haven’t arrived yet,” the young owner said calmly and began to call all the workers in sequence, never raising her voice. After 20 minutes, a guy on a motorcycle with keys drove up, opened the gate, after some time another guy brought a basket of vegetables. The cafe woke up, low Asian tables were put in their places, plastic chairs with short legs, a large menu in Vietnamese was wiped over the display case, used chopsticks, napkins, cola cans were thrown away, the cook began to clean vegetables and seafood, lit the stove.
Hien kicked out the motorcycle and offered to show the city, but first - to have a proper breakfast. Vinh is not often visited by Western tourists, my blond hair sticking out from under the helmet turned around both passing by and passers-by. Here in Asia, where there are only brunettes, I began to like my own hair color - after all, out of 7 billion people on the planet, blondes are in the minority, especially light-eyed ones. We drove up to a street cafe filled exclusively with Vietnamese. Here they sit down at the table without permission. A pregnant woman across from me was pouring herbal tea into glasses for herself and her son. The rest, as one, ate soup with rice noodles from deep bowls. Having finished her tea, a woman with a round belly stood up, pulled her velvet dress down to her knees, and began to start her motorcycle. Her son, probably a primary school student, put on a colored helmet, then a large backpack, and began to climb onto the seat. They left. Hien finished her noodles. And we also went.
I was the only European in the residence museum of Ho Chi Minh City. Among the Vietnamese, this place is very popular and the entrance is absolutely free. At the entrance, portraits of ideological leaders - Marx, Lenin, Ho Chi Minh City are sold, in a bookstore - their works. It is strange to observe the flourishing of socialism for a person born during its collapse in another country. People who were born at the same time as me - at the end of the USSR, believe only in themselves or drown in pessimism. Museum visitors, on the contrary, were enthusiastically discussing something. large groups, were happy to take pictures against the backdrop of the ascetic home of a childless and ideologically obsessed leader. It seemed to me that each of them has something more than himself - and maybe they are united by a common idea.
We drove through endless green rice fields to a hill from which you can see all of Vinh. The city is divided into two parts: urban, filled with highways and rural, immersed in greenery. The Lam River divided the city. Here it does not at all look like the mountain stream, next to which our acquaintance with Hien took place. Calm and smooth on its vast shores, Lam Song, outside the city of Vinh, emptied into the sea. Since we were not far from the sources, we decided to drive to the very mouth, along the villages with peasants in the fields, fishermen, children collecting crayfish on the shore, expensive country residences. The beach was clear and clean. We were silent and looked into the dark turquoise sea, which was only warming up for the season. You don't need to know the language to feel the mood.
Hien returned to her cafe, which again turned out to be closed, but this time tidied up from the inside. She also methodically called the staff. When we went inside, the work began to boil. Hien, without any emotion, began sweeping the floor. I kept looking at her.
Are you worried about me?” she asked.
Yes, I'm still surprised how you can control yourself, - I said, comparing it with myself, bus stories.
Do not worry, it will be good.
I began cleaning and setting tables. An hour later, the food and the room were ready. Two years later, a large group of Vietnamese came, apparently to celebrate some holiday. The couples sat down at the table, Hien smiled and, together with the staff, carried small gas burners, food, drinks.
It was completely dark, the company was sitting together at the table, a little tired Hien left the cafe. At home, while Hien was looking for her evening wardrobe, her mother called her. The girl returned to the room, grabbed a sunflower from the table and carried it to her mother. When she returned, she explained, her mother again asked when Hien would have love, because she is the only one of 4 children who is not married. The wedding portraits of the rest hang in large frames in the hall. To which Hien brought a sunflower and said that this is her love. Not even roses, the mother joked sadly.
With light make-up in light, simple clothes, Hien met friends in some, judging by the overcrowding, very popular establishment. 5 guys sat close to each other, like all the other Vietnamese in this noisy cafe, a young guy, a waiter, only had time to squeeze through the crowd, delivering food. As soon as they learned my name, they immediately offered vodka. Well, a quick, but quite expected start. Their branded "Men`s vodka" is 29.5 degrees, they drink a lot of it, getting drunk, they become lazy and cheerful, and the whole company goes to sing Karaoke. This is not a joke, but a hit of the Vietnamese youth - special cabins with golden stucco, red velvet on the walls, waitresses in short skirts, sweet grapes on the tables and endless pop music from microphones. The time paid for singing is strictly controlled by a security guard at each of the building's booths. I can't sing, against the background of tonal Vietnamese my voice turned out to be the lowest of the company, and the language was the most unexpected in a karaoke club. I was asked to sing Katyusha in Russian. One of Hien's friends sang along to me in Vietnamese, he knew the words better than me, he was happy as a child. Still, for me, such entertainment is not easy - to spend two hours among kitsch and high-pitched Vietnamese pop music. In the end, one of the guys asked me why I trust them, Hien, because I don’t know anything about them. I was silent for a minute, but even then I could not find what to answer. Because at first glance, either I trust or I don’t - and this turns out to be the most correct. It also happened when I first saw Hien. They joked that at least they knew my passport data, they had nothing to be afraid of me. “Yes, but my passport is not all of me.” Your passport will be in two hours with a passing bus, Hien said, and offered to drink coffee in a quiet place until then. Her face was visibly tired, but she couldn't help but finish the story with the passport, due to the fact that no one speaks English and they won't understand me, and, in the end, she promised. " You are lucky,” one of them said.
In a quiet cafe with wicker chairs, we joined a company unknown to Hien. The guys played the guitar, I sang "Yesterday" to them. “Better than the old pop music,” I burst out aloud after the song. “It must be,” either the guy across the street said or heard. Roi was studying in Irkutsk as a builder-designer, almost at the same time when I was looking for shamans on an island in the middle of Lake Baikal on my first trip. He speaks good Russian, but now he lives in Vietnam, "building" a family instead of buildings. He said about the latter, even with some longing, peculiar to people my region, and asked what songs I know in Russian. Sad - no, only rock and roll. «I'm another Russian». We continued to sing the Beatles and recall the frosts of Siberia.
At 12 at night at the exit from the city of Vinh, Hien and a friend were waiting with me for a passing bus with a passport. The driver texted Hien saying that he wanted 100,000 dong (about 200 rubles) for the service, appeared 10 minutes later, opened the door on the move, grabbed the money, issued a passport, left for Hanoi without stopping. Probably, at that time he felt like a hero of an action movie during a top-secret operation. My passport, hard to believe, was again in my hands. A loud "Yes" resounded in the night Vinh.
The guys walked me to the night bus Vinha - Muen Hoi. While they were figuring out the price, the driver crept up from behind and grabbed my cheeks, he didn’t find them, he was surprised at my non-round, like his, bony face. Another circle of hell is unavoidable, I thought to myself and drove off. At night, a lot of people crowded into the bus from different villages, I shared a seat with one woman, modest, but rather wide. There was no sleep, they were smoking and spitting nutshells on the floor. The female conductor slapped me on the shoulder from behind, and yelled something in Vietnamese, showing that I had 200 thousand dongs, while from all the other 120 thousand. I gave 120, she stood on the chair with her feet, as if on pedestal, threw the money back at me. The third season of the entreprise theater, please! People turned around, laughed, pointed fingers at me. The stylish guy in front, could not look at me, at them, suppressed by shame and silence, buried himself in the glass, behind which deserted night mountains flashed. “120 or I’ll get out here, and tomorrow I’ll call the police,” I said calmly in Russian and began to move towards the exit. Now they will demand 200,000 dongs from me, in an hour they will demand to stand on one leg, in another hour there will be a new chauvist whim of rabid undeveloped peasants. The conductor shouted very loudly at my back, then took the money, did not touch me for the next 4 hours, shouted from afar, at times pointing her finger, including at the temple. At dawn, I arrived in Muen Heh, hugged my friends. As if between us lay not a day, but half a life. On the way to the border, the locals managed to slap our backpacks and yell after us, at the very border an officer with a straight posture and a stern voice organized the entire crowd into a queue, where there was a place for us in order, and not by race. Having crossed the border and just a couple of meters away, in calm, sparsely populated Laos, I fell on the grass and fell asleep. And no one looked at me except the sun. Nobody.
Time magazine named this photo one of the 100 most important photographs of all time: a Vietnam War general killing a civilian with a headshot. Since then, 50 years have passed. There is a whole story behind this document, illustrating those cruel times.
An entire movie is devoted to this scene. At first, everything was quite ordinary: another day of the Vietnam War on the streets of Saigon. A small man, dressed in shorts and a plaid shirt, barefoot, with his hands cuffed behind his back. Several soldiers lead him through the city. Suddenly, from somewhere to the right, another person enters the frame. He brandishes a gun, driving other people away from him, and then pulls forward right hand, aiming a pistol at the prisoner, and shoots him in the head. Just.
At the same moment, the American photographer Eddie Adams also pulled the trigger of his camera. So exactly 50 years ago, on February 1, 1968, a picture appeared that later became one of the most famous military photos in history: a civilian was killed - in fact, executed - by a military man. Many believe that this picture influenced the entire subsequent course of the Vietnam War.
The man in the plaid shirt was named Nguyen Van Lem. He was in his 30s and was married. Among other rebels in the communist Viet Cong, Nguyen Van Lem fought under the command of Ho Chi Minh against the US-backed South Vietnam. In fact, both sides agreed to a truce on the occasion of the Vietnamese New Year, which is celebrated on February 1st. But, despite the agreement, Ho Chi Minh the day before gave the order to launch a large-scale campaign that went down in history as the Tet Offensive.
Was the victim a member of the "suicide squad"?
Fierce fighting was also going on in Saigon, and Lem participated in them. Presumably (it is still unknown for sure), he was a fighter in one of the "death squads" that acted against the South Vietnamese policemen and their families. Lem was allegedly captured that morning not far from mass grave, which contained 34 corpses. Australian cameraman Neil Davis later said that Lem, in particular, killed friends of Saigon police chief Nguyen Ngoc Loan, as well as his godchildren.
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Sike 06/26/2014 Loan is the man with the revolver. 37 year old general former pilot, a student friend of the Prime Minister of South Vietnam. He later claimed that Lem killed the family of one of his officers. This version coincides with the statement of the Australian photographer. Whether this is true, apparently, no one will ever know. But be that as it may, the general, without hesitation, pulled the trigger of his "Smith-Wesson" .38 caliber.Several reporters were watching the scene.
This scene was seen by several war reporters at once. Some of them said that Loan would never just shoot a Viet Cong for no reason. The video, made by cameraman Vo Suu for the US television channel NBC (NBC), can now be easily found on YouTube. It shows how Lem falls to the ground, and blood begins to flow from his head. Loan, in turn, holsters the gun and leaves.
But even more effective than the television footage was Adams' photograph. The American, then 34, worked for the Associated Press news agency and was already an experienced employee. According to him, he was going to take a picture of how the military would interrogate the detainee. "Then it was business as usual that the detainees were interrogated while being held at gunpoint,” the photographer said. But that time it turned out differently.
In the following days, this photo was published by all the major newspapers in the United States, as well as in many other countries of the world. People saw the general, his hand, the gun, and then the face of Nguyen Van Lem, who was destined to die in the next second. His left eye is still open. Many saw in this photo confirmation that the United States supported the wrong side in Vietnam. Therefore, American political circles gradually began to oppose this war.
One of the top 100 photos of all time
This shot was chosen as the main photo of 1968. Adams got for it Pulitzer Prize- the main journalistic award in the United States. Time magazine named him one of the top 100 photographs of all time. Nevertheless, Adams later emphasized each time that he regretted taking this picture. According to him, he was taken out of context, so that he is only "half the truth." “The general killed the Viet Cong, and I killed the general with my camera,” said the photographer.
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Vietnam War
InoSMI 03/02/2015 By his own admission, Adams sometimes asked: “What would you do if you were in the place of this general? At that moment in that place? On that hot day? What if you caught this (presumably) scoundrel who has already killed two or three American soldiers?” He asked this question until his death in 2004.Loan instantly became famous throughout the world. The operator later told how he approached the journalists immediately after the shot and said: “These are killing our comrades. I think the Buddha will forgive me." In the pictures taken a little later, you can see how he drinks beer, smokes, laughs. And three months later he was seriously injured and lost his right leg.
The general fled to the USA
After withdrawal US troops from Saigon in 1975, the general fled to the United States with his family. Some demanded that he be tried as a war criminal, but this never happened. He lived in Virginia, where he opened his own pizzeria, which, however, was forced to close when information about his past became public. In 1998, he died of cancer at the age of 67.
In Saigon, now called Ho Chi Minh City, this scene is no longer remembered. Hundreds and thousands of mopeds now drive along Li-Tai-To Street in the 10th district, where it broke out. There is no memorial plaque or other reminder of what happened here. The city's military museum has a photo of Adams - among many others, also telling about the times when death roamed the country.
The materials of InoSMI contain only assessments of foreign media and do not reflect the position of the editors of InoSMI.
