On the road to the massacre memorial at Son My (pr. sahn meey), I read again the write-up about the "My Lai Massacre" in my Lonely Planet book. I was afraid I'd be a wreck at the site, since just reading the facts of the events of the morning of 16 March 1968 made me tear up in the car.

However, I was massively grateful to the state-sponsored "tour guide," who talked me and three other Americans through the site; her repeated heavy-handed judgments about the terrible events of that day were just clumsily propagandistic enough to stir up the tiny bit of American pride that still resides in me and thus interfere with the natural sympathy I'd have for the victims enough to prevent me from crying. As she went on and on about the "terrible crimes committed by the Americans" (after first having asked us all our nationality) in her soft, well-practised English, I had to actively suppress the urge to ask, "where's the monument to the 3,000 innocent, unarmed victims summarily shot, clubbed to death, and buried alive by the Communists in Hue?"

However, this reaction faded as I saw more: the trees with bullet holes still visible, the foundations of the tiny houses that now serve as mass graves based on family groupings, the reconstructed family artillery shelters into which U.S. troops had thrown hand-grenades to shred to death the cowering villagers, and finally, the still-functioning drainage ditch into which 75 to 150 unarmed local people were forced into before being mowed down by machine-gun fire (the Vietnamese monument puts this count at 170).

Although I largely gave up the mindless game of "whose evil was eviller?" I was still struck by the stupidity of some of the baldly propagandistic usage of these events; for example, pictured in the small museum at the end are several '60s military/political figures with the following caption: "Secretary of Defense Clark Clifford introducing President Nguyen Van Thieu to William Bundy, Assistant of foreign secretary. They indirectly caused the Son My massacre."

One of the goriest photographs is a color picture of a woman shot in the head, with large exit wound on her forehead. Curled neatly near her chin, placed carefully to fit within frame, is a pink coil of convoluted brain tissue. Another shows an old man lying in a pool of his own viscera, a large amount of intestines resting outside of his abdominal cavity.

Even with all the trappings of propaganda, I found myself feeling ashamed and a little helpless at seeing the photos of U.S. soldiers just before the kill, rifles drawn, bayonets fixed. I wanted to ask, in a weakened, wounded voice, "...these are our guys?? Shouldn't these be Nazis?" It's so much more comfortable to think of "our guys" as the good guys--liberators, saviors; 'only Nazis kill innocent people, right?'

After viewing the gory photographs and maps, some of which were reproduced from a 1968 Newsweek article, one is invited to record one's thoughts in a special guest book. I found reading other people's reactions fascinating. Many were in Japanese or Chinese, so I couldn't read them. Most of the English-language writings were mundane generalizations about "man's inhumanity to man," "corrupt politicians," and the like. Some were just provocatively, self-righteously condemning in their overall "anti-Americanism." Especially harsh were a few from Sydney, Australia, one of which said something like, "It looks like the Americans never learned anything from the Nazis." There were also long, cliché-filled poems, etc., a recommendation of a book (Four Hours at My Lai) from Vancouver, and some pop-psych observations about the nature of good and evil.

My favorites, however, are the most concise, which tend to have been written by American veterans themselves. Dennis Jarvis, of Orlando, FL, wrote, "I was in the same Division six months after. We were shot at Daily it was hell!" And my very favorite, written by someone not partial to long speeches: "War is hell, and hell came here."

At the entrance to the museum is a large plaque listing the names and ages of everyone killed at the several subhamlets. There were many children and old people. A quick bit of math put me at age 7 in 1968, so I decided to write down the names of every 7-year-old killed on that day. I counted 17 of them, including two pairs with exactly the same full names (I wondered if that was a mistake). It took a while to write them all down, and I was sweating quite a bit in the heat. People kept peering into my book to see what I was writing. Later, after having read much of the guest book, I decided to put in my own entry:

"I was 7 in 1968. So were Han Van Thu, Tran Ba, Vo Thi Anh, Nguyen Khai, Nguyen Thi Van, Do Thi Nhut (2), Do Thi Nhanh (2), Do Thi Loc, Nguyen Cu, Nguyen Thi Huyn, Nguyen Dep, Ngo Thi Xi, Nguyen Sang, Nguyen Thi Hoa, and Ngo Thi Thi."

For a while after leaving the museum, it was a little startling to look at every Vietnamese person (especially children) like I had to check myself with each: "is this one a victim?", sort of in the same way one can temporarily view humans as chess pieces, most notable for their relative position, after a lengthy session of deep chess play.