VietNamNet Bridge – “What Thompson, Andreotta and I did that day is not heroic or brave. It is a normal thing. We only tried to save women, children and innocent villagers,” Lawrence M. Colburn, the only living member in pilot Hugh Thompson’s team, answered VietNamNet from the US.

My Lai massacre: horrible memoirs
Fatal morning through Ron Haeberle’s memoirs

The unfortunate woman

One day in late fall 2010, Colburn, a medical equipment trader in Atlanta, the US, received an email from a Vietnamese man in Germany. The man introduced herself as a survival in the My Lai massacre. He expressed gratitude to Thompson, Colburn, Ron Ridenhour, Seymour Hersh and William R. Peers. He also wished to see his heroic benefactors once a time in his life.

Colburn described the story of the above man by two words “heartbreaking and inspirational.” He immediately arranged his work to fly to Germany one month later, with his family.

Coming back to the morning of March 16, 1968, Thompson’s team flew over Son My. They saw many bodies on the field and road villages. They released signal asking for medical assistance but US infantrymen did not save the wounded people but killed them all.

Colburn and his teammates witnessed colonel Ernest Medina shot to dead a young girl on the field. Many people were running to hide from guns. American soldiers were firing hundreds of people, including many kids, in a canal. Meanwhile, over ten civilians were hunting by Lieutenant William Calley’s soldiers.

Pilot Thompson landed his helicopter amid the villagers and the group of US soldiers and ordered Colburn and Andreotta to point their machine-guns to the soldiers and shoot them if they did not stop killing innocent people.

At that time Colburn was 19, Thompson 25 and Andreotta 22 years old.

In some interviews, Colburn and Thompson told another sad story: after seeing a young girl was shot to dead, they saw a woman staggering near Road 521 (around 20m from the place where Ron Haeberle took the photo which shook the world). They threw SOS shell towards the woman but Ernest Medina shot her.

Running for a while, the woman sat on the ground. Thompson landed the helicopter. They told the woman to sit still to prevent blood from bleeding and waited for their return. After that they turned to face William Calley’s troops to rescue a group of villagers. Over ten minutes later, they returned to the woman but she was dead by a bullet to her head. Ron Haeberle took the photo of the dead woman.

Colburn and Thompson were still painful a long time later because they could not save the woman. Fourty-two years later, when Thompson was dead, Colburn unexpectedly received an email from that woman’s son and flew to Germany to see that man - Tran Van Duc.

“If Duc contacted us when Thompson was alive, he would have immediately flown to Germany the next day,” Colburn said. He and Thompson have spent almost of their lives to raise their voice and struggled for victims of the My Lai massacre.

The boy of My Lai
Duc’s family had lived near Binh Duc market, around 10km from My Lai. In 1967, the family evacuated to My Lai to hide from US bombs and became victims of the My Lai massacre.

Duc said that when the massacre happened, he was 7 but every detail in that four hours has deeply imprinted on his mind and obsessed him for decades.

That morning, American troops drove five brothers and sisters and their mother to a rice field and shot them. After the first burst of gunfire, Duc’s mother received a gunshot to her leg and stomach. Duc’s brothers and sisters lied down around, wounded or pretended to be dead. When US soldiers left, the mother told Duc to hold his sister – Tran Thi Ha (only 14 months old) to run to his grandmother’s home. Duc obeyed his mother, holding his sister to walk on the village road. The mother was then shot to dead by another American soldier.

Duc walked for seven kilometers to his grandmother’s home. Later his elder sister also survived and they saw each other at the grandmother’s home. The three kids lived with their grandmother. Duc grew up and became a police officer of Son Tinh district. He then went to Germany to work and settled there.


Duc and his son, Tran Van Vien, 17, returned to Son My last October. Vien said that he knew a little about the past. Recently he saw his father to be very sad after each trip back to Vietnam. He understood that the Son My pain has never stopped in his father’s heart. Whenever returning to Son My, Duc visited the Son My relics, the field where the massacre happened and the martyr cemetery, where his father – a revolutionist – lies at rest.

In 2009, Duc detected that the caption of Ron Haeberle’s photo “The brother protects his sister” is wrong. He asked the Son My relics management board to correct but they did not agree. This made Duc more painful. He had to write memoirs to relief the pain. He tried to contact Colburn and Ron Haeberle to share that pain and to find out the truth about the controversial photo.
Duc said that the characters in that photo are Duc and his sister Tran Thi Ha. Duc obeyed his mother’s instruction to bring his sister to his grandmother’s home. On the way, a helicopter approached and lowered. Duc urgent hugged Ha in his arms and lied down to the road. Haeberle took that scene.

However, the Son My Relics management board did not agree with Duc. The controversy over the photo has prolonged for three years, since 2009.

That’s why Haeberle returned to Son My.

Hoang Huong