Since the official ceremony was in Vietnamese I didn’t understand a word of it. Photographers and TV crews scrambled forward when Mike Boehm, an honored guest wearing a red silk robe and matching hat, played a mournful tune on his violin from the My Lai documentary, The Sound of the Violin. When the speeches ended we were invited to take a burning stick of incense from a Buddhist monk and place it in a decorative holder at the base of the statue.
Two days later we were talking about the commemoration with a Vietnamese travel agent and her husband. “Why,” he asked me, “has your country not apologized to the Vietnamese people for what they did at My Lai?”
“I don’t know,” I said with a shrug, “ …but we should.”
The tragic legacy of Vietnam continues to haunt us.