My Lai massacre photographer reunited with survivor in Vietnam

(16 Mar 2018) Talk of peace dominated the 50th anniversary commemoration of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, but among the hundreds in the audience were survivors and a former US Army photographer whose gruesome images galvanised anti-war opinion. Friday’s memorial events were held at the site of the 1968 massacre by American troops of 504 unarmed Vietnamese villagers, mostly women, children and elderly men. The audience included Sergeant Ron Haeberle, who photographed the aftermath in My Lai, and survivor Tran Van Duc, who was six at the time and whose murdered mother was photographed by Haeberle. The two men bonded after they met in 2011. Duc lives in Remscheid, Germany, and a German cinematographer, curious about the connection, put him in touch by a message on Facebook to Haeberle in Ohio. Duc recalled some US soldiers appearing at his family’s house soon after landing by helicopter, who then herded him, his four siblings, and their mother out onto a trail, where American troops began shooting at them. Duc’s mother, wounded in the stomach and thigh, tried to cover him and his 14-month-old sister. After the shooting, the soldiers moved along to the village. Duc’s sister began to cry, and their mother, fearful she would draw the soldiers to return, told him to take her to his grandmother’s house, seven kilometres (4 miles) away. Clutching his sister, Duc looked back to see his mother try to grab a bag to get something to staunch her bleeding, but he knew she was in desperate condition. By the time his grandmother and other villagers returned to recover the remains of their loved ones, they had already been buried. Baby Ha and another sister survived, but two of Duc’s other sisters were killed. Duc and Haeberle on Thursday visited the trail where the three, along with about three dozen other people, were shot down. Haeberle’s shocking photos were published first in November 1969 in the Plain Dealer, the biggest newspaper in his home state of Ohio, and then in Life magazine and all around the world. He had been using his Army-issue camera to take photos of fellow soldiers to be despatched to their hometown papers, a standard military public relations practice which, he acknowledged, did not work so well that day. It was a technicality that brought the pictures of the carnage to public view; he also carried his personal camera, a Nikon F, for which he had one roll of colour film, which meant he did not have to turn in photos to the Army’s Public Information Office. The photo which disturbed him most, he said, was “the woman with the brains lying beside her head. Because later on in life I found out it was Duc’s mother. That to me was upsetting.“ Haeberle came upon the killing scene after being dropped off by a helicopter in the second wave entering the village. With no enemy - the Viet Cong, the VC - in the area firing at them, he had an unmolested view of the atrocities. The coldblooded killing was mindboggling to Haeberle, who was 26 at the time, about six years older than the average troops in Charlie Company. Later, he concluded the American soldiers were badly trained, scared, bitter, and since they couldn’t understand why the Vietnamese villagers seemed hostile, they considered them to be just like the Viet Cong guerrillas they were fighting. Haeberle gave his camera, the one he shot his famous photos with, what he called his My Lai camera, to Duc, who he said installed it on an altar in his home in Germany. Find out more about AP Archive: Twitter: Facebook: ​​ Instagram: You can license this story through AP Archive: