Interviewer: Please tell us with as much detail as possible the event of January 31st, 1967.
Thuong Thi Mai: On the 31st, the Americans came.
Thuong Thi Mai: When they came, we were in the house.
Thuong Thi Mai: They entered the house and pushed us backward.
Thuong Thi Mai: When we could not go back any further they shot my father, my mother, my sister in law and a niece.
Thuong Thi Mai: They killed three persons in the courtyard and shot my mother in the house.
Thuong Thi Mai: There were five of us left and we ran to the front end of the house when they opened fire blindly on us.
Thuong Thi Mai: Bodies dropped all over the place.
Thuong Thi Mai: I was the only one who was still alive and I did not know what to do so I just lay flat down there in a ridge and managed to survive.
Thuong Thi Mai: After they killed my whole family, they used the powdered gasoline to burn the children and my mother.
Thuong Thi Mai: They were so burnt up that when I collected their remains, only a few bones were left.
Interviewer: Do you recall any additional detail?
Thuong Thi Mai: Next door to me was a woman who had just given birth to her baby.
Thuong Thi Mai: The baby was about a month old.
Thuong Thi Mai: They killed the mother and smashed the baby against the wall like this.
Thuong Thi Mai: Then they used a knife to slit the baby up and then burnt it.
Thuong Thi Mai: They rubbed powdered gasoline on the baby and just burnt it.
Interviewer: When the Americans came and burned your house and killed your parents and your niece, were you angry? What were your feelings then?
Thuong Thi Mai: I was extremely angry.
Thuong Thi Mai: They called everybody a VC.
Thuong Thi Mai: All the women and children were called VCs.
Thuong Thi Mai: What kind of soldiers were they who could not even identify women and children? What kind of a war was this they were fighting? We were all women and children.
Thuong Thi Mai: There was not a single able bodied man around.
Thuong Thi Mai: All babies, children and women and old women.
Thuong Thi Mai: They rushed us, they gritted their monkey teeth and then they opened fire.
Thuong Thi Mai: They gritted their teeth and then they just opened fire with their rifles.
Thuong Thi Mai: They didn't care for anything at all.
Thuong Thi Mai: After they killed the people, they burnt down all the houses so that the survivors had no place to live in.
Thuong Thi Mai: They burned everything.
Thuong Thi Mai: Not a single thing was left on the ground.
Thuong Thi Mai: Even dead children were burnt.
Thuong Thi Mai: Hence, I could collect only that much of the remains of three children.
Thuong Thi Mai: It was only a handful of bones.
Thuong Thi Mai: Their parents were also all killed.
Thuong Thi Mai: All the children were killed.
Thuong Thi Mai: In one case, the mother was killed and left two tiny babies who clung to the mother breasts and sucked at them.
Thuong Thi Mai: The babies were sitting like this and sucked at the breasts.
Thuong Thi Mai: One child is still alive now, but the other one died.