Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: FRIDAY, June 8, 1990                   TAG: 9006080048
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A5   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: PETER ENG ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: HO CHI MINH CITY, VIETNAM                                LENGTH: Medium

NURSE'S MY LAI HOSPITAL NEEDS STRANDED SUPPLIES

Three weeks ago, Cherie Clark and her private International Mission of Hope inaugurated the two-story hospital at My Lai, where soldiers of Charlie Company shot hundreds of villagers to death in 1968.

But the hospital remains an empty building. The $300,000 of medical supplies needed to open it are in Atlanta and Portland, and the cost of privately transporting them to Vietnam is too high, said Clark, of Denver.

Clark, a volunteer nurse in Vietnam during the war, said Washington has agreed in principle to take the supplies along when space is available on its aircraft going to Hanoi, Vietnam's capital. But it gave no commitment and no supplies have gone thus far, she said.

The U.S. government has embargoed all trade and official aid to Vietnam since the war ended in 1975.

"We're saying to the U.S. government: Give us a break this time. Fly the supplies here. The people are suffering all sorts of ailments," Clark said in an interview in Ho Chi Minh City, where she has an office.

Clark said more than half the children in the My Lai area, about 340 miles northeast of Ho Chi Minh City, are malnourished.

She said villagers wept at the inauguration of the hospital, built by about 100 local laborers on the spot where the U.S. helicopters landed on the bloody day in March 1968. The handful of survivors recalled how they lay under heaps of bodies, she said.

"The old men were looking at us, and the kids were holding me and they wouldn't let go," Clark said.

"We wanted to bring health care to them," she said. "We wanted them to know that there were different kinds of Americans, that some care even though it was 20 years ago.

"They say they cannot forgive, but they love the new Americans who have come back," she said.

On March 16, 1968, Charlie Company's first platoon, led by Lt. William Calley, killed at least 175 Vietnamese men, women and children at My Lai, according to the 1970 report of a U.S. Army inquiry.

A plaque in the village is inscribed with the names of 504 men, women and children Vietnamese officials say died there.

Calley was the only soldier convicted for the massacre at a court-martial in March 1971. He was sentenced to life imprisonment.

Following a public outcry, then-President Richard Nixon reduced his sentence to 20 years, and Calley actually served just three years under house arrest before his conviction was overturned by a federal judge.