The strawberry ice cream for sale by the ticket booth seemed out of place at the museum to the My Lai massacre, one of America’s most ghastly crimes of war. The parking lot held a single car. Only a wide sign near the entrance explained the significance of the location.

It showed a map of the area as it looked on the morning of March 16, 1968, when a company of American soldiers showed up and killed more than 500 women, children and older men, raping girls, mutilating bodies and burning homes with families still inside.

One of the massacre’s survivors, Nguyen Hong Mang, would tell me later that he had met the soldiers with a smile, shouting, “Welcome, Americans!” He was 14.

Minutes later, he and his family and neighbors were being lined up and shot, crumpling into a pile of the dead and nearly dead.

Retelling such horrors, in person and with a public institution right where you live, takes a special kind of courage. Most war memorials in Vietnam focus on revolutionary heroes. My Lai is pure tragedy. And the way the affected hamlets deal with one of the war’s worst atrocities says a lot about how to honor trauma without becoming defined by its scars.