Luom said she escaped being killed by jumping back into the bunker just before the shooting started. Maybe God blessed me to be a survivor. Luom, who now lives in a nearby village, said she had not heard about the controversy over the killings until a week ago, when she met with foreign journalists. She said she does not read newspapers because she is illiterate and does not watch television because she spends most of her time working on a fishing boat. Today, this village is home to about 350 families, and is surrounded by verdant rice paddies, palms and banana trees.
Most people grow rice or work on shrimp farms.
Electricity came a few years ago, allowing a few prosperous families to install television sets. Until a week ago, nobody talked much about what happened in February 1969. There were so many innocent people who were killed. No one here spoke angrily about the United States. I bore a lot of hatred toward them.