Hero

Hugh Thompson Jr.

Hugh Thompson Jr. was an American hero. He came to mind in connection with the recently announced death of William Calley. Both men participated in one of the darkest moments of American military history.

Thompson and Calley were born months apart in 1943, Thompson in Georgia, Calley in Florida. Both their fathers were World War Two navy veterans. Thompson was part Cherokee. He was brought up without racial prejudice and was taught the honor that went with being a warrior.

In 1968, both men were twenty-five years old and serving in Vietnam. Calley was an infantry lieutenant, Thompson a warrant officer and the pilot of a three-man observation helicopter. On March 16, their paths crossed at a hamlet called My Lai.

Thompson was flying reconnaissance, trying unsuccessfully to draw fire. It turned out the hamlet, thought to be an enemy stronghold, was occupied only by rice farmers and their families. But after a brief artillery barrage, as U.S. troops moved into the area, Thompson began to see bodies. Recognizing that they were civilians, he marked them with smoke grenades so they could receive medical aid. Then he saw the Americans systematically killing them.

The details of the massacre, which involved gang rape and the murder of some five hundred civilians, are horrific. Members of Calley’s Company C were among the worst perpetrators. They led civilians to an irrigation ditch and executed them. “These people were marched into the ditch while begging for mercy for their children,” said Thompson’s gunner, Lawrence Colburn. “And there was no mercy that day.”

My Lai (photo by Ronald L. Haeberle)

Colburn described Hugh Thompson as a man with a great sense of humor, a swagger, and thick southern drawl. Thompson radioed back to his base, “Something ain't right about this. There’s bodies everywhere.” The pilot watched an army captain kick a wounded woman before killing her. Colburn said Thompson “was just beside himself. He felt helpless.”

Thompson landed his helicopter. He confronted Calley, who parroted the familiar line, “Just following orders.” Thompson ordered the men of his crew to hold American infantrymen at bay with machine guns while he retrieved a dozen civilians from a bunker. He had the Vietnamese evacuated to a hospital. Later he returned to the ditch and saved the life of an eight-year-old boy partly buried under corpses.

In spite of the angry reports that Thompson filed, army brass tried to cover up the incident. When it came out two years later, twenty-six officers and enlisted men were charged. All except Calley were acquitted or pardoned. Widely seen as a scapegoat, Calley endured forty-two months of confinement to his quarters before being set free.

Thompson had directly saved more than a dozen lives. His protests had led to the cancellation of further operations in neighboring hamlets, potentially preventing hundreds more deaths. “He had a very solid moral footing if you will,” Colburn remembered. “And he had that blood of a warrior.”

For his actions that day, Thompson was vilified and became a pariah in the Army. He received death threats. Dead animals on his porch. Although he initially was given a medal, he threw it away because it was based on a false narrative of what had happened. A congressman from South Carolina demanded that he be court-martialed.

Only in the 1990s, when the war was long over, did Hugh Thompson begin to get recognition for his heroism. One of the honors he received, along with his crew, was the Soldier’s Medal, the Army’s highest non-combat award.

In 1998, Thompson and Colburn returned to My Lai (the third crewman, Glenn Andreotta, had been killed in action shortly after the massacre). They met some of the people whose lives they had saved. Thompson told them, “I just wish our crew that day could have helped more people than we did.”

Colburn remembered that the villagers asked “why the people who committed these atrocities didn't come with us and ask for forgiveness, so we could forgive them. . . . If Lieutenant Calley went to Vietnam tomorrow and met with those survivors and asked for forgiveness, they would forgive him. It's probably not a bad idea.”

Hugh Thompson broke his back in a helicopter crash in Vietnam. He returned home and remained a flight trainer in the army until 1983. He died of cancer in 2006

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