The Stories You Don't Hear About

 

March 16, 1968. Vietnam. Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson lifted his small observation helicopter over a village called My Lai on what should have been a routine reconnaissance mission. What he saw below made no tactical sense. Bodies everywhere. Not Viet Cong fighters. Old men. Women. Children. And American soldiers still shooting. Thompson circled lower trying to understand what he was witnessing. He radioed for help evacuating wounded civilians. Marked their positions with green smoke. Then watched American ground troops walk up to the smoke and kill the wounded people he'd just marked for rescue. His door gunner Lawrence Colburn and crew chief Glenn Andreotta sat in the helicopter realizing the same impossible thing. American soldiers were massacring unarmed civilians. Not in combat. Not under fire. Just systematically murdering entire families in a ditch.

 

Thompson was twenty-four years old. A warrant officer. Nobody important in the military hierarchy. The ground troops were following orders from their lieutenant, William Calley, who was following what he claimed were orders from his captain. Thompson had no authority over any of them. But he had a helicopter with a machine gun and a choice about what to do with it. He landed between American soldiers and a group of civilians huddled in a bunker. Got out. Walked toward the soldiers. His hands weren't on his weapon but his crew's hands were on theirs. Thompson told Lieutenant Calley that he was going to evacuate the civilians. Calley said they'd be taken care of. Thompson knew exactly what that meant. So he turned to his crew chief and gunner and gave an order that could have gotten him court-martialed or shot. If those American soldiers tried to kill the civilians Thompson was protecting, his crew was to shoot the Americans.

 

Then he went back to the bunker, coaxed out terrified Vietnamese civilians who had every reason to think he was there to kill them too, and loaded them into his tiny observation helicopter. Made multiple trips. Flew children and elderly people to safety while American soldiers watched and did nothing because Thompson had made it clear what would happen if they did. Later they found a small boy still alive in a ditch filled with bodies. Andreotta went down into that ditch of corpses and pulled the child out. They flew him to safety too. Thompson reported what he'd seen to his superiors as soon as he landed. Detailed the massacre. Named names. Expected someone to do something immediately. Instead the Army covered it up. Buried the reports. Told Thompson to keep quiet. Gave the ground troops involved medals for combat action.

 

For a year nothing happened. The massacre stayed hidden. Then investigative journalist Seymour Hersh broke the story in November 1969 and everything exploded. 

 

Congressional hearings. International outrage. Courts-martial. The My Lai Massacre became a symbol of everything wrong with the Vietnam War. And Hugh Thompson became something complicated. To some people he was a hero who'd saved lives and exposed atrocity. To others, especially many veterans and military officials, he was a traitor who'd betrayed fellow soldiers. He received death threats. People left mutilated animals on his doorstep. His home was vandalized. At speaking events, veterans walked out when he talked about My Lai. The military treated him with suspicion for decades.

Lieutenant Calley was court-martialed and convicted of murdering twenty-two civilians, though the actual number was closer to five hundred killed that day. He served three and a half years under house arrest before President Nixon commuted his sentence. Most of the other soldiers involved faced no significant punishment. The officers who'd ordered or allowed the massacre got away with it almost entirely. The military wasn't interested in justice. It was interested in limiting damage. Hugh Thompson spent the next thirty years living with what he'd seen and what he'd done. He struggled with anger.  

Depression. Survivor's guilt over the people he hadn't saved. Frustration that so few faced real consequences. But he never apologized for landing that helicopter or for the order he'd given his crew to shoot Americans if necessary.

 

In 1998, thirty years after My Lai, the Army finally gave Thompson the recognition it should have given immediately. He and his crew received the Soldier's Medal, the highest award for bravery not involving direct combat with an enemy. At the ceremony Thompson said he was accepting it for everybody who tried to do the right thing in Vietnam, everybody who stood up when it would have been easier to look away. He died in 2006 at age sixty-two. By then public opinion had shifted. Most people recognized him as a hero. But that recognition came decades too late to undo the threats, the ostracism, the years of being treated like he'd done something wrong by refusing to let massacre continue.

 

Thompson's story asks uncomfortable questions America still struggles to answer. What do you do when the enemy isn't the people you're supposed to be fighting but your own side? When following orders means participating in atrocity? When stopping murder means threatening to kill the murderers? When doing the right thing makes you a traitor to people who think loyalty means silence? He was twenty-four years old with no authority and he made a choice that saved lives and exposed truth and cost him decades of peace. He didn't ask for recognition. Didn't want to be a symbol. Just saw something wrong and decided he couldn't fly away and pretend he hadn't seen it.

 

That's not comfortable heroism. That's the kind that leaves you angry and isolated and wondering if you did enough even though you did more than almost anyone else would have. The kind where you save people and then spend thirty years getting death threats from the country you served. The kind where you do everything right and still wake up seeing that ditch full of bodies. Hugh Thompson landed his helicopter between soldiers and civilians and said no more. Not on my watch. Not while I can do something about it. And he lived with the consequences of that choice for the rest of his life, knowing he'd saved some people but couldn't save all of them, knowing he'd told truth but truth didn't guarantee justice.