Let us pause for a moment and pay tribute to a true and patriot
American, who stands in start contrast to cowardly phonies Arnold
Schwartzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, Toby Keith, John Wayne, George W
Bush, Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon, Colin Powell, and sadly, so many,
many more...
January 12, 2006
He Broke Ranks; He Did the Right Thing
Hugh Thompson and My Lai
By CLANCY SIGAL
There is an Ugly American, a Quiet American and then there's Hugh
Thompson, the Army helicopter pilot who, with his two younger crew
mates, was on a mission to draw enemy fire over the Vietnamese village
of My Lai in March, 1968. Hovering over a paddy field, they watched a
platoon of American soldiers led by Lt. William Calley, deliberately
shoot unarmed Vietnamese civilians, mainly women and children,
cowering in muddy ditches. Thompson landed his craft and appealed to
the soldiers, and to Calley, to stop the killings. Calley told
Thompson to mind his own business.
Thompson took off but then one of his crew shouted that the shooting
had begun again. According to his later testimony, Thompson was
uncertain what to do. Americans murdering innocent bystanders was hard
for him to process. But when he saw Vietnamese survivors chased by
soldiers, he landed his chopper between the villagers and troopers,
and ordered his crew to fire at any American soldiers shooting at
civilians. Then he got on the radio and begged U.S. gunships above him
to rescue those villagers he could not cram into his own craft.
On returning to base, Thompson, almost incoherent with rage,
immediately reported the massacre to superiors, who did nothing, until
months later when the My Lai story leaked to the public. The
eyewitness testimony of Thompson and his surviving crew member helped
convict Calley at a court-martial. But when he returned to his
Stateside home in Stone Mountain, Georgia, Thompson received death
threats and insults, while Calley was pardoned by President Nixon.
Indeed, for a time, Thompson himself feared court-martial.
Reluctantly, the massacre was investigated by then-major Colin Powell,
of the Americal Division, who reported relations between U.S. soldiers
and Vietnamese civilians as "excellent"; Powell's whitewash was the
foundation of his meteoric rise through the ranks.
Hugh Thompson died last week, age sixty two. Thirty years after My
Lai, he, and his gunner Lawrence Colburn, had received the Soldiers
Medal, as did the third crew member, Glenn Andreotta, who was killed
in combat. "Don't do the right thing looking for a reward, because it
might not come," Thompson wryly observed at the ceremony.
Something stuck in my head when I learned of Thompson's death. "There
was no thinking about it," he said before his death. "There was
something that had to be done, and it had to be done fast."
Words similar to these are often used by combat heroes to describe
incredible feats of courage under fire. With one possible difference.
According to the record, Thompson did have time to think about it as
he took off from My Lai, hovered and tried to wrap his mind around the
horror below. Then he made a conscious decision to save lives. Some of
the Vietnamese he rescued, children then, are alive today.
Ex-chief warrant officer Thompson is a member of a small, elite corps
of Americans who have broken ranks and refused to run with the herd.
They include Army specialist Joseph Darby, of the 372d Military Police
Company, who reported on his fellow soldiers who were torturing
prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison. His family has received threats to
their personal safety in their Maryland hometown. And Captain Ian
Fishback, the 82d Airborne West Pointer, who served combat tours in
Iraq and Afghanistan, and tried vainly for seventeen months to
persuade superiors that detainee torture was a systematic, and not a
'few bad apples', problem inside the U.S. military. In frustration, he
wrote to Senator McCain, which led directly to McCain's anti-torture
amendment. I wouldn't want to bet on the longevity of Captain
Fishback's military career.
Thompson's death also reminded me of Captain Lawrence Rockwood, of the
10th Mountain Division. Ten years ago, Rockwood was deployed to Haiti
where, against orders, he personally investigated detainee abuse at
the National Penitentiary in the heart of Port au Prince. He was
court-martialed for criticizing the U.S. military's refusal to
intervene, and kicked out of the Army. While still on duty, he kept a
photograph on his desk of a man he greatly admired. It was of Captain
Hugh Thompson.
Some of my friends get so angry at the Bush White House, and so
despairing, that they slip into a mindset where Americans - the great
'Them' out there - are lumped into a solid bloc of malign ignoramuses.
They forget that this country is also made up of people like Hugh
Thompson, Joe Darby, Ian Fishback and Lawrence Rockwood - outside and
inside the military.
Clancy Sigal's Zone of The Interior, is finally being published in the
UK, by Pomona at £9.99. Sigal can be reached at clancy@jsasoc.com.
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