A forgotten hero stopped the My Lai massacre 50 years ago today

[steve2470]

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-wiener-my-lai-hugh-thompson-20180316-story.html


Helicopter pilot Hugh Thompson speaks with reporters at the Pentagon on Dec. 4, 1969, after testifying about the My Lai massacre in South Vietnam. (Associated Press)



Everybody's heard of the My Lai massacre — March 16, 1968, 50 years ago today — but not many know about the man who stopped it: Hugh Thompson, an Army helicopter pilot. When he arrived, American soldiers had already killed 504 Vietnamese civilians (that's the Vietnamese count; the U.S. Army said 347). They were going to kill more, but they didn't — because of what Thompson did.

I met Thompson in 2000 and interviewed him for my radio program on KPFK in Los Angeles. He told the story of what happened that day, when he and his two-man crew flew over My Lai, in support of troops who were looking for Viet Cong fighters.

"We started noticing these large numbers of bodies everywhere," he told me, "people on the road dead, wounded. And just sitting there saying, 'God, how'd this happen? What's going on?' And we started thinking what might have happened, but you didn't want to accept that thought — because if you accepted it, that means your own fellow Americans, people you were there to protect, were doing something very evil."

Who were the people lying in the roads and in the ditch, wounded and killed?

[Control-Z]

1. I remember this story, I think.

Didn't he and his crew gather up children and fly them to safety making as many trips back as possible to fly more children out?

[uppityperson]

2. K&R with one more paragraph of who some of the victims were

Today there's a little museum in My Lai, where Thompson is honored, and which displays a list of the names and ages of people killed that day. Trent Angers, Thompson's biographer and friend, analyzed the list and found about 50 there who were 3 years old or younger. He found 69 between the ages of 4 and 7, and 91 between the ages of 8 and 12.

[Hoyt]

3. Thats when I really started hating war and warmongers.

[yardwork]

4. I'll never forget.