Hugh Thompson and the My Lai Massacre during the Vietnam War

I had known of the My Lai Massacre (504 or 347 Vietnamese civilians killed by U.S. Soldiers in 1968) but I had never known the full story of it. Hugh Thompson is a true hero for standing up to fellow Americans when they were doing evil acts. We need more like him.



Hugh was a recon helicopter pilot. He and his crew were flying over My Lai to look for Viet Cong fighters.

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"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."

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Old women, old men, children, and babies were slaughtered.

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Then Thompson and his crew chief, Glenn Andreotta, and his gunner, Lawrence Colburn, "saw some civilians hiding in a bunker, cowering, looking out the door. Saw some advancing Americans coming that way. I just figured it was time to do something, to not let these people get killed. Landed the aircraft in between the Americans and the Vietnamese, told my crew chief and gunner to cover me, got out of the aircraft, went over to the American side."

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What happened next was one of the most remarkable events of the entire war, and perhaps unique: Thompson told the American troops that, if they opened fire on the Vietnamese civilians in the bunker, he and his crew would open fire on them.

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Hugh's actions were not really acknowledged until 1998 when he was awarded the Soldiers Medal. I wonder how many more innocent lives would have been lost if he had not stepped up.

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By the time the My Lai massacre ended, 504 people were dead. Among the victims were 182 women—17 of them pregnant—and 173 children, including 56 infants.

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Some sources say that 347 were killed...still a staggering number.

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Nick Turse investigated violence in Vietnam against noncombatants for his book “Kill Anything that Moves.” He concluded — after a decade of research in Pentagon archives and more than 100 interviews with American veterans and Vietnamese survivors — that Americans killing civilians in Vietnam was “pervasive and systematic.” One soldier told him there had been "a My Lai a month."

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