Hugh Thompson died this week. He was a key witness in the My Lai court martial trial and, many years later, a recipient of the Soldier’s Award. In the face of a massacre, he put himself between officials in his own military and villagers in Vietnam:
I walked over to the ground units and said, “Hey, there’s some civilians over here in this bunker. Can you get them out?” They said, “Well, we’re gonna get them out with a hand grenade.” I said, “Just hold your people right here please, I think I can do better.” So I went over to the bunker and motioned for them to come out, everything was OK. At that time I didn’t know what I was going to do, because there was more than three or four there, more like nine or ten or something like that. So I walked back over to the aircraft and kind of kept them around me and called the pilot that was flying the low gunship and said, “Hey, I got these people here down on the ground, and you all land and get them out of here.” So he agreed to do that, which I think was the first time a gunship’s ever been used for that. There’s enough of them there that he had to make two trips and he picked them up and took them about ten miles or so behind the lines and dropped them off.
A short while later we went back to the ditch. There was still some movement in there. We got out of the aircraft and Androtta, my crew chief, walked down into the ditch. A few minutes later he came back up carrying a little kid. We didn’t know what we were gonna do with this one either, but we all get back in the aircraft and figure we’d get him back to the orphanage or hospital back over at Quang Ngai. In examining him in the aircraft that day, the kid wasn’t even wounded, or we didn’t see any wounds, I’ll put it that way. He was covered with blood, and the thought was going through my mind and my crew’s mind, “How did these people get in that ditch?”