
A forgotten hero stopped the My Lai massacre 50 years ago - DoreenMichele
http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-wiener-my-lai-hugh-thompson-20180316-story.html#
======
romwell
I wouldn't call him forgotten - while I'm bad with remembering names, when I
saw "My Lai", the first thing that came to mind was "that badass helicopter
pilot who landed his helicopter between civilians and US soldiers, and
threatened to open fire to protect the civilians".

What I _didn 't_ know was that he took so much flak for that - from statements
that _he_ should be the one punished to death threats and dead animals on his
porch. Unsurprising, yet sad.

His name was Hugh Thompson, and today, let's remember that name[1].

[1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugh_Thompson_Jr](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugh_Thompson_Jr).

~~~
owenversteeg
An extra point: his "helicopter" was about the smallest thing you could get
and still call it a helicopter. It provided no cover or protection for the
people inside. Had the soldiers engaged, Thompson and the others would have
gone down instantly.

Photo:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hiller_UH-12_(H-23)_bw....](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hiller_UH-12_\(H-23\)_bw.jpg)

~~~
romwell
Thanks for this. In my mind, a "helicopter" is something like a Huey. This is
a rotor with a tail!

------
apo
High point: _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._

Talk about courage.

Low point: _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."_

Courage seems far too scarce a commodity.

~~~
InclinedPlane
Hasn't really stopped either. Read up on things like the shoddy evidence that
goes into drone bombing or the crimes of Seal Team Six or the many other
horrific acts the US military has done in recent years and decades. If
anything it seems like we are getting better at sweeping this stuff under the
rug.

~~~
phobosdeimos
The US military studied Vietnam a lot:

No more draft, career soldiers only Control the media One year tour of duty
(they broke this one in Iraq because they were running low)

~~~
platz
\+ use mercenaries

~~~
jacobush
"Oops, who could have imagined they'd be a little liberal with the bullets. Oh
well."

------
rmason
There are a lot of people who use the My Lai massacre as an example of the
'real' America. There are a lot of My Lai's and William Calley's in other
countries throughout history. But far fewer Hugh Thompson's and to me that's
the 'real' America.

In Michigan we've got the recent example of Dr. Hanna Attisha and the Flint
water crisis. She was vilified by Flint officials, state officials and by the
state's universities. The state health director called her irresponsible and
execs at her hospital wanted her fired.

Worries made her physically ill. I do not know how she stood courageously for
so long but she did. Eventually a Detroit Free Press article supported her and
in time everyone withdrew their opposition.

[https://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/2015/10/10/h...](https://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/2015/10/10/hanna-
attisha-profile/73600120/)

~~~
abalone
_> There are a lot of My Lai's and William Calley's in other countries
throughout history. But far fewer Hugh Thompson's and to me that's the 'real'
America._

There were a lot of My Lai’s _in Vietnam_. Biggest misconception is that it
was some kind of fluke. But in a “war” where entire civillian populated areas
were designated “free fire zones” where you could kill anything that moves,
civillian massacres were the norm. Not every solider did it of course but it
was a regular feature of that war.

It is good to recognize brave soldiers that resisted. But we must be
respectful enough of those who were murdered to not attempt to rehabilitate
the image of America in Vietnam by pretending those resisters were the norm or
represented the true spirit of America and what it was aiming for or some such
sentimental nationalist nonsense. As the article notes, a My Lai happened
every month in Vietnam. Civillian mass murder was an explicit goal and the
U.S. was very good at it.

~~~
GuardianCaveman
As the article quotes one soldier there was a mai Lai every month. You make it
sound like this was a fact in the article. One unnamed soldier claimed that.

And I think the free fire zones were much more centered on artillery and air
strikes and not ground infiltrations just walking and shooting whomever they
wanted to, but it’s still horrible the disregard for human life.

But to state as you do that civilian mass murder was the goal, that’s false.
The goal was war of attrition of actual combatants. What they did was not care
or let civilian casualties stop them from trying to carry out that goal. Still
horrible but come on there is enough bad stuff to point to without
exaggeration and misleading.

~~~
abalone
That is pure unresearched wishful thinking.

They would fly helicopters up to farmers on a field who would look up at them
in confusion and do nothing. Then they'd turn on a siren and when the farmers
scattered they shot them all down for taking "evasive action", making them
"combatants". There'd be reports of raids with hundreds of "viet cong" killed
and a few weapons recovered. The killing machine was about body counts.
Kissinger ordered "anything that flies on everything that moves." Villages
were leveled in indiscriminate, massive bombing campaigns that exceeded twice
the ordinance dropped in WWII. Millions were killed.

If you really want to research what happened in Vietnam start with Nick
Turse's _Kill Anything That Moves_.[1] It's a polemical title but it's based
on a ton of primary research, e.g. the Pentagon's War Crimes Working Group and
the National Archives and interviews with over a hundred veterans. And that
stuff will make any good soul polemical.

[1]
[https://www.amazon.com/dp/1250045061/ref=rdr_ext_tmb](https://www.amazon.com/dp/1250045061/ref=rdr_ext_tmb)

~~~
wnkrshm
> The Vietnam population did not see the kind of drop you would get from
> widespread systematic ethnic cleansing over a 19+ year war. 2.7 Million
> Americans went to Vietnam and a tiny fraction did some horrific things, but
> this was far more limited than often portrayed.

And deleted before I could reply - for anyone else interested and just two
quick examples, read up on Free-Fire Zones and the Strategic Hamlet Program.
The former is the indiscriminate killing of anyone found in the area and the
latter is forced relocation of civilians and forced labor to build said new
hamlets.

That's top down strategy and can't be put on people losing their composure in
the field.

~~~
wahern
The Strategic Hamlet Program was adopted from the British, who used it to
quell the Communist insurgency in Malaysia. Basically, round everybody up into
a small group of villages for their "protection". Assume everyone who doesn't
stay in the village is the enemy.

Notwithstanding the abuses in Malaysia (I'll leave it to others to question
the necessity and efficacy), it _definitely_ didn't translate to the Vietnam
context. For one thing, in Malaysia the Communists mostly came from the ethnic
Chinese community, who were a minority and _already_ highly concentrated in
the cities.[1] Vietnam had/has a similar ethnic Chinese minority (wealthy,
urban, etc), but they were Capitalists, not the Communists. The pool of
Communists was everybody else, the largely rural population.

[1] Interestingly, to this very day Malaysia still has laws which prevent
Chinese from owning certain types of rural property, ostensibly to protect the
rights of the rural Malay population. I don't know, but I presume such laws
have always been in effect in Malaysia, even before the colonial era. At the
time of the insurgency rural Chinese were probably already a suspicious group.
In hindsight the insurgency was just an excuse for the powers (British,
majority Malays) to reinforce the stable status quo, which is why the program
"worked". In Vietnam the status quo was increasingly untenable.

------
oconnor663
> On the 30th anniversary of the massacre, Thompson went back to My Lai and
> met some of the people whose lives he had saved. "There were real good
> highs," he told me, "and very low lows. One of the ladies that we had helped
> out that day came up to me and asked, 'Why didn't the people who committed
> these acts come back with you?' And I was just devastated. And then she
> finished her sentence: she said, 'So we could forgive them.'

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

------
torstenvl
Another hero, whom I as a judge advocate personally admire, is Captain Aubrey
Daniel III, the prosecutor in the case against Calley. While still on active
duty, he wrote a letter to President Nixon urging him not to intervene.

Thompson displayed both physical and moral courage, whereas Daniel was never
in any danger to life or limb. But his moral courage is courage nonetheless.

[https://www.famous-trials.com/mylaicourts/1623-daniels-
ltr](https://www.famous-trials.com/mylaicourts/1623-daniels-ltr)

------
maxxxxx
Most people would find it easier to just go along or look the other way.

These guys were true war heroes and had courage under fire. They should be
held up as examples what soldiers should be.

~~~
elboru
That’s scary, we all like to judge others’ actions in order to feel morally
superior, but what percentage of people would actually do something when they
see their peers, friends, colleagues and superiors doing bad stuff? It’ll be
always easier to go along and just fool yourself and say “I’m just following
orders”

~~~
Theodores
It is not as simple as that though. We know from war and concentration camps
how many people 'just follow orders'.

Briefly...

In WW2 the Nazis learned from the Soviets that mass graves were a bad thing if
discovered. They also knew that the Final Solution was an actual crime, the
leaders acknowledged this but deemed the crime to be necessary for the
survival of their own imaginably 'Aryan' race. Hence they got the
Sonderkommando Jews to exhume mass graves and to build huge funeral pyres that
they then used to burn the bodies. The Sonderkommando guys just followed
orders until they were expected to build one final funeral pyre after all of
the bodies were burned. By then they twigged that they were expected to meet
their own fate that way. Only then, at the last chance, did they try to do
something, e.g. try and escape or sabotage the gig. So long as there was
someone in front of them in the queue these poor souls could be forced to do
the unthinkable.

The Germans had it all worked out, they could get people to shove their own
mother into the gas chamber. They had enough bullets to make this fully
possible. They could get practically anyone to participate in the criminal
venture. Even if life was a misery in the concentration camp they could get
people to want to stay there another day because life under such circumstances
was better than being actually dead.

I am certain in my own mind that everyone I have ever met in my entire life
could be made into a Sonderkommando if push came to shove. This includes
people in my family so quite a claim.

I am also sure that everyone I have met has heard of the holocaust. Yet I do
not imagine any heroics of the Schindlers List type of Hollywood movie.

On the other hand, most regular soldiers do not like killing people, even if
they are engaged in an 'honest war' and not a known crime. Some soldiers
deliberately miss. Some go AWOL. Some play football with the enemy on
Christmas Day.

But then you have situations like Abu Ghraig where atrocities happen but the
people involved do not believe they are committing a crime and have no fear of
being found out. These people really do have a psychological problem, they are
actually 'sick in the head'.

However, during wartime the overwhelming majority of the population are not on
the front line or anywhere near. Due to fear, propaganda and circumstance
(e.g. being a parent, being too young, being too old) this bystander
population passively goes along with the war, even if they do not fully
subscribe to the doctrine of the day. These people have no skin in the game,
they mostly support the doctrine and they don't think that far outside of what
they are told to think, even if they laugh at some of the lies told to them.
When the likes of MLK talk of being alone, it is these bystander folk that
hurt the most.

~~~
watwut
Regular German army was part of ethnic cleansing and committed a lot of
atrocities. It was not just camps, it was also random violence against
citizens.

They did not missed on purpose. They burned whole villages.

You did not needed to be on the frontline to be killed by them, anywhere in
occupied territory was enough.

------
josu
>Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in most European
countries. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options
that support our full range of digital offerings to the EU market. We continue
to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with
our awa

I'm in Mexico :/

~~~
gerdesj
Welcome to Europe mate. The place has always been a bit weird and I see no
problem with Mexicans being considered Europeans. I'm British (we are properly
strange)

May I also welcome you to the world of IP to location nonsense. Quite large
chunks of IPv4 have been shuffled around the world to the point that geo
location on IP is nonsense.

------
abenedic
A thing more oft than not forgotten about war, is the individual element. I
was in my countries armed forces, while necessary. I saw many different types
of commanders during that time. One thing not to forget is that a person is
still a human even if a soldier. My commander ordered things I hated to do,
while a person in a similar position was hung for failure to perform duty,
allegedly because of his belief in human life.

------
AndyMcConachie
Seymour Hersh, the reporter who's largely the reason we know about the My Lai
massacre at all, recently published his Memoirs.

[https://www.amazon.com/Reporter-Memoir-Seymour-M-
Hersh/dp/03...](https://www.amazon.com/Reporter-Memoir-Seymour-M-
Hersh/dp/0307263959/)

He's probably one of the most important investigative reporters to have ever
lived.

------
1ceaham
Some of you may find the recently-staged monodrama focused on Hugh Thompson
with the Kronos Quartet of interest. The NYT wrote it up [1], but excerpts can
also be found elsewhere. I found it a fitting tribute to his memory.

[1]: [https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/28/arts/music/my-lai-
review-...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/28/arts/music/my-lai-review-
vietnam-kronos-quartet.html)

------
pessimizer
He wasn't "forgotten", he was energetically smeared and condemned by the most
right-wing, racist and nationalist elements of the government, media and US
population; and all of the people who committed the massacre were acquitted
but one, and that one was ordered released from jail by the POTUS during trial
with his life sentence ultimately commuted to 3 1/2 years of house arrest.

~~~
wonder_er
It's easier to think he was forgotten, than that he was hated and attacked by
his own government and country.

If the latter is true, well - introspection is hard, and this is getting
uncomfortable, so I guess I'll go check Twitter.

------
pvsukale1
I read the wikipedia article about this article. There is picture of a woman
seconds before being killed. She is with her children. She was recently
sexually abused and was trying to tie her buttons. And it is really
devastating. How did United States get away with this? All that captain got
was a 3 years house arrest?!

------
bbddg
If there was any justice in the world, the US officials who dictated military
action in Vietnam would be tried for war crimes.

~~~
fit2rule
If there was justice in the world, Cheney, Bush, Rumsfeld, and Obama would all
be in The Hague, in irons.

There is no justice in the world.

~~~
phobosdeimos
Thats far too easy. In a democracy YOU are the state.

I wonder what would happen if we could live cast our military deployments so
that every voter has access to every war crime committed? Maybe then people
wouldn't be so quick to sign up for another war. Or they would at least be
honest about it.

~~~
DanBC
Watch films and TV shows where blatantly illegal actions - including Geneva
convention war crimes - are committed by the heros. I'm not persuaded the
public wants less of this. And politicians sometimes play to this, asking for
action that's of dubious legality

------
jrandm
I want to add to what chris_mc and others said confirming this horrible
instance is used as a training exercise for lots of the US military.

When I did USMC boot camp in the late 2000s this and other less publicized
examples were used to enforce disobeying unlawful orders and encouraging
critical thought.

To quote a West Wing episode (AFAIK): "All wars are crimes." I'm glad we try
to do better by teaching from our mistakes.

------
GreeniFi
I’ve known several soldiers over the years and all had struggles with
depression and possibly PTSD. I obviously wouldn’t want to present these
limited data points as conclusive evidence, but I’ve been struck by the extent
to which combatants pay a high price for their jobs. I feel sorry for them,
because no-one tells them about this when they’re recruited. It’s a real bait
and switch: promises of comraderie, glory and a trade and what you actually
get is a thumping case of depression and PTSD. I don’t believe in karma, but
this looks a bit like it to me.

------
objektif
Lets also remember Aubrey Daniel who worked hard to prosecute these war
criminals.

------
8bitsrule
When I hear about Vietnam, I think about the 13 young men I grew up with in a
town of 6000 who _didn 't_ get a chance to be grandfathers.

Nobody 'wins'. We all LOSE.

------
squarefoot
"Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in most European
countries. ..."

So much for the _World Wide_ Web.

Someone give me back the web 1.0 before 2000, please.

~~~
Bluestrike2
[https://outline.com/pvdxgM](https://outline.com/pvdxgM)

And 100% agreed, particularly for a major newspaper.

~~~
drakenot
Thanks for the link. I hadn't heard of outline.com before, but seems like a
useful service.

~~~
giodamelio
It is pretty nifty. They have a Chrome extension too, but that seems like
massive overkill so I threw together a quick bookmarklet [1]. You need a
decently new browser to use it.

    
    
      fetch(
        "https://outlineapi.com/parse_article?source_url=" +
          encodeURIComponent(window.location)
      )
      .then(res => res.json())
      .then(body => {
        if (body.error) {
          return alert(`Outline Bookmarklet Error: ${body.error}`);
        }
        window.location.href = `https://outline.com/${body.data.short_code}`
      })
      .catch(err => {
        alert("Outline Bookmarklet Error. See console for details.");
        console.error(err);
      });
    

Or minified to be copied directly into bookmark:

    
    
      javascript:fetch("https://outlineapi.com/parse_article?source_url="+encodeURIComponent(window.location)).then(o=>o.json()).then(o=>{if(o.error)return alert(`Outline Bookmarklet Error: ${o.error}`);window.location.href=`https://outline.com/${o.data.short_code}`}).catch(o=>{alert("Outline Bookmarklet Error. See console for details."),console.error(o)});
    

[1]:
[https://gist.github.com/giodamelio/c97f71a12eec5c142f21f757a...](https://gist.github.com/giodamelio/c97f71a12eec5c142f21f757a6ba4d8a)

------
qubax
It's a bit strange that we are remembering the "hero" but not the 500 or so
innocent vietnamese men, women, children and infants who were raped, tortured
and/or killed. Strange how we always have to make ourselves the good guys. The
"heroes".

If you look at the war photos. You'll see infants. Such a horrific war.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Lai_Massacre](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Lai_Massacre)

It's also strange that we say this is the worst event in vietnam war, when we
dropped napalm on people ( chemically burning them to death ) and more than 4
million people were killed in that terrible war. God knows how many vietnamese
women and children were raped. My Lai was one of thousands of my lai incidents
in vietnam.

~~~
baddox
See also: people who claim that the atomic bombings of Japan saved lives, and
the people who claim that white people deserve credit for being the people who
ended slavery in the United States.

~~~
captain_perl
As a student of WW2, millions of Japanese lives were saved by the atomic
bombs:

1) Japanese military leaders were planning to continue fighting until no
citizens were left: "even if the Japanese people die, their spirit will live
on."

Surrender rates in previous island battles were on the order of 1% (ie. 99%
killed or seriously injured.)

2) the Japanese people were facing starvation had the war continued. The early
surrender helped with the rebuilding effort and prevented the nation from
literally starving to death.

3) American leaders chose to bomb secondary cities, rather than completely
destroy Tokyo, a capital city

4) had Russia invaded Japan, they typically would de-industrialize the enemy
by transporting power plants and other facilities back to Russia

5) Japan actually refused to surrender to the USA. The emperor's broadcast
never used the word, and the leader who signed the surrender document was
approx. #10 in the leadership hierarchy.

The emperor was a serious amateur microbiologist and realized what an atomic
bomb was, so did not need convincing that the war was lost.

(He was against starting the war with China and the USA and said so, but faced
assassination and constitutional issues if he made a serious effort to change
sentiment.)

~~~
Synaesthesia
This is not true, serious military figures in the US armed forces concluded
that Japan was utterly defeated and was making peace feelers. They were
basically defenseless at that stage of the war, against the bombing raids.

The civilian massacre could have been prevented by merely demonstrating the
bomb. However they chose to experiment by dropping it on an city.

~~~
olavk
I think this ignores the historical context. The US had air control and been
bombing the mainland relentlessly for a while. The firebombing of Tokyo had
already caused bigger loss of life than the Hiroshima bomb did. So it was
clear to both parties that the US did have the destructive capability and were
willing to use it. This did not cause the Japanese to surrender. Why would it
have made any difference to "demonstrate" the bomb, if actually bombing the
capital and killing 100000 did not have that effect?

Even after the second bomb, just before announcing the surrender, there was an
attempted coup d'etat by high ranking officers to prevent the surrender. So
its not like surrender was a given after seeing a nuclear bomb.

It is only in retrospect it seems obvious that the nuclear bomb would lead to
surrender. Even taking about "the decision to drop the bomb" as it was some
unique moral dilemma is kind of anachronistic. Of course they were going to
drop the bomb, just like they used any other weapon at their disposal.

~~~
jacobush
Don't forget demonstrating both ability and willingness to the keen onlooker
standing eagerly in the wings: the Soviet Union. It was ready to take on a
weakened Japan in a drawn out conflict. Also, who knew what ambitions there
were for Europe?

Best nip any grand ambitions in the bud.

(The Soviet Union was still some years away from having nuclear bombs.)

------
quickthrower2
Oblig: [https://xkcd.com/206/](https://xkcd.com/206/)

