Remember this hero of a dark day

By BOB KERR
Providence Journal
Hugh Thompson died last week. He was a difficult kind of hero. He took a stand for decency and humanity, and some people vilified him for it.
News of his death did not get anywhere near the attention it deserved. Maybe that's because we are still so uneasy with that day almost 37 years ago when American soldiers showed a capacity for depravity and savagery that called all kinds of moral assumptions into question.
Was it an isolated aberration or just grizzly proof that Americans are not immune from the kind of evil that can shut down years of civilized living and turn a man into something his family wouldn't recognize? Even as we go to war again, we don't seem to have a solid answer.
In the village of My Lai, in what was then South Vietnam, American men went on a killing spree on March 16, 1968, that left hundreds of people who had nothing to do with the war -- old men, women, children -- dead in a ditch. There was rape and mutilation.
And Hugh Thompson, a warrant officer and pilot, saw it all from the air and put his helicopter down in the middle of it, between the soldiers gone mad and the few remaining villagers left alive. He told his two-man crew to open fire on their fellow Americans if they had to. He called in nearby gunships to fly four adults and five children to safety. And he flew one small child to a hospital.
The child was spotted moving in the killing ditch and pulled from among the bloody corpses.
News of the barbaric slaughter was slow to reach the folks back home. The Army did not move quickly or thoroughly to investigate the reports of a massacre. But in 1970, author Seymour Hersh laid it all out for us. He won the Pulitzer Prize for telling us about Lt. William Calley and the men under his command who allegedly were looking for the Viet Cong when they crossed over to the dark side and created a hellish bloodbath of innocents.
Incredible courage
Thompson and his crew -- door-gunner Lawrence Colburn and crew chief Glenn Andreotta -- simply couldn't accept what they saw from their helicopter. They landed and showed incredible courage. They went against their own when they knew their own were brutally, criminally wrong.
It was the kind of courage not easily fit into Army history. Some people, including one crazed congressman and some fellow soldiers, thought Thompson and his crew deserved condemnation rather than praise. It was not until 1998 that Thompson, Colburn and Andreotta were given the prestigious Soldier's Medal.
It was a posthumous award for Andreotta, who was killed in action three weeks after My Lai. Even 30 years after the killing, Army officials were wary of reviving memories of the day the war in Vietnam went terribly, murderously wrong.
Calley was eventually tried, convicted and sentenced to life in prison for the massacre, but President Nixon reduced his sentence and he served an insultingly brief three years of house arrest.
Thompson apparently lived a quiet life after Vietnam. He did visit West Point once a year to lecture on his experience. He died of cancer last week in a Department of Veterans Affairs medical center in Louisiana. He was 62.
Seymour Hersh has, of course, moved on to Iraq, where he has written about another generation of soldiers and other dark chapters.
But it will be years before Hersh or anyone else tells us the full story of this underreported war in Iraq. And it will be years before we know how well the courageous legacy of Hugh Thompson was embraced by those who followed him.
X Bob Kerr is a columnist for The Providence Journal. Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service.