by Мастер » Tue Mar 16, 2021 8:30 am
On 16 March 1968, shortly before his 25th birthday, Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson Jr., a helicopter pilot for the United States Army, flew his Hiller OH-23 Raven over a village in South Vietnam, providing air support for a ground operation there. In his crew were gunner Lawrence Colburn, not quite nineteen years old, and crew chief Glenn Andreotta, who was twenty years old. The helicopter took no fire, and later reports suggest that the villagers were almost all unarmed. Nonetheless, the village was shelled, and ground troops moved in. What followed was a slaughter, with estimates of the number killed (all Vietnamese) ranging from 347 to 504.
Thompson and his crew dropped green flares near the wounded Vietnamese - this was a signal that there was someone who needed medical attention. When they flew by again later, they found all the people they had marked were dead, and realised that the people they were trying to help, they had gotten killed instead. At this point, the members of the helicopter crew realised what was going on.
Thompson used an open frequency, to make sure lots of people heard it, on his helicopter radio to send a message including words like "unnecessary killing". At various points, he landed the helicopter, and challenged the people committing the massacre, including US army officers who outranked him. At one point, he landed his helicopter between the American soldiers and the Vietnamese civilians, and told his crew that if the Americans did not stop their efforts to kill the civilians, his crew should fire on them (the American soldiers, not the civilians). Lawrence Colburn agreed, but wasn't sure whether he could really do it. The soldiers did stop, so he never found out. The crew managed to save a number of civilians, including a small child seen moving underneath a pile of dead bodies.
Thompson reported what he had seen, but it didn't really go anywhere until reporter Seymour Hersh managed to uncover many of the details of the massacre. Thompson was given a medal, but threw it away when he saw the medal citation had a highly falsified account of what happened. He testified in congress about what he had seen and done, was called a traitor by some members of that august body, and one congressperson tried to push (unsuccessfully) for a court martial. Later, when the public became aware of this incident, fourteen people were court-martialled, but only one, Lt. William Calley, was convicted (for twenty murders). He was sentenced to life imprisonment, but two days later, Richard Nixon had him placed under house arrest instead, pending appeal. Calley ultimately served about 3.5 years of house arrest.
Glenn Andreotta was killed in Vietnam later in 1968. After generally fading from public view, becoming a helicopter pilot for oil companies, Hugh Thompson ended up in contact with Lawrence Colburn again for the first time in 16 years because of a film project. Both Thompson and Colburn gave lectures on the ethics of warfare at West Point and other locations. Colburn cites a story in which American soldiers in Iraq were preparing to fire on some people there, when one of them said, do you remember what those old guys from Vietnam told us back at the academy? They held their fire, investigated further, and discovered the people they had almost killed were unarmed civilians.
Thompson died of cancer in 2006, leaving Lawrence Colburn the sole survivor of the helicopter crew. He also died of cancer, in 2016. Before that time, though, Мастер managed to locate him on the internet, and had a brief conversation with him. After providing some information and reference suggestions for further study of the whole incident, Colburn signed off, saying that many were disgusted and refused to participate in the massacre, but only one man tried to stop it - Hugh Thompson.
An immigrant who came to the US at a young age, and wasn't old enough to be sent to Vietnam, nonetheless sometimes wonders - what would he have done?
They call me Mr Celsius!