New Heroes for a New Century

Obituary for a Hero for Our Century: Hugh Thompson (1943-2006)

Herbert Hirsch (Virginia Commonwealth University); Abridged by Naama Haviv (Clark University)

On March 16, 1968, Hugh Thompson was the crew chief of a helicopter flying over the village of My Lai, Vietnam. As he and his crew mates, Lawrence Colburn and Greg Andreotta, skimmed the ground, they saw piles of Vietnamese wounded and dead civilians. A group of American soldiers approached a young woman on the ground. One of them nudged her with his foot, then shot her; Thompson and his men could only look on, horrified.

Thompson flew over to the other side of the village and saw numerous bodies in an irrigation ditch, with US soldiers standing closely by. He landed near the ditch and asked if the soldiers were helping the civilians, some still moving. A sergeant suggested putting them out of their misery, and Lieutenant Calley told Thompson to mind his own business. As Thompson reluctantly got back into his helicopter, the soldiers fired into the ditch.

As civilians ran for cover, Thompson landed his helicopter between the troops and the civilians. He jumped out asked the lieutenant to help get the civilians out of the bunker. The lieutenant told Thompson he would get them out with a grenade. Thompson radioed other helicopters to land and take the civilians to safety, and told his crew to shoot the Americans if they fired on the civilians. As they prepared to return to base, the crew saw something moving in AN irrigation ditch �� a child of about four. Andreotta waded through bloody cadavers to pull him out and Thompson, overcome with emotion, flew the child to a nearby hospital (US News and World Report).

Thompson told his superiors what happened, but the investigation which followed was perfunctory. Though nearly 80 soldiers participated in the killing and cover-up, only one person was court martialed �� William Calley �� and he was eventually pardoned by Nixon. Thompson was attacked as a traitor, receiving nasty letters and death threats. Only thirty years later, on March 6, 1998, after an internal debate among Pentagon officials afraid that giving Thompson an award would reopen old wounds, Thompson and Colburn received the Soldier��s Medal. Both men said they received a far more satisfying reward when they took a trip back to My Lai to dedicate a school and ��peace park.�� There they met a young man who they believe was the boy they rescued.

Remembering Hugh Thompson, who passed this last January, is especially important as we live in a time not, as some have argued, without heroes, but a time when we respect the wrong ones. How many of us can recall the name of Hugh Thompson, the helicopter pilot who landed his aircraft between a group of Vietnamese and Americans who were about to kill them? Or how many of us remember the name of the soldier who refused to obey an order to execute civilian elderly men, women, and children at My Lai? Yet how many of us know William Calley, or William Westmoreland or Richard Nixon? Hugh Thompson��s example is an appropriate antidote in a time of despair, where headlines decry the crime and violence of contemporary society.

Philip Hallie in Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed (1979) notes that the very prevalence of war and violence causes people to lose their ��awareness of the pricelessness of life,�� because they become accustomed to killing. This, he argues, ��destroyed the foundations of a life-and-death ethic. War substituted military heroism for dignity�� (Hallie, 274). It is quite probable that this demise of a life-and-death ethic has spilled over into modern life in general. That the prevalence of violence at all levels �� in our communities, by groups in international politics, by nation states �� has sanctioned mass murder and created a commonness of violence and death which continues to erode our awareness of the pricelessness of life, along with our capacity for outrage at injustice and cruelty. Death and violence appear, in the modern period, to be the ��normal�� state of human existence.

If this is the case, then people such as Hugh Thompson �� who resist death, who actively refuse to participate in killing and take action to oppose it �� deserve the status of modern heroes. We need to not only celebrate their acts, but attempt to understand the development of their motivations to the same extent that we examine those of the killers. Resisters could provide an alternative focus for memory. We might consider replacing the heroes who kill with those who refuse to kill. This would necessitate a massive change in national and cultural values; the entire reward structure of a society would have to be radically transformed. The socialization process would have to change so that we no longer celebrate generals, presidents, or supposed martyrs �� who lead nations to war or take innocent human life �� but those who have the courage to stand up and attempt to stop the killing of the innocent.