Three American Heroes at the My Lai Massacre

September 5, 2017 will be the 48th anniversary of Lt. William Calley being charged with murder for the My Lai massacre in Vietnam. Calley would eventually serve just three-and-a-half years under house arrest and then be released due to irregularities at his trial. Nobody else was ever punished for the murders of 347 unarmed civilians at My Lai on March 16, 1968.

The crew of one OH-23 Raven observation helicopter tried to stop the killing. Pilot Hugh Thompson, Jr., door gunner Laurence Colburn, and crew chief Glenn Andreotta used green smoke to mark a group of wounded Vietnamese civilians so they could get help. Later the crew saw that everyone in this group had been killed. They marked another wounded Vietnamese woman with green smoke and then watched as an American Captain walked up to her, kicked her, and shot her.

Thompson, Colburn, and Andreotta made several more attempts to rescue civilians and were able to get some of them evacuated to safety. At one point Thompson set his helicopter down between American soldiers and Vietnamese civilians and told his men to fire on the Americans if necessary to stop the killing.

It was this helicopter crew that reported the massacre to their base that day and got a Lieutenant-Colonel to order the men on the ground to "knock off the killing."

Andreotta was killed in action just three weeks after his brave intervention at My Lai. Thompson and Colburn survived the war and the whole helicopter crew was awarded the Soldier's Medal for bravery not in the face of the enemy 30 years after My Lai in 1998. A Major-General Ackerman said at the award ceremony that "It was the ability to do the right thing even at the risk of their personal safety that guided these soldiers to do what they did" and that they "set the standard for all soldiers to follow."

Sometimes all the normal rules of civilized behavior seem to disappear and people find themselves in nightmares of danger and fear and violence. In those terrible times I hope there will always be people like Thompson and Colburn and Andreotta. People who try to stop us - even in chaos and blood and confusion - stop us from sliding completely into hell by still having the moral clarity to know what is right and by still having the courage to do it.

Hugh Thompson, Jr., Laurence Colburn, and Glenn Andreotta are American heroes and they are my heroes.

[The My Lai Massacre was the most terrible atrocity committed by American troops in Vietnam. This book is about a true American hero who tried to stop it.]

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Copyright © 2017 by Joseph Wayne Gadway