A Good Man at a Massacre
US Army soldiers went on a bloody rampage near the Vietnamese village of Son My on March 16th, 1968. Over several hours, they massacred about 500 unarmed civilians. Most victims were women, quite a few of whom were violated and mutilated before they were murdered, children, even infants. Terrible as the massacre was, it would have been worse if not for the heroic intervention of one man: then-Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson, Jr., a helicopter pilot who arrived on the scene halfway through the atrocity. All he got for his heroics to stop the atrocity was ingratitude from the US Army.
As he described what he witnessed: “We kept flying back and forth, reconning in front and in the rear, and it didn’t take very long until we started noticing the large number of bodies everywhere. Everywhere we’d look, we’d see bodies. These were infants, two-, three-, four-, five-year-olds, women, very old men, no draft-age people whatsoever“. At first, Thompson and his crew thought the casualties were accidental collateral damage from an American artillery barrage. The truth hit when they saw the soldiers’ commanding officer, Captain Ernest Medina, execute an unarmed, wounded woman. Thompson immediately swung into action.
