A
hero scorned
Yahoo!News
Fri Jan 13, 6:45 AM ET
In 1968, helicopter pilot Hugh Thompson flew into the thick of what he
thought was a fierce battle in South Vietnam and discovered, instead,
that a massacre was going on - of women, children and elderly men at
the hands of U.S. soldiers. Horrified, he landed his helicopter between
the soldiers and the civilians, ordered his crew to fire on any
American who continued shooting, called for back-up and rescued
victims, digging through corpses to scoop up one child.
An instant hero? It would be nice to think so. A year later, the public
found out about the killings - infamous as the My Lai massacre, exposed
by journalist Seymour Hersh. But Thompson, who died of cancer last week
at age 62, received no honors then. He was made a pariah.
For years, when he walked into officers' clubs, they emptied out. He
got threatening phone messages. Dead animals were left on his porch.
When he was called to give closed congressional testimony, a senior
lawmaker said that if anyone deserved to be court-martialed, it was
him. As it was, only one officer, Army Lt. William Calley, was
convicted, spending just three years under house arrest before
President Nixon pardoned him.
In 1998, after a book and CBS' 60 Minutes told of Thompson's courage,
the Pentagon was shamed into giving him and his crew the Soldier's
Medal, the highest award for bravery not involving conflict with an
enemy. He was invited to lecture on military ethics at the U.S.
Military Academy at West Point.
What Thompson really deserved, and never got, is the hero's recognition
afforded other national icons of moral courage, such as Rosa Parks. Not
so much for his benefit as for the nation's. The mob mentality that
took over at My Lai was an extreme manifestation of a common human
instinct. It's just easier to go along with the crowd, rationalizing
corrupt behavior, than it is to face the danger of stopping it. That
was true at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison and at corrupt Enron.
Nobody likes a snitch. But when courageous people instinctively supply
the moral compass missing higher up in their command - as Thompson did
at My Lai, as a young soldier did at Abu Ghraib and as whistle-blower
Sherron Watkins did at Enron - they deserve recognition.
When Hollywood takes up that kind of plot, in movies such as The
Insider, it's easy to cheer. Too bad it's so different in real life.
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