please note: this article contains images and descriptions of events that may distress the reader
On March 16th 1968 the U.S. Army attacked My Lai Village in Vietnam.
Helicopter pilot Hugh Thompson and his gunner Lawrence Colburn were there. And they witnessed a massacre.
Colburn-
“We saw a young girl about twenty years old lying on the grass. We could see that she was unarmed and wounded in the chest…We were hovering six feet off the ground not more than twenty feet away when the captain came over, kicked her, stepped back, and finished her off. He did it right in front of us. When we saw him do that; it clicked. It was our guys doing the killing…
They spotted an irrigation ditch full of bodies. A lieutenant and his men, guns in hand-
…And then Mr Thompson set down our helicopter-“
Thompson
What's going on here, Lieutenant?
Lieutenant Calley
This is my business.
Thompson
What is this?
Lieutenant Calley
Just following orders.
Thompson
Orders? Whose orders?
Lieutenant Calley
Just following the captain...
Thompson
But, these are human beings, unarmed civilians, sir.
Lieutenant Calley
Look Thompson, this is my show. I'm in charge here.
Thompson
Yeah, great job.
Lieutenant Calley
You better get back in that chopper and mind your own business.
As Thompson and Calley argued, Calley’s men shot again at the Vietnamese civilians in the ditch, making sure they were all dead. Thompson and his crew recoiled in horror. Taking off again, they aimed to get ahead of the killing and save any villagers they could…
Thompson landed again between the advancing soldiers and villagers cowering in a bunker. Colburn takes up the story-
“…I heard Mr Thompson confront our guys- ‘There are civilians in that bunker – how are you going to get them out? And they said they were gonna get them out with hand grenades! And Thompson told them he had a better idea. He said ‘Keep your boys in place. If you fire on these people, my people are gonna fire on you..! Then he came back past the aircraft, and told me, ‘I’m gonna go get them out myself. If those boys fire at the people, shoot them…’
Thompson-
‘…I told Colburn we didn’t have any choice. We had asked. We had been polite. I was like a penned animal in a cage. There was no way out - we just had to get our men to stop killing. I just thank God everybody played it cool and nobody started shooting. We didn’t volunteer to be heroes but right there and then it was the only way out and I felt we had to take it… There was no way I could turn my back on them’
Colburn–
“We passed over the ditch one more time and our crew chief Glenn said: "I saw something move." Mr Thompson landed again and Glenn charged in there, mired above his knees in what was once human beings. Maybe 175 people stacked three or four high. He picked this little kid up but couldn't get out of the ditch because it was hard to get footing so he handed the child up to me and I grabbed the kid by the back of her shirt. I remember thinking: I hope the buttons are sewn on well because they're going to have to support her weight…
The child sat on my lap, limp. She had that blank thousand-yard stare. I couldn't even make her blink. She was in severe shock. She had no broken bones, no bullet holes, but she was completely drenched in blood.”
Thompson-
“When Glenn picked her up, she was still clinging to her dead mother. We flew the little person to Quang Ngai hospital, an orphanage. A Catholic nun came out in her habit. Hugh took her and gave her to the nun- ‘Sister, I don't know what you're going to do with her. I don't think she's got any parents.’
We left her there and flew away.
For 30 years, I prayed she was only 4 or 5 so she wouldn't remember, but when I met her (in 2001), I found out she was 8 and she remembered everything. You talk about someone to admire. This little girl stayed at the hospital for two days, then, on her own, left and walked 10 miles through the jungle to her village to make sure her parents were buried properly.”
In My Lai the American troops raped the women with bayonets. They sodomized the children. They decapitated people. They killed a monk, threw him down a well and followed with hand grenades. In four hours of terror the troops killed over five hundred innocent people and burnt the village to the ground.
On his return to base, Hugh Thompson reported what he saw but Colburn remembers that it would be a year and a half before the massacre became public knowledge.
…It was in ’seventy or seventy-one that Life magazine finally published the colour photographs that were taken on the ground that day – by somebody with their own camera. And I thought well, now maybe there will be justice…
But… Once I saw how the trials were going I can remember testifying and thinking, they are just trying to discredit our story! And I could see that the people involved were not going to let it through at any price. The trials became a sham just to appease the American people…’
Before My Lai, Americans always saw their boys in uniform as heroes. Their troops had brought war criminals - the Nazis, to justice. When the massacre of such a huge number of unarmed Vietnamese civilians by U.S. soldiers became public, it shook the America to its core. Had ‘our boys’ really killed these people in cold blood?
Many found it so unbelievable that, instead of Hugh Thompson, they perversely celebrated Lt. William Calley; the officer who had ordered his men to shoot civilians. They said Calley was an unjustly accused hero. Even future president Jimmy Carter encouraged people to hoot their horns and flash their lights in support of Calley.
For years after, Thompson was persecuted within the military as one of those who had ‘blown the whistle’ on My Lai. He’d walk into an officer’s club and people would leave. He received death threats and hate mail and dead animals were left on his porch…
In the 1980s, University Professor David Egan - who was himself a survivor of a Nazi massacre during WW2 - began to campaign on Thompson’s behalf. He persuaded people including Vietnam-era Secretary of State Dean Rusk, to lobby the government to honour the helicopter crew.
Thompson and his colleagues, Lawrence Colburn and Glenn Andreotta, were finally awarded the Soldier's Medal, the highest US military award for bravery when not confronting an enemy.
After the grotesque of Cally - who would serve barely any time in prison and be the only soldier convicted - My Lai had at least one true American hero. William Eckhardt, who served as chief prosecutor for the My Lai courts-martial said- "When you have evil, sometimes, in the midst of it, you will have incredible, selfless good. And that's Hugh Thompson.”
Thompson was close to tears as he accepted the award in 1998 "for all the men who served their country with honour on the battlefields of South-East Asia". Crew chief Glenn Andreotta's award was posthumous. He had been killed in Vietnam less than a month after My Lai.
Lawrence Colburn -
“The thing that made Thompson carry on was that he loved his country and he was bound and determined to maintain integrity and honour within the ranks of the military. And, actually if you look at his life, he went full circle. In the end he became a teacher and went to places like West Point and tried to communicate with these young officers how important it is to not be taken in by negative peer pressure or a mob mentality when things are tough…”
A lone US Army photographer captured the horror of My Lai. His photographs the definitive evidence of the massacre; making any cover-up impossible.
Without Ron Haeberle's pictorial testimony, The plea for justice would never have been believed. But in the years before true justice was served, Haeberle was a man haunted by the same demons that had driven Thompson to alcoholism, depression and night terrors.
And the pictures would never have come to light if Haeberle had not made it his business to carry two cameras into action. He had an army issue Leica which he used to photograph the soldiers in action at My Lai - but not the dead all around them.
...Haeberle had another discreet and personal camera - a Nikon - on which he shot in colour the awful consequences of the GIs actions. The pictures from the Nikon were not released to the army by Haeberle - he held on to them until he could get them to the press back in the USA.
Haeberle raised the Nikon to his eye, capturing the desperation around him-
"...But just as soon as I turned and walked away, I heard firing… I saw the people drop. And I think back - could I have prevented this; how could I have prevented this? It’s a question I still ask myself today."
Ron Haeberle photographer
Truong Thi Le, a survivor of the carnage remembers-
Nothing was happening here… It was a very normal life. When the helicopters came and the soldiers surrounded us… It makes me so unhappy… It’s so hard… I miss my mother… My children… I think of them lying there dead… And my heart is cut to pieces
As the helicopters thundered overhead, Haeberle saw a small boy desperately trying to protect his sister by trying to hide her underneath him. Haeberle took the photograph before being moved on by the GI seen just out of frame. The photographer assumed both children had been killed that day but on returning to Vietnam decades later he discovered that by some miracle, Duc, the boy seen in the photograph had saved his sister, Thu Ha Tran and that their sister My had also survived by hiding under dead bodies.
The four became great friends.
Ron Haeberle with My Lai Survivors Thu Ha Tran, Thi My Tran & Duc Tran Van
Haeberle took the last photo of Duc's mother (a My Lai victim) with his Nikon. Now he decided to give the camera to Duc. Here was the camera that had revealed the truth about My Lai - and Haeberle hoped that gifting the Nikon to Duc would give him a kind of talisman to hold back the dark spirits of that dreadful day in March 1968.
There is an extraordinarily powerful film about My Lai which can be viewed here: