My Lai Massacre Hero Buried

[Sleepless In NY]

LAFAYETTE, United States (AFP) - Hugh Thompson, the US army helicopter pilot who rescued Vietnamese civilians from American troops during the My Lai massacre, was buried with full military honors.

On March 16, 1968, Thompson led the rescue of more than a dozen Vietnamese civilians at My Lai, an incident one American general described as "one of the most shameful chapters in the army's history."

"It was probably one of the saddest days of my life," Thompson told a 1994 conference on the massacre at Tulane University in New Orleans

Up to 504 Vietnamese civilians were killed by US troops at My Lai including as many as 210 children aged 12 or younger, according to historians.

As his helicopter hovered overhead, Thompson recalled, he noted a large number of bodies lying in the village below.

"Everywhere we'd look we'd see bodies," Thompson said. Most of the villagers had been shot and left for dead.

Although outranked, Thompson ordered the lieutenant and his men to stand down.

"Thompson put his guns on the Americans and said he would shoot them if they shot another Vietnamese," said William Eckhardt, the chief prosecutor at the My Lai courtmartial.

Thompson subsequently testified at criminal trials of the army officers, an act which initially left him ostracized by others in the military.

As a combat pilot Thompson was shot down four times in Vietnam. He suffered a broken back in his last crash and received a Purple Heart and Distinguished Flying Cross.

More http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20060112/ts_afp/usvietnamthompson

Didn't see this covered anywhere in the mainstream media. Found it by accident on yahoo. Anyone else see it reported? What a courageous man.

Made me think of Kerry & the Swift Boat Liars.

[IndyOp]

1. Hugh Thompson

:patriot:





Into the Dark: The My Lai Massacre

[FloridaPat]

2. 4 million Vietnamese civilians killed by troops like these on orders

from Washington. An Ohio newspaper found that out last year. It was the Pentagon's Vietnamzation plan - special troops going around shooting everyone they could find. Get rid of the population therefore no more communists. And we are now doing this in Iraq.

I had followed the whitewashing of My Lai and had never heard this story. A true hero, Mr. Thompson.

[alcibiades_mystery]

3. I think that's plain old bullshit

Would love to see the citation on that.

Needless to say, and everyone's known for years, the free fire zone policy amounted to de facto genocide in practice, but I seriously doubt you have any documentation that anybody in the Pentagon or chain of command advocated getting "rid of the population" as a matter of policy. I mean, please.

Not to mention that you don't seem to know anything about what "Vietnamization" was. Vietnamization, as it was called, was the strategy initiated by the Nixon administration beginning in 1969. The goal was to transfer combat operations to the ARVN over a period of years, thereby reducing US troop presence. It certainly wasn't in force in March-November 1967 (this is pre Dak To, much less Tet!), and it certainly didn't refer to any strategy of extermination. Get a hold of your facts.

[Solon]

6. Tiger force, anyone?

http://hnn.us/articles/1816.html

[alcibiades_mystery]

8. One battalion killed 4 million people in the Song Ve Valley?

Holy cripes! I'm astonished!

:eyes:

As I clearly indicated, the free fire zone policy amounted to de facto genocide. That seems to be what happened here. Now, if you give me a document that shows Pentagon brass advocated these actions as policy, you will have proved me wrong. As it stands, my point remains just as valid as it was before you posted, and just as right.

[Solon]

10. Actually I didn't say that...

Also, they are the only one that we know about. Personally, I'm skeptical of the 4 million figure for Vietnam alone, however, does it really matter if it was either 4 million or just 4? Murder is still murder after all, and we aren't any better than any other Empire, its stupid to think otherwise. BTW: Just an FYI, if sheer numbers is perferable, it has been estimated that since at least WW2, the United States has been responsible either directly(War), or indirectly(CIA coups and training) in killing about 6 million people. Former State Department official William Blum correctly calls this an "American Holocaust." Exact numbers aren't known, of course, but we did kill at least 200,000 civilians when pacifying the Philipines back at the turn of the century. Gods only knows the true count of the amount of blood that is on the United States hands since then.

[FloridaPat]

12. George Carlin came out with 190 million. Don't know where he got

that figure.

[alcibiades_mystery]

14. You're right

The numbers don't matter, and they didn't matter to me when I posted my response, above. I was disputing the specific claim of Florida Pat in post#2, to wit: that the Ohio story says that 4 million were killed on orders from Washington. I first hypothesized that no article said anything of the kind. Once the article was posted, I read it and affirmed that the article simply says nothing of the kind, and that's my only point.

[FloridaPat]

11. Read it and weep. Yes, our government is that bad.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2003/nov2003/tole-n08.shtml

[alcibiades_mystery]

13. Let's be very precise here

I'm disputing your assertions in the previous message.

There you say the following:

4 million Vietnamese civilians killed by troops like these on orders from Washington. An Ohio newspaper found that out last year.

The Ohio newspaper article says exactly NOTHING of the kind. It says several hundred Vietnamese were killed by one battalion in a relatively limited area of the RVN, and it doesn't specify where the order to do so came from, supposing any existed. You can post the link as many times as you want. It simply doesn't say what you say it does.

It was the Pentagon's Vietnamization plan - special troops going around shooting everyone they could find. Get rid of the population therefore no more communists.

The actions of the Tiger Force were certainly not part of the "Pentagon's Vietnamization plan." You apparently have zero idea what "Vietnamization" even means or meant. It certainly wasn't what you claim it to be, and was not even in existence in March-November 1967, when the Ohio newspaper article says the Tiger Force atrocities occurred.

I am not disputing that widespread atrocities were committed by American forces in Vietnam. This is common knowledge and well-documented. I'm disputing your specific claims in post #2, which are presented without evidence and even without knowledge of basic terms.

[upi402]

4. WOW, I never heard a thing about it.

God speed my brother.
:patriot:

[stevedeshazer]

5. A guy with a conscience deserves a K & R, especially these days.

:kick:

[Poll_Blind]

22. An example of a real hero. Real heroes are not extinct, but they...

...give appearance of same as they always compose the tiniest fraction of a society's population.

PB

[HysteryDiagnosis]

7. A site dedicated to his legacy.....

http://www.ntcsites.com/acadianhouse/nss-folder/publicfolder/AHP/Forgotten_Hero/photographs2.htm

[jonnyblitz]

9. it's sad that he was ostracised. as a vet I want to know where is

the honor in covering this sort of evil BULLSHIT that went down at My Lai up? I get tired of this mindset that military personal are above criticism and can just rape and pillage with no consequence and anybody who calls them (us) on it is to be ostracized and vilified! sick. Same with the swiftboat dipshits who got all indignant over the Winter Soldier hearings and Kerry speaking out. :puke:

[RC]

15. An Introduction to the My Lai Courts-Martial

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=364&topic_id=80986

Two tragedies took place in 1968 in Viet Nam. One was the massacre by United States soldiers of as many as 500 unarmed civilians-- old men, women, children-- in My Lai on the morning of March 16. The other was the cover-up of that massacre.

U. S. military officials suspected Quang Ngai Province, more than any other province in South Viet Nam, as being a Viet Cong stronghold. The U. S. targeted the province for the first major U.S. combat operation of the war. Military officials declared the province a "free-fire zone" and subjected it to frequent bombing missions and artillery attacks. By the end of 1967, most of the dwellings in the province had been destroyed and nearly 140,000 civilians left homeless. Not surprisingly, the native population of Quang Ngai Province distrusted Americans. Children hissed at soldiers. Adults kept quiet.

<SNIP>

My Lai village had about 700 residents. They lived in either red-brick homes or thatch-covered huts. A deep drainage ditch marked the eastern boundary of the village. Directly south of the residential area was an open plaza area used for holding village meetings. To the north and west of the village was dense foliage .

By 8 a.m., Calley's platoon had crossed the plaza on the town's southern edge and entered the village. They encountered families cooking rice in front of their homes. The men began their usual search-and-destroy task of pulling people from homes, interrogating them, and searching for VC. Soon the killing began. The first victim was a man stabbed in the back with a bayonet. Then a middle-aged man was picked up, thrown down a well, and a grenade lobbed in after him. A group of fifteen to twenty mostly older women were gathered around a temple, kneeling and praying. They were all executed with shots to the back of their heads. Eighty or so villagers were taken from their homes and herded to the plaza area. As many cried "No VC! No VC!", Calley told soldier Paul Meadlo, "You know what I want you to do with them". When Calley returned ten minutes later and found the Vietnamese still gathered in the plaza he reportedly said to Meadlo, "Haven't you got rid of them yet? I want them dead. Waste them." Meadlo and Calley began firing into the group from a distance of ten to fifteen feet. The few that survived did so because they were covered by the bodies of those less fortunate.

<SNIP>

An army helicopter piloted by Chief Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson arrived in the My Lai vicinity about 9 a.m. Thompson noticed dead and dying civilians all over the village. Thompson repeatedly saw young boys and girls being shot at point-blank range. Thompson, furious at what he saw, reported the wanton killings to brigade headquarters .

Meanwhile, the rampage below continued. Calley was at the drainage ditch on the eastern edge of the village, where about seventy to eighty old men, women, and children not killed on the spot had been brought. Calley ordered the dozen or so platoon members there to push the people into the ditch, and three or four GIs did. Calley ordered his men to shoot into the ditch. Some refused, others obeyed. One who followed Calley's order was Paul Meadlo, who estimated that he killed about twenty-five civilians. (Later Meadlo was seen, head in hands, crying.) Calley joined in the massacre. At one point, a two-year-old child who somehow survived the gunfire began running towards the hamlet. Calley grabbed the child, threw him back in the ditch, then shot him.

Hugh Thompson, by now almost frantic, saw bodies in the ditch, including a few people who were still alive. He landed his helicopter and told Calley to hold his men there while he evacuated the civilians. Thompson told his helicopter crew chief to "open up on the Americans" if they fired at the civilians. He put himself between Calley's men and the Vietnamese. When a rescue helicopter landed, Thompson had the nine civilians, including five children, flown to the nearest army hospital. Later, Thompson was to land again and rescue a baby still clinging to her dead mother.

<SNIP>

Daniel then asked Meadlo about the massacre at the eastern drainage ditch, and in the same almost emotionless voice, Meadlo recounted the story, telling the jury that Calley fired from 250 to 300 bullets into the ditch. One exchange was remarkable:

Q: What were the children in the ditch doing?
A: I don't know.
Q: Were the babies in their mother's arms?
A: I guess so.
Q: And the babies moved to attack?
A: I expected at any moment they were about to make a counterbalance.
Q: Had they made any move to attack?
A: No.



Sorry, the story has beeen deleted.
http://militaryhistory.about.com/gi/dynamic/offsite.htm...

* * * * * * * *

This is relevant to what is going on in Iraq as we speak.
But now, we invade a nation that is no threat to itself or to its neighbors, take out its government and wage war on its civilians.
We need to stop the war crimes and find a peaceful way to solve the words problems. Killing people and stealing their property is not the way to it.

[Sleepless In NY]

16. Nixon Pardoned Calley

[blogslut]

17. Interesting side note to My Lai

A certain Major was put in charge of investigating complaints of atrocities against the Vietnamese people. Guess who?

The My Lai massacre. On March 16, 1968, US soldiers from the Americal Division slaughtered 347 civilians--primarily old men, women, children, and babies--in the Vietnamese village of My Lai 4 (pronounced, very appropriately, as "me lie"). The grunts also engaged in torture and rape of the villagers.

Around six months later, a soldier in the 11th Light Infantry Brigade--known among the men as "the Butcher's Brigade"--wrote a letter telling of widespread killing and torturing of Vietnamese civilians by entire units of the US military (he did not specifically refer to My Lai). The letter was sent to the general in charge of 'Nam and trickled down the chain of command to Major Colin Powell, a deputy assistant chief of staff at the Americal Division, who was charged with investigating the matter and formulating a response.

After a desultory check--which consisted mainly of investigating the soldier who wrote the letter, rather than his allegations--Powell reported that everything was hunkey-dory. There may be some "isolated incidents" by individual bad seeds, but there were no widespread atrocities. He wrote: "In direct refutation of this portrayal is the fact that relations between Americal soldiers and the Vietnamese people are excellent." The matter was closed.

http://www.disinfo.com/archive/pages/dossier/id803/pg1/

[Cleita]

21. Thanks for posting this.

Many people today aren't aware that Colin Powell was the military's man in covering up the My Lai massacre and making it go away in the media.

[rman]

18. Chomsky : "My Lai insignificant in context"

It's not that My Lai is unimportant per-se, it is insignificant compared to US atrocities in Vietnam that we did not hear about in the MSM.


The Legacy of War
Noam Chomsky
Excerpted from Rogue States, 2000
http://www.chomsky.info/books/roguestates06.htm

<snip>
As in Vietnam, and Laos and Cambodia, too, the targets were primarily civilian. The main target, however, was always South Vietnam. That included saturation bombing of the densely populated Mekong Delta and air raids south of Saigon that were specifically targeting villages and towns. They were deciding, "let's put a B-52 raid on this town." Huge terror operations like "Speedy Express" and "Bold Mariner" and others were aimed specifically at destroying the civilian base of the resistance. You might say that the My Lai massacre was a tiny footnote to one of these operations, insignificant in context.
The Quakers had a clinic nearby, and they knew about it immediately because people were coming in wounded and telling stories. They didn't even bother reporting it because it was just standard, it was going on all the time. Nothing special about My Lai. It gained a lot of prominence later,
<more>

[WildEyedLiberal]

24. Noam Chomsky's outrage rings hollow

Since he was quite the apologist for the butcher of Cambodia, Pol Pot.

I am in no way excusing the atrocities in Vietnam; quite the contrary. But Chomsky resembles the neocons in the sense that he is only outraged about human rights violations when they are committed by governments that do not align with his political agenda. Atrocities committed by "leftist" regimes such as Pol Pot's or Stalin's earn a blind eye from Chomsky. Real liberals are outraged at every act of brutalization against innocents, regardless of the political agenda or motive for the brutality.

Hugh Thompson is a true American hero. His physical and moral courage were remarkable, and may he rest in well-deserved peace. :patriot:

[rman]

25. Chomsy is not an appologist for the Pol Pot genocide.

Rather Chomsky uses it as a point of reference to show that genocides purported and supported by the West are comparable in scale and equally horrific - in spite of the fact that there's no outcry about those in the Western mainstream media.


Noam Chomsky on Cambodia under Pol Pot, etc.
http://www.zmag.org/forums/chomcambodforum.htm

Cambodia
Noam Chomsky
http://www.chomsky.info/articles/19700604.htm


East Timor
http://www.zmag.org/CrisesCurEvts/Timor/timor_index.htm

http://www.chomsky.info/articles/19990910.htm

[WildEyedLiberal]

26. Well, he may say that now

But at the time, he did not take seriously the reports of atrocities coming from Cambodia and seemed to dismiss them as Western anti-communist slander.

http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/chomsky.htm

As that article says, to paraphrase, "Noam Chomsky is very good at illuminating crimes, but only the crimes of the right villains." He had then no interest in digging deep to uncover the extent of the crimes in Cambodia, and if he acknowledges it now, it is because denying it would be akin to denying the Holocaust, given the overwhelming burden of proof of the crimes of the Khmer Rhouge. For Chomsky, only the war crimes of Western capitalist nations and Israel seem to merit any sort of sustained outrage.

[rman]

27. I challenge you to provide a quote from Chomsky himself

(in context) where he says anything that comes even close to "the Khmer Rouge genocide wasn't a bad thing".


The closest anyone seems to come is the observation that Chomsky was initially skeptical of reports of Khmer Rouge atrocities. Given the track record of the media to exaggerate the bad things "the enemy" does and downplaying the bad things "we" do, it's only prudent to be skeptical, until such time when the claims have been verified by other sources.

For the rest Chomsky's critics are selective in the supposed evidence they provide for the claim that Chomsky is an apologist for the Khmer Rouge genocide. After all, Chomsky's supporters "...gather all of Chomsky's fig leaves into a single pile, they exclaim: My, what a lot of greenery." So according to the critics, looking at all what Chomsky has said on the matter rather then only looking at a few choice quotes, is just a silly thing to do.

[DrunkenMaster]

28. Total Bullshite

Chomsky COMPARED coverage of the Pol Pot regime to the Indonesian genocide in East Timor to demonstrate the slanted coverage of American media. For you to claim that makes makes him an apologist for Polt Pot is totally disingenous, just like the liar David Horowitz.

I DARE you to locate a direct quote where Noam Chomsky defends the Cambodian genocide. ONE FREAKING SENTENCE WILL DO.

[WildEyedLiberal]

29. From 1979:

"If a serious study…is someday undertaken, it may well be discovered…that the Khmer Rouge programs elicited a positive response…because they dealt with fundamental problems rooted in the feudal past and exacerbated by the imperial system.… Such a study, however, has yet to be undertaken."

This was written three years after the Khmer Rouge revolution and its atrocities, mind you. The reports of the atrocities, first hand and investigative, were certainly public in 1979. To claim, in 1979, three years after the mass killings, that the "Khmer Rouge programs elicited a positive response" sounds pretty damn close to apologizing for the atrocities - or at least denying them, which is every bit as bad.

Why do some here condemn right-wing Holocaust deniers but give a pass to those like Chomsky who denied the crimes of communist regimes until forced to stare at the piles of skulls? Hypocrisy is not an attractive trait, from the right or from the left. Crimes against humanity transcend political conflict and should never be minimized because they reveal uncomfortable facts about a certain political ideology - that goes for both right-wing apologists of empire and fascism and left-wing apologists of communist totalitarianism.

I find this phenomenon particularly distasteful in a thread about Hugh Thompson, who, though he was an American solider, did not turn a blind eye to the crimes being committed by his fellow Army comrades.

[UTUSN]

19. Taps K&R for a true - not a propaganda - hero n/t

[newyawker99]

20. Sleepless In NY

Per DU copyright rules
please post only four
paragraphs from the
copyrighted news source.

Thank you.


NYer99
DU Moderator

[Poll_Blind]

23. I came across this Free Republic thread about Thompson's death...

Why do I bring up the wretched name of FR? Well, because even on FR the messages were generally in favor of Thompson. Even among those thieves of Liberty! Just goes to illustrate my belief that about half of FR is composed of aging ex-military types bent on relieving old "glories" by armchair quarterbacking what they think is hardline conservatism. As misguided as the ex-military are, they know what Thompson did was right and say so. The other half are pure brown-shirt Nazi types, who would rather have Thompson shot than let the truth get out. And they state as much with their own posts!

No mercy for the brown-shirts.

By clicking here you will enter the most poisonous hive of vitriol against Liberty. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.

PB