Death of a good soldier
We think we may have seen this covered somewhere else on Irish blogs in the last couple of days, but we haven't been able to find it again at any of our usual haunts. Hugh Thompson, the US Army helicopter pilot who (along with the help of his crew and other pilots) intervened to save the last survivors of the My Lai massacre has died.
My Lai can be said to have exposed the real horror of what was taking place in Vietnam. From U.S.News:
My Lai can be said to have exposed the real horror of what was taking place in Vietnam. From U.S.News:
"Before My Lai, Americans always saw their boys in uniform as heroes. Their troops had brought war criminals, the Nazis, to justice. So when the massacre of some 500 unarmed Vietnamese civilians by U.S. soldiers became public a year and a half later, it shook the country to its core. Many Americans found it so unbelievable they perversely hailed Lt. William Calley, the officer who ordered his men to shoot civilians, as an unjustly accused hero. But My Lai did produce true heroes, says William Eckhardt, who served as chief prosecutor for the My Lai courts-martial. "When you have evil, sometimes, in the midst of it, you will have incredible, selfless good. And that's Hugh Thompson."We wish we had confidence that there wouldn't be Stateside 'patriots' today threatening to kill individuals who had shown such courage in Iraq.
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