30 Years After Massacre at My Lai, Army Honors GIs

Thirty years ago, Hugh C. Thompson Jr. and Lawrence Colburn received medals for heroism under enemy fire at a little hamlet in Vietnam called My Lai.

Friday, the Army corrected an oversight. For there was no enemy that March morning in My Lai. Or rather, the enemy was us.

During a searing ceremony at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the two comrades were awarded the Army’s highest medal for bravery not involving conflict with an enemy.

The medals were accompanied by brutally frank citations that talked about what really happened in My Lai on March 16, 1968.

About “the unlawful massacre of noncombatants by American forces.”

About “fleeing Vietnamese civilians and pursuing American ground troops” who were bent on “murder.”

Several hundred civilians--mostly women, children, old men--were killed by Lt. William L. Calley Jr. and his troops. Eventually the atrocity was exposed, Calley was convicted of murder, and the Army began a painful self-examination.

The story the Army never formally acknowledged until Friday is how Thompson, Colburn and a third man, Glenn U. Andreotta, stopped the My Lai massacre before more people died.

*

“We will finally recognize these men for their heroic actions,” said Maj. Michael W. Ackerman, who pinned the Soldier’s Medal on the lapels of Thompson and Colburn, both in their 50s.

Andreotta was killed in action about three weeks after the massacre. His family will receive his posthumous medal. After accepting their medals, Thompson and Colburn went to the black granite wall and made a pencil rubbing of Andreotta’s name.

They also shook hands with a long receiving line, consisting mostly of men with shining eyes, some wearing full Army dress uniforms, some in jeans and leather.

“The integrity and courage [they] stood up for was the part of America I went over there to fight for,” said Leigh Price, 58, an attorney from Denver who was a Marine stationed at Da Nang at the time of the massacre. He heard about the medal ceremony Thursday and immediately bought an airline ticket to be present.

Ackerman called My Lai “one of the most shameful chapters in the Army’s history,” but the three medal winners rejected the example set by their fellow soldiers and “set the standard for all soldiers to follow.”

On that early morning in Quang Ngai Province, Thompson was the 24-year-old pilot of a combat helicopter. Colburn was his gunner, Andreotta his crew chief.

Their mission was to draw enemy fire in support of troops maneuvering on the ground. The chopper skimmed the treetops to My Lai, and the crew came upon a scene so beyond their experience that at first they couldn’t make sense of it.

There was shooting, but there was no enemy. There were piles of bodies in a ditch, but they weren’t soldiers.

*

The chopper swung away, trying to smoke out Viet Cong, found none, and kept circling back to the village.

“Every time we made a pass through the area, there were more bodies,” Thompson said in an interview.

They did not see most of the killing.

“I saw one incident where an American just walked up and blew this woman away,” he said.

Most of the bodies were piled in a ditch. Andreotta was looking that way and Thompson remembers him crying: “My God, they’re firing into the ditch.”

That’s when the three soldiers in the chopper understood what was happening.

Thompson spotted women and children cowering in a bunker. He put the chopper down between them and some advancing American soldiers. He went and talked to a lieutenant whose name he doesn’t know.

“Can you get [the civilians] out?” Thompson recalls saying.

“With a hand grenade,” said the lieutenant.

“I said, ‘Hold your people here, I think we can do better than that.’ ”

Thompson called in another helicopter to evacuate the 10 civilians. It took two trips. Thompson, Colburn and Andreotta provided cover, in case their fellow Americans started shooting.

Then Thompson and his crew lifted off and set down again near the ditch with the bodies, looking for survivors. Andreotta waded among the bodies and came up with a little boy, “covered in slime, blood” but alive. The crew ferried him to a hospital, and he survived.

Thompson reported what they saw to his commanding officer, who called off all action in the sector, effectively ending the killing, Ackerman said Friday.

The Army initially tried to cover up the full story of My Lai. Journalists have interviewed Thompson and told his story over the years, but until Friday, he was still recognized by the Army for saving the civilians from the Viet Cong.

But the Army has taken the lessons of My Lai very seriously. Every soldier who becomes an officer now must study My Lai and watch a videotape that includes commentary from Thompson.