Compare and Contrast
Hugh Thompson, the US Army helicopter pilot who intervened against his fellow soldiers to rescue Vietnamese civilians they were massacring at My Lai and who then reported the killings to his superiors, testified at the inquiries and received a commendation from the Army three decades later, died yesterday of cancer in Alexandria, La. He was 62.
In his own words:
“I’m Hugh Thompson. I was a helicopter pilot that day, and I guess I was invited here to tell you about a day of my life. That particular morning we were to provide reconnaissance for a ground operation that was going on in My Lai 4, which was better known to us as Pinkville.” It was supposed to be a real big operation that day. I flew a Scout helicopter covered by two gunships that flew cover for me, and my job was to recon out in front of the friendly forces and draw fire, tell them where the enemy was, and let them take care of it. “
“The village was prepped with artillery prior to the assault, and we went in right when the “slicks” —the troop-carrying aircraft that brought the Charlie company and Bravo company— landed simultaneously right in front of them. We started mak ing our passes, and I thought it was gonna be real hot that day. The first thing we saw was a draft-age male running south out of the village with a weapon and I tol m to et him. He tried, but he was a new gunner— he missed him. That was the only enemy person I saw that whole day.”
“We kept flying back and forth, reconning in front and in the rear, and it didn’t take very long until we started noticing the large number of bodies everywhere. Everywhere we’d look, we’d see bodies. These were infants, two-, three-, four-, five-year-olds, women, very old men, no draft-age people whatsoever. That’s what you look for, draft-age people. It came out in the interrogations that my crew and myself went through. My gunner’s big questions—were, “Were there weapons that day?” There was not the first weapon captured, to my knowledge, that day. I think a count has been anywhere from two to four hundred, five hundred bodies— it was that many. I think that’s a small count, including the three villages that were hit.”
“As we were flying back around the civilian people, there was one lady on the side of the road, and we knew something was going wrong by then. Larry Colburn, my gunner, just motioned for her to stay down; she was kneeling on the side of the road. We just ordered her to stay down; we hovered around everywhere, looking, couldn’t understand what was going on. We flew back over her a few minutes later and most of you all have probably seen that picture; she’s got a coolie hat laying next to her. If you look real close, some odd object laying right next to her— that’s her brains. It’s not pretty”
We saw another lady that was wounded. We got on the radio and called for some help and marked her with smoke. A few minutes later up walks a captain, steps up to her, nudges her with his foot, steps back and blows her away.
We came across a ditch that had, I don’t know, a lot of bodies in it, a lot of movement in it. I landed, asked a sergeant there if he could help them out, these wounded people down there. He said he’d help them out, help them out of their misery, I believe. I was . . . shocked, I guess, I don’t know. I thought he was joking; I took it as a joke, I guess. We took off and broke away from them and my gunner, I guess it was, said, “My God, he’s firing into the ditch.”
As a little exercise in comparison, here’s an account of the assault on Fallujah from a self-described former US Army Black Hawk helicoper pilot, using the pseudonym 2slick ( I can make no claims for the veracity of this link or any moral judgements upon the author – I cite it purely as an on-the-spot account of what appears to be current US Army combat practice) :
“We crossed the train station just before midnight and led the way for the Marines by killing everything we could in our way. It took our tanks and brads until 10 am the next day to get 2 miles into the city. They killed about 200 insurgents in the process and softened the enemy for the Marines. 5 of our soldiers were wounded in this first 10 hours, but we accomplished our part of the plan.
The Marines’ mission was to follow TF 2-7 and fight the enemy by clearing from building to building. A lot of the insurgents saw the armored vehicles and hid. They waited for the Marines to come and took their chances by fighting them since the Marines weren’t protected by armor like we were. In that first day of fighting, the Marines took 5 x KIA and many more wounded, but they also did their job very well. Along the way, they found HUGE caches of weapons, suicide vests, and many foreign fighters. They also found unbelievable amounts of drugs, mostly heroin, speed, and cocaine. It turns out, the enemy drugged themselves up to give them the “courage” and stupidity to stay and fight.
The enemy tried to fight us in “the city of mosques” as dirty as they could. They fired from the steeples of the mosques and the mosques themselves. They faked being hurt and then threw grenades at soldiers when they approached to give medical treatment. They waived surrender flags, only to shoot at our forces 20 seconds later when they approached to accept their surrender.
Have they really have learned nothing since Mai Lai, the Generals?
“We crossed the train station just before midnight and led the way for the Marines by killing everything we could in our way.”
Apparently not.
Thompson was a true hero, no question of that. But 60’s technology didn’t allow the curent incessant barrage of 24hr cable news media that whisleblowers of today must contend with. They, who just as heroic as Thompson – are drowned out, swamped by the sheer shrieking volume of manufactured, winger-driven, media hysteria , as it twists itself into knots of denial of what a completely and utterly devastating, for-the-centuries, fucking clusterfuck Bush made. That is, those wingers who are not totally oblivious, or evil, or both. Those fuckers just ruin those who oppose them, ignoring laws they’re sworn to uphold, using the apparatus of the state against its own citizens
Congress then gave Thompson a full open hearing, but it appears Congress now is being deliberately obstructed:
Whistleblowers Describe Routine, Severe Abuse
by Jim Lobe
As a military jury in Texas considers the fate of Lynndie England, the low-ranking reservist pictured in the notorious photos of the abuse of Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison in late 2003, two sergeants and a captain in one of the U.S. Army’s most decorated combat units have come forward with accounts of routine, systematic and often severe beatings committed against detainees at a base near Fallujah from 2003 through 2004.
The captain, referred to as “Officer C” in the report, said he had made persistent efforts over 17 months to raise concerns about the abuses and obtain clearer rules about the treatment of detainees but was consistently told by higher-ups to ignore abuses and to “consider your career.”
“In many cases, he was encouraged to keep his concerns quiet; his brigade commander, for example, rebuffed him when he asked for an investigation into these allegations of abuse,” according to the report. Only when he began taking his concerns to members of Congress, according to the report, did the Army agree to investigate his complaints.
However, “just days before the publication of this report he was told that he would not be granted a pass to meet on his day off with staff members of U.S. Senators John McCain and John Warner,” who, along with two other Republican senators, have sponsored legislation that would require the Pentagon to abide by the Geneva Conventions and the Army Field Manual in its treatment of all detainees.
Let’s hope these whistleblowers, and the many others like them, continue to show the same courage as Thompson did. Bush and his minions are prepared to do some pretty scary things to stifle dissent. When your government argues it’s perfectly legal for it not only to spy on but to disappear, torture or murder people, even if they are US citizens – because anything the President does is legal (Why? Because he says so) – then the courage that is required is immense.
Thompson then had faith that the system would work. A Thompson now can have no such faith.
