The Other American

We are just ordinary people
living in ordinary times
meeting face to face
with other ordinary people
across the gulf of extraordinary evil
We are just men & women
facing each other
with guns in our hands
with pens, hammers, screwdrivers
brushes &

keyboards
doing what this moment
calls for to us to do across
the gulf of extraordinary evil
to become heroes in ordinary times.

-- Dan Wilcox*

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What is so significant about the death of a retired American army pilot at the ripe age of 68, when one finds that the march of death continues unabated for scores of active soldiers of the US in the quagmire of today’s Iraq with no immediate end in sight?

But Hugh Thompson was definitely no ordinary soldier. The massacre of more than 500 innocent Vietnamese, mainly women and children in 1968 by the US army at My Lai, would have been long forgotten if he would not have shown the courage to speak out. Those were the heydays of US imperialism which had occupied Vietnam once the French colonisers had left and the said operation undertaken was part of its larger project of terrorising the common people lest they support the reds. For the villagers of My Lai, situated in remote parts of Vietnam, he proved to be the ultimate saviour who literally landed among them from the sky like a proverbial angel to save them from impending death.

It was March 16, 1968 when 24 year old Hugh Thompson along with his crew was incidentally was flying over this remote village in Vietnam when he saw corpses lying scattered over the village. He landed in the village and to his utter dismay found that Lt Kelley and his men were butchering people. He forcefully intervened and saw to it that the killing stopped. Of course none of his seniors or the US establishment took kindly to his demeanour. At one point of time he was to be court-martialed under some fabricated charges.

But Hugh did not give up. When he returned to his Stateside home in Stone Mountain, Georgia, Thompson even received death threats and insults. Senior journalist Seymour Hersh who got Pulitzer Prize in 1970 for his exposure of the My Lai Massacre was candid enough to describe Thompson as ‘one of the good guys … You can’t imagine what courage it took to do what he did’.

It took eighteen months for the My Lai massacre to reach the media. Hugh testified before the Congress, a military enquiry and a court martial, which decided to convict Lt William Calley, for his involvement in the massacre of 500 unarmed civilians. It is a different matter that when Nixon assumed Presidency he used his special powers to release Calley.

Much on the lines of Guernica, a village completely flattened by the Nazi forces during the second world war or later day Srebrenica or Fallujah which also saw massacre of thousands of innocents, My Lai today has become another metaphor for the barbarities unleashed by conquerors over innocent people. And there is no iota of doubt that it was because of the efforts of people like Hugh that the rest of the world came to know about the real meaning of US's mission democracy.

One does not know whether any of the survivors of the My Lai massacre have any photograph of the legendary pilot who had the courage of his convictions. But it is heartening to know that there are still people albeit a very few of them in the US army who have in the corners of their hearts still imbibed the values for which Hugh lived.

Abuse of detainees in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq could not have come to light if army specialist Joseph Darby of the 372 military police company had not dared to report on his fellow soldiers who were torturing prisoners. And who can forget Captain Ian Fishback, the 82d Airborne West Pointer, who was part of the combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, and who tried for seventeen long months to tell superiors that detainee torture was a systematic, problem inside the U.S. military.

And last but not the least it would be height of indecency if one does not mention Captain Lawrence Rockwood, of the 10th Mountain Division. It has been more than ten years that he was deployed in Haiti where defying orders he personally investigated detainee abuse at the heart of Port au Prince, the capital of Haiti. And he had to pay the price for his humane intervention. He was court-martialed for criticizing the U.S. military’s refusal to intervene and was kicked out of the Army. His friends tell us while on duty that he always kept a photograph on his desk of a man he greatly admired. It was of Captain Hugh Thompson.