Hugh Thompson Sr. was a World War II Navy veteran who worked as an electrician in Stone Mountain, Georgia. He raised his two sons—Hugh Jr. and Tommie—with strict discipline. If the boys did something wrong, their mother Wessie would punish them. Then Hugh Sr. would come home from work and punish them again.
Hugh Sr. and Wessie were working-class Episcopalians in 1950s Georgia who actively denounced racism and helped minority families in their community. They taught their boys three simple rules: don’t be a bully, help the underdog, and follow the golden rule.
Hugh Jr. graduated from Stone Mountain High School in 1961, served three years in the Navy with the Seabees, got his discharge, married, and became a funeral director. When his brother Tommie deployed to Vietnam with the Air Force, Hugh Jr. enlisted in the Army in 1966, learned to fly helicopters, and arrived in Vietnam in December 1967.
On the morning of March 16, 1968, Hugh Jr. and his crew—Glenn Andreotta, 20, and Lawrence Colburn, 18—lifted off for an operation in Quảng Ngãi Province.
What Hugh Jr. saw from his helicopter was death. Dozens of bodies in irrigation ditches. The village burning. U.S. Army soldiers moving through the village they called My Lai, killing everyone—old men, women, children, infants. No return fire. No Viet Cong. Just slaughter.
Hugh Jr. landed near an injured woman and radioed for medical evacuation. When he circled back, she’d been shot dead. Captain Ernest Medina was standing nearby. Hugh Jr. confronted him. Medina told him to get back in his helicopter. Hugh Jr. kept reporting what he was seeing. No one stopped it.
Then Hugh Jr. spotted about a dozen civilians running toward an earthen bunker with American soldiers chasing them.
This was the moment Hugh Sr. and Wessie had been preparing their son for without knowing it. Hugh Jr. put his helicopter down between the American soldiers and the bunker and told Andreotta and Colburn to train their M60 machine guns on the Americans. If the soldiers tried to harm the civilians, his crew was to open fire.
Hugh Jr. walked to the bunker. He spoke no Vietnamese. The people inside were terrified. He used hand signals. Finally nine or ten civilians emerged. Hugh Jr. radioed friends flying gunships overhead and they evacuated the civilians to safety.
In an irrigation ditch filled with nearly a hundred bodies, Andreotta spotted movement. He waded into the corpses and pulled out a boy covered in blood, clinging to his dead mother. Hugh Jr. flew him to the hospital.
By day’s end, between 347 and 504 Vietnamese civilians had been slaughtered. Hugh Jr. had saved perhaps a dozen lives. The Army investigated, concluded about 20 civilians had been accidentally killed. The division commander congratulated Charlie Company. Hugh Jr. received a Distinguished Flying Cross. He threw it away.
The next year, journalist Seymour Hersh broke the story. Hugh Jr. testified before Congress. Congressman Mendel Rivers called him a traitor. Twenty-six soldiers were charged. Most were acquitted. Lieutenant William Calley was convicted and sentenced to life. President Nixon commuted it to three years house arrest.
Hugh Jr. struggled with PTSD, alcoholism, divorce, nightmares. For nearly two decades he disappeared.
Thirty years later, the Army awarded Hugh Jr. the Soldier’s Medal. Days later, he and Colburn returned to Vietnam and met two women they’d saved. The women had families now—children and grandchildren who wouldn’t exist without that helicopter.
In 2001, they were reunited with the boy from the ditch. His name was Do Ba. He was 36, just out of prison for theft. Village officials called him “a walking casualty.” He’d been eight years old that day. He remembered everything.
Look, this might make a cleaner story if one of the women’s grandchildren grew up to discover a cure for cancer, or if Do Ba became a beloved teacher.
But you don’t save people because of what you think they’ll do for humanity. You save them because humanity is inherently worth saving.
A boy clinging to his dead mother deserved to live. The women deserved to live. The old man deserved to live.
At the reunion, a Vietnamese woman approached Hugh Jr. She wished the men who killed her neighbors could have come back too. Hugh Jr. looked confused. She finished: “So we could forgive them.”
“I’m not man enough to do that,” Hugh Jr. later told a reporter. “I’m sorry. I wish I was, but I won’t lie to anybody.”
Hugh Jr. died of cancer on January 6, 2006. He was 62. Lawrence Colburn was at his bedside.
I admit. I wondered a few times while writing this: Who would write a newsletter called Big Optimism, and feature the My Lai massacre?
I think it’s because you don’t have to save the world. You just have to save the very small part you can see.
On a terrible morning in March 1968, one man looked down at a nightmare and decided to do something about it.
Examples like that are as optimistic and inspiring as I can imagine.
7 optimistic moments from history this week
Sunday March 15: “I feel very honored to own the name.” — Aron Meystedt, current owner of the domain name symbolics.com, which on this day in 1985 was the first “.com” domain registered, by a computer company called Symbolics Inc.
Monday March 16: "The dream of yesterday is the hope of today and the reality of tomorrow." — Robert H. Goddard, American physicist who on this day in 1926 launched the world's first liquid-fueled rocket in Auburn, Massachusetts, a 2.5-second flight that rose 41 feet and traveled 184 feet before crash-landing in a cabbage field.
Tuesday March 17: “By all accounts there never existed a more miserable set of beings than these wretched creatures now are.” — George Washington, describing the evacuating British forces after 11,000 troops and Loyalists fled Boston by ship on this day in 1776, ending an eight-year occupation after American forces fortified Dorchester Heights with cannons dragged 300 miles through winter snow from Fort Ticonderoga.
Wednesday March 18: "I gently pulled myself out and kicked off from the vessel. An inky black, stars everywhere and the sun so bright I could barely stand it." — Alexei Leonov, Soviet cosmonaut who on this day in 1965 became the first human to walk in space
Thursday March 19: "It will become apparent that it is one of the most important conservation measures ever enacted by the Congress of the United States." — Senator William M. Calder of New York, sponsor of the Standard Time Act signed into law on this day in 1918
Friday March 20: "I feel now that the time is come when even a woman or a child who can speak a word for freedom and humanity is bound to speak." — Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin was published in book form on this day in 1852, selling 300,000 copies in its first year and becoming so influential that President Lincoln reportedly called her "the little lady who made this big war."
Saturday March 21: May there only be peaceful and cheerful Earth Days to come for our beautiful Spaceship Earth." — U.N. Secretary-General U Thant, in his Earth Day statement this day in 1971.