GUEST BLOG: Pat O’Dea – OBEY!

We badly need heroes like Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson Jr. today.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugh_Thompson_Jr.

“Kill Them All”
The Washington Post just reported: “Hegseth order on first Caribbean boat strike, officials say [was] “Kill them all.”

Hegseth’s order, and the resulting murders in international waters, violates domestic law, international law, and the law of war.

Cowards

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6fKGmrjvFm8

@1:35 minutes:
…..the folks who are deciding to obey what appear to be clearly patently unlawful orders.

@2:20 minutes:
“The order was to kill everybody.”
“A missile screamed off the Trinidad coast, striking the vehicle and igniting a blaze from bow to Stern. For minutes, commanders watched the boat burning on a live drone feed. As the smoke cleared, they got a jolt. Two survivors were clinging to the smoldering wreck. The special operations commander overseeing the September 2 attack,….
ordered a second strike to comply with Hegseth’s instructions.
Two people familiar with the matter said and the two menmwere blown apart in the water…..

@3:34 minutes:
There is no way to wash clean the taint of illegality that defines an order, to quote; “kill everyone”, including the survivors of the first strike clinging to the side of the sinking boat…..

@4:03 minutes:
aside from it being completely immoral and base to do that to survivors of a strike, there’s a reason why it’s illegal under international law…..
under well known international law that goes back not just to modern international law, but goes back centuries.
International law directing how you use force abroad, says you cannot give an order for, ‘no quarter’, ‘take no survivors’, that’s not lawful under any interpretation of the law of armed conflict.
And it hasn’t been for a very long time.
This predates the [American] revolution and it’s certainly embedded in the Haig Regulations and in the Geneva Conventions, that we have signed as treaties and made part of our law…..
You don’t kill prisoners.
You don’t kill what are called ‘hors de combat’ or out of the fight, in French.
That includes POWs, includes wounded and sick, and it includes the shipwrecked. It includes survivors.
And there are special protections that you give to shipwrecked crews. Whether you’re fighting a law enforcement campaign, or you’re fighting an armed conflict. When there are survivors in the sea, you actually have a duty to go rescue them. Not just don’t kill them, but to also rescue them. That’s an affirmative obligation to save their lives, not to take their lives. It’s easy to to kill him. Clearly, we did that.

@5:51 minutes:
That order, to ‘kill everyone’, was interpreted by a three-star Admiral at the time.
That Admiral, (now the JSOC four-star Commander of special operations.)
said “Launch the second missile, because those two shipwrecked crew members might get picked up by their fellow narco terrorists and continue trafficking drugs.”…..

Heroes

He landed his helicopter between American troops and Vietnamese civilians. Then he ordered his crew: if the soldiers keep shooting, open fire on them.

On the morning of March 16, 1968, Chief Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson Jr. took off in his Hiller OH-23 Raven observation helicopter with his crew—door gunner Lawrence Colburn and crew chief Glenn Andreotta. They were supporting a search-and-destroy operation in Sơn Mỹ, a cluster of hamlets in Quảng Ngãi Province, South Vietnam. Intelligence reports said Viet Cong forces were hiding in the area.
But as Thompson flew low over the village of Mỹ Lai, he realized something was terribly wrong.
He saw bodies everywhere. Women. Children. Elderly villagers. Infants. No military-age males. No weapons. No enemy fire.
And he saw American soldiers—his fellow troops—shooting them.
Thompson and his crew had been trained to draw enemy fire, to spot threats, to protect ground forces. But the only threat he saw was coming from the Americans themselves.
He spotted a wounded woman lying in a field and marked her position with a smoke grenade, then radioed for ground troops to help her. He watched from the air as an American officer—Captain Ernest Medina—walked up to her, prodded her with his foot, and shot her dead.
Thompson was shaking with rage.
He flew over an irrigation ditch and saw it was filled with bodies—maybe a hundred people piled on top of each other. Then he saw movement. There were survivors down there. People still alive.
He landed and confronted a sergeant, asking if they could help the people in the ditch. The sergeant replied that the only way to help them was to “put them out of their misery.”
Then Lieutenant William Calley approached. Thompson, though outranked, tried to reason with him:
“These are human beings, unarmed civilians, sir.”
Calley’s response: “This is my show. I’m in charge here. It ain’t your concern.”
Thompson said, “Yeah, great job,” and as he walked back to his helicopter, he told Calley: “You ain’t heard the last of this!”
He took off, and as he circled overhead, he watched in horror as soldiers began firing into the ditch to kill the survivors.
Thompson flew toward the northeast corner of the village. Below, he saw about ten civilians—including children—running toward a homemade bomb shelter. Pursuing them were soldiers from Charlie Company’s 2nd Platoon.
Thompson knew exactly what was about to happen. And he made a decision that could have ended his career or his life.
He landed his helicopter directly between the American soldiers and the fleeing civilians.
Then he turned to Colburn and Andreotta and gave an order that no one had ever given in the history of the U.S. military: “Y’all cover me! If these bastards open up on me or these people, you open up on them. Promise me!”
Colburn turned his M60 machine gun toward the American soldiers.
Thompson stepped out of the helicopter—unarmed except for a sidearm he never drew—and walked toward the Americans. He confronted the platoon leader, Stephen Brooks.
The standoff lasted minutes, but it must have felt like hours. Thompson was placing himself in the line of fire. His crew was aiming weapons at fellow Americans. The civilians huddled behind them, terrified.
Finally, Thompson convinced the soldiers to hold their fire. He then radioed for help. Two UH-1 Huey gunships—helicopters that would never normally land in a combat zone—came down. Thompson coaxed 11 Vietnamese civilians out of the bunker: women, children, and one elderly man. In two trips, the helicopters evacuated them all to safety.
Thompson flew back toward the irrigation ditch. Andreotta spotted movement among the bodies. They landed again.
Andreotta waded into the ditch—through the remains of perhaps 100 dead and dying men, women, and children—and pulled out a small boy, Do Ba, miraculously alive but covered in blood. Thompson flew the child to a hospital in Quảng Ngãi, leaving him in the care of a nun.
Then Thompson returned to his base and filed an angry report to his superiors. His report quickly reached Lieutenant Colonel Frank Barker, the operation’s overall commander.
Barker immediately radioed ground forces: cease fire. The massacre ended.
By that point, between 347 and 504 unarmed Vietnamese civilians had been killed. Thompson and his crew had directly rescued 12 people. His cease-fire order may have saved countless others who would have been killed if the operation had continued.
For his actions that day, Thompson was initially awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross. But the citation was a lie. It praised him for rescuing a Vietnamese child “caught in intense crossfire” and said his actions “greatly enhanced Vietnamese-American relations.”
Thompson threw the medal away.
What followed was nearly as nightmarish as the massacre itself.
In 1970, Thompson testified before Congress. Congressman Mendel Rivers, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, declared that Thompson was the only one who should be punished at Mỹ Lai—because he had threatened to shoot American troops. Rivers tried to have Thompson court-martialed.
Thompson received death threats. Mutilated animals appeared on his porch. He was called a traitor. He went by a nickname to avoid being recognized. Some in the military protected him by keeping his name out of reports, but others made his life hell.
“I do not like death threats,” Thompson later said. “I don’t like mutilated animals on my porch in the morning, so I just kind of went away, went invisible.”
He continued flying missions until his helicopter was shot down and he broke his back in the crash. He was evacuated to a hospital in Japan, ending his combat service in Vietnam.
Twenty-six soldiers were eventually charged with crimes related to Mỹ Lai. Most were acquitted or pardoned. Calley was convicted and sentenced to life in prison, but served only three-and-a-half years under house arrest.
For decades, Thompson’s story remained largely unknown. He didn’t talk about it publicly. He just wanted to forget.
But in the late 1980s, a Clemson University professor named David Egan saw Thompson in a documentary and launched a letter-writing campaign. He spent nine years pushing for Thompson to be properly recognized.
Finally, on March 6, 1998—thirty years after Mỹ Lai—Thompson and Colburn were awarded the Soldier’s Medal, the highest military decoration for bravery not involving conflict with an enemy. Andreotta received the medal posthumously; he’d been killed in combat three weeks after Mỹ Lai.
Army Major General Michael Ackerman said at the ceremony: “It was the ability to do the right thing even at the risk of their personal safety that guided these soldiers to do what they did. They set the standard for all soldiers to follow.”
Ten days later, Thompson and Colburn returned to Vietnam for the 30th anniversary commemoration at Mỹ Lai. They met some of the people they had saved, including two women who had hidden in the bunker that day.
One Vietnamese woman said something that stunned Thompson. She wished that the soldiers who had shot at them could have attended the ceremony—so she could forgive them.
Thompson later told a reporter: “I’m not man enough to do that. I’m sorry. I wish I was, but I won’t lie to anybody. I’m not that much of a man.”
Thompson died of cancer on January 6, 2006, at age 62. Lawrence Colburn was by his side.
Today, Thompson’s story is taught at military academies as the ultimate example of moral courage. His actions are studied in ethics classes around the world. A foundation bears his name. Residents of Mỹ Lai maintain a museum where his name appears alongside the names of the victims.
Hugh Thompson Jr. didn’t stop the Mỹ Lai massacre with superior firepower or battlefield tactics. He stopped it by doing something infinitely harder:
He stood between evil and the innocent, knowing it might cost him everything.
He proved that real courage isn’t always about charging the enemy. Sometimes it’s about confronting your own side when they’ve lost their way.
And he showed the world that in the midst of unthinkable horror, one person with moral clarity can save lives.