My Lai hero Hugh Thompson Jr. dead at 62

<p>Hugh Thompson Jr., a former U.S. Army helicopter pilot who rescued unarmed Vietnamese civilians from his fellow GIs during what became known as the My Lai massacre, died early Friday, his biographer and a hospital spokesman confirmed. He was 62.</p><p>Thompson, who was from Lafayette, died at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in the central Louisiana city of Alexandria, hospital spokesman Jay DeWorth said.</p><p>Trent Angers, Thompson'a biographer and family friend, said Thompson was being treated for cancer and had been removed from life support earlier this week. Angers said Thompson's former gunner, Lawrence Colburn, had driven in from Atlanta to be at his bedside.</p><p>"America has lost a valuable hero of the Vietnam conflict," DeWorth said.</p><p>It was March 16, 1968, when Thompson and his crew watched in horror as an American Army officer walked up to an injured Vietnamese girl, flipped her over with his foot _ and shot her dead. They saw the bodies of Vietnamese children, women and old men piled in an irrigation ditch and saw American soldiers approaching.</p><p>"These people were looking at me for help and there was no way I could turn my back on them," Thompson recalled in a 1998 Associated Press interview.</p><p>He placed his chopper down in front of the advancing Americans and gave his gunner, Lawrence Colburn, a direct order: Train your M-60 on the GIs and if they try to harm the villagers, "You open up on them."</p>

http://accesswdun.com/article/2006/1/132081