Hugh Thompson (April 15, 1943 – January 6, 2006)

Farewell my friend. I had read about you when I was struggling to find my foot and you were to me then and are to me now, the reason why I will never be able to generalize a people, no matter what crimes were committed in their name, because I know that there are always people like you, people who believe in the sanctity of the human ideal. An ideal that has thousands of books written on it, had thousands of philosophers pondering over it but one that can only be realized when someone like you, ordinary in all sense of historical significance, stand up and shake up the relentless march of history with one action. This ideal can have many name – justice, equity, dignity, honesty, courage but has only one underlying notion – the best that can be realized in man.

In retrospect, you can be called naïve. You stood up to fight injustice in an already grossly unjust war. You chose to fight in a war that waged against a people who never threatened your home, your family, your country. Until that moment when you defied history in My Lai, you were aiding the oppressors, a member of that force that was ravaging the land of a people who had the temerity to decide for themselves what they wanted for a government. Perhaps you can be faulted for not knowing enough about history, about knowing what oppressors do when they invade. Hundreds of My Lai s occurred in Vietnam, many before My Lai itself. You must have heard the rumours, yet you must have chosen to believe in the sanctity of the American war mission, about the necessity of waging war against the Vietnamese to save them from themselves, about the right of nation to impose its word on another nation.

Yet I believe that it is this fact alone that made you a hero. That you chose to stay your ground, that when confronted with the naked truth. When the veil fell, you did not cling on to illusions, on to the overwhelming tendency to self-preserve that most of us would feel. That when the moment of truth came, you chose to obey a higher law. I realize that condemning the past is easy when you can be a spectator and have the luxury and the leisure to view history in terms of causes and effects. It is being in the middle that is difficult, it is when you are a pawn in the great game that is always around us that it is difficult to not be fatalistic, to not take refuge in inaction with the excuse that you were not aware that such a thing can happen or worse, deny yourself the truth by saying that that such a thing cannot happen. Let us take a moment to think for yourselves. So many things are happening around us that it leaves most of us numbed. Don’t we try to escape the obvious truth in frivolous pursuits like say materialistic pursuits? Human rights are being a mockery of everyday, people are deprived of their very essense of life by the very circumstances and system that we enjoy the fruits of. And yet do we raise a voice in pursuits? don’t we practise the fine art of denial everyday? And maybe a future generation would blame us for our naivety, for our inaction in the face of obvious realities, just as we freely criticize our previous generation, as we criticize you.

Yes, you left your mark that day when you stood between American guns and defenseless women, children and old men in My Lai. You chose not to become a pawn by saving that barely alive four year old from the ditch of death. You and your men (door-gunner Lawrence Colburn and crew chief Glenn Andreotta) chose to defy death itself, even though you were aware that your action may lead to your court martial. You chose instead to take the side of your conscience. You and your men could have easily turned away and chose to view this as one of the things that happen in war, the innocuously sounding ‘collateral damage’ that one of your country’s general spoke of forty years later, ‘collateral’ of course meaning innocent civilians butchered for the sake of the american dream. You instead turned back when they started shooting civilians dumped in a ditch. You ordered your men to shoot your own soldiers if they harmed the civilians. I don’t believe that you did it just because you had a sudden surge of courage, I believe that you did it because you could do no other. You said later that it must have taken a lot of courage to do what you did and it did. You were not seeking glory, you must have known at that moment, that attaining glory in war is an illusion and even in your disillusionment you chose to stay and salvage your humanity from the hell that your fellow countrymen had created on earth.There are so many people today walking around alive because of you, not only in Vietnam, but people who kept their units under control under other circumstances because they had heard your story. We may never know just how many lives you saved.

Yet for all that, you were deemed unpatriotic because you had spoken for the enemy. You had committed the greatest sin possible. You turned against the country that was bringing God to the atheist rabble. You spoke for the Godless yellow against the evangelical white. People called for your death and people brought out processions to support Lt Calley under whose orders his men raped and mutiliated women, chased old men and children to ditches where they were shot. They were of course heroes, the quintessential consummation of the great American dream. Yet you stood up for the ideals that were supposedly the founding principle of America, which of course had remained just that – an ideal. America denied you but so many of its people embraced you because your act had made them seek out the best in themselves. Humanity embraced you because the ideals you had stood up for were nothing unique to America but were of humanity. You were the spark that prevented many My Lai s from occurring. Because three men had chosen to face the barrel of a gun rather than being behind it, the power of the people, which the war strategists had so blithely forgotten in their game plan, was given a new breath. Yet you were consigned to the dustbin of history till that university professor (David Egan, a professor emeritus at Clemson University in late 1980s) rescued you and your ideal from being forgotten. You were given a piece of metal that they named the highest gallantry award in 1998. It was safe then you see, Vietnam was forgotten, so they thought. So they could give you a piece of metal and give you a pat, those same men who were plotting on another mission of God, whose name was Mormon by the way, God of wealth. They felt that the lesson of My Lai and Hugh Thompson and his men had become a hazy memory.

But they had underestimated the spark that you had unleashed. Your action must have hovered in the air when millions marched before the Iraq war, an unprecedented event. People had marched for Vietnam a decade after it started. This was perhaps the first time that the world marched before a war had begun. Many people among them might have forgotten your name but nobody had forgotten what war brings, because you showed them. In this time of bombardment of images and sounds that make no sense because they are not supposed to, you stood out clear and the machinery of propaganda saw its first real defeat.

However the war did occur, the people were not powerful enough, atleast not yet and many My Lai occurred and still occurring. However the people who started it became discredited even before it started. That was your victory. And who can say that it was not another Hugh Thompson who smuggled out images of Abu Gharib to show to the world that the war machine havnt learned anything, from My Lai or from anything else? And who can say that the intense anti-war activity on the only medium largely free from corporate censorship, the net, is not partly due to your shadow? And who can say that the intense fear of public opinion that results in censorship is not due to your heroic stand? These are all your victories.

And you will be there among us when we will be able to, one day, eventually, stop wars by our sheer presense. When marches will actually stop war. When this gradually increasing consciousness among the dispossessed and the fooled gradually turns into concrete results, who can say that your bravery to stand up for humanity wasn’t a part of that molding?

Sadly you will not be there to see it. But then what is death? You have done your part in history, taken its burden, its threats and become immortal in a way that no fountain of youth can make you immortal. I don’t know whether you felt redeemed at the end. But I do hope that you went away feeling that if given a chance you would do the same all over again. Somehow I think you did.

So farewell my friend, you have shown us a path of light. I don’t know whether we have the shoulder to bear it but you give us hope, because like you, we are ordinary men and women like you were, perhaps even after My Lai, with our common fears and dreams. Yet you showed that one man can courageously stand up to turn the face of history so as to sear its face with your fire. Then so be it, my friend, you have passed on the baton and I know some of us will vindicate your faith in humanity. You have enriched us and we will be forever in gratitude to you.

Farewell.