<v Speaker 1>I'm Jerry Broadway, and this is Anonymous America, where we

<v Speaker 1>take a deep dive into American history to find a

<v Speaker 1>hero that you've probably never heard of. On the morning

<v Speaker 1>of March sixteenth, nineteen sixty eight, a young Army helicopter

<v Speaker 1>pilot flew low over a village in Vietnam and he

<v Speaker 1>saw something on the ground that just didn't make sense.

<v Speaker 1>The dead he saw below him were not soldiers. They

<v Speaker 1>were old men, women, children, and the men doing the

<v Speaker 1>killing were wearing the same uniform he did. He had

<v Speaker 1>a decision to make, and he had about the length

<v Speaker 1>of a heartbeat to make it. And the decision he

<v Speaker 1>made would get him branded a traitor for the next

<v Speaker 1>thirty years. His name was Hugh Thompson Junior, and that

<v Speaker 1>morning he did something almost no one else in that

<v Speaker 1>uniform could find the courage to do. From Hay Dad Productions,

<v Speaker 1>this is Anonymous America. Hugh Thompson Junior was born in

<v Speaker 1>Nia eighteen forty three. He grew up in Georgia, raised

<v Speaker 1>by a family that took two things seriously, their faith

<v Speaker 1>and the plain idea that you treat people right and

<v Speaker 1>you stand up when someone doesn't. Now in Vietnam. Hugh

<v Speaker 1>flew a small scout helicopter. It was a light, bubble

<v Speaker 1>canopied aircraft meant to fly low and slow, spotting the

<v Speaker 1>enemy for the units on the ground. And on that

<v Speaker 1>March morning, he had two crewmen with him, a gunner

<v Speaker 1>named Lawrence Colburn and a crew chief named Glenn Andreotta.

<v Speaker 1>They were flying over a cluster of hamlets the Americans

<v Speaker 1>called my Lie. Soldiers had gone in at dawn expecting

<v Speaker 1>a hard fight against the enemy, but there was no fight.

<v Speaker 1>There was no return fire. In fact, there was no

<v Speaker 1>enemy at all. There were just villagers. And what Thompson

<v Speaker 1>could see from the air in the ditches and in

<v Speaker 1>the fields was not a battle. It was something else entirely.

<v Speaker 1>At first, he thought the people on the ground were

<v Speaker 1>wounded and needed help, so he marked their positions with smoke,

<v Speaker 1>the way you would to send medics. And then he

<v Speaker 1>watched from above as the soldiers walked up to the

<v Speaker 1>very people he had just marked and killed them. He

<v Speaker 1>saw a ditch full of bodies, he saw an officer

<v Speaker 1>moving toward it, and that's when Hugh made his choice.

<v Speaker 1>He put his helicopter down on the ground directly between

<v Speaker 1>a squad of advancing American soldiers and a small group

<v Speaker 1>of villagers huddled in a crude, earthen bunker. And then

<v Speaker 1>he did the thing that some men would call treason

<v Speaker 1>for the rest of his life. He turned to his

<v Speaker 1>two crewmen and he told him to point their weapons

<v Speaker 1>at the American soldiers, and if those soldiers opened fire

<v Speaker 1>on the civilians, Thompson told his crew to return fire.

<v Speaker 1>He got out of the helicopter and walked up to

<v Speaker 1>a fellow American an officer who outranked him by the way,

<v Speaker 1>and faced him down. He put himself between the guns

<v Speaker 1>and the people, and then one at a time he

<v Speaker 1>coaxed those villagers up out of that bunker and called

<v Speaker 1>in other helicopters to carry them to safety. His crew

<v Speaker 1>chief Andreatta waded into the ditch a bar and lifted

<v Speaker 1>out a small boy. He was still alive, and they

<v Speaker 1>flew him out in their own aircraft. When Thompson got

<v Speaker 1>back to base, he was shaking with rage, and he

<v Speaker 1>reported everything he had seen straight up the chain of command.

<v Speaker 1>And because of what he said that day, the killing

<v Speaker 1>was called off. Now the full truth of what happened

<v Speaker 1>at my life took more than a year to reach

<v Speaker 1>the American public. The killings that day in my life

<v Speaker 1>were done by Charlie Company, and the man who led

<v Speaker 1>them on the ground was a young lieutenant named William Calley,

<v Speaker 1>operating under his company commander, Captain Ernest Medina. Somewhere between

<v Speaker 1>three hundred and fifty and five hundred unarmed servilians were

<v Speaker 1>massacred that day, and the army covered it up for

<v Speaker 1>more than a year. It only came out because a

<v Speaker 1>soldier named ron ryden HOWERD who hadn't even been there,

<v Speaker 1>heard the stories and wrote letters to Congress and the

<v Speaker 1>Pentagon until someone listened, and then journalist Seymour Hirsch broke

<v Speaker 1>the story nationally in nineteen sixty nine. You might think

<v Speaker 1>that Hugh Thompson Junior would have come home a hero,

<v Speaker 1>and you would be wrong. For decades, he was treated

<v Speaker 1>as the problem. He got hate mail, he got death threats,

<v Speaker 1>people left dead animals on his porch. A powerful congressman

<v Speaker 1>stood up and said that the only man who ought

<v Speaker 1>to be punished over the Malai incident was Hugh Thompson Junior,

<v Speaker 1>for turning his weapons on fellow Americans. He kept flying,

<v Speaker 1>he kept serving, He rarely spoke of the incident at

<v Speaker 1>my life, and Glenn Andreotta, the man who pulled the

<v Speaker 1>boy out of the ditch, was killed in action just

<v Speaker 1>three weeks later. He never lived to see that any

<v Speaker 1>of what they had done would ever matter. The army

<v Speaker 1>did eventually charge around two dozen officers and enlisted men,

<v Speaker 1>either with the killings or with the cover up, and

<v Speaker 1>here's how that shook out. Nearly all of them walked,

<v Speaker 1>charges were dropped, or the men were acquitted, including Ernest Medina,

<v Speaker 1>who was defended by f Lee Bayley, and the brigade

<v Speaker 1>commander who'd helped bury it. All of everyone involved in

<v Speaker 1>a massacre of hundreds, exactly one person was ever convicted,

<v Speaker 1>Lieutenant Calli. In nineteen seventy one, he was found guilty

<v Speaker 1>of the premeditated murder of twenty two villagers and sentenced

<v Speaker 1>to life at hard labor, but even that didn't hold.

<v Speaker 1>Within two days, President Nixon ordered Cali out of the

<v Speaker 1>stockade and into house arrest in his own quarters at

<v Speaker 1>Fort Benning. His senates got knocked down to twenty years,

<v Speaker 1>then to ten, and he was paroled in nineteen seventy four.

<v Speaker 1>All told, he served about three and a half years

<v Speaker 1>almost the entire strets confined to his apartment on base,

<v Speaker 1>not a cell, He lived out a quiet civilian life

<v Speaker 1>in Georgia, afterward offering a public apology decades later in

<v Speaker 1>two thousand and nine, and he passed away in twenty

<v Speaker 1>twenty four. In nineteen ninety eight, the United States Army

<v Speaker 1>awarded Hugh Thompson Junior and both of his crewmen the

<v Speaker 1>Soldier's Medal, the highest honor of the Army. He gives

<v Speaker 1>for bravery that does not involve fighting the enemy. Andreotta

<v Speaker 1>received his the only way he still could, posthumously. Years later,

<v Speaker 1>Thompson went back to Vietnam and met some of the

<v Speaker 1>people he had lifted out of that bunker. One of

<v Speaker 1>them ask a simple question why the men who committed

<v Speaker 1>the crime had not come along to face them two

<v Speaker 1>and Hugh had no answer for that. So the tally

<v Speaker 1>is this. The man who tried to stop the killing,

<v Speaker 1>Hugh Thompson Junior, got hate mail, death threats, and thirty

<v Speaker 1>years of being treated like a traitor, and the men

<v Speaker 1>who did the killing got, in almost every case nothing,

<v Speaker 1>And the one who once convicted spent his punishment under

<v Speaker 1>house arrest. Hugh Thompson died in two thousand and six.

<v Speaker 1>Near the end, he said he had only done what

<v Speaker 1>he was raised to do, what he always hoped anybody

<v Speaker 1>would have done. And the hard part of the story

<v Speaker 1>is this, on that particular morning, almost nobody did. That's

<v Speaker 1>Hugh Thompson, that's anonymous America