Landing Between the Living and the Dead

On March 16, 1968, Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson Jr. flew his OH-23 Raven helicopter low over the Vietnamese hamlet of My Lai. What he saw below defied comprehension — American soldiers from Charlie Company were systematically executing unarmed civilians. Bodies of women, children, and elderly lay in irrigation ditches. Thompson spotted a group of Vietnamese civilians being herded toward a ditch by U.S. troops.

He did what no manual trained him to do. He landed his helicopter directly between the soldiers and the civilians. He turned to his crew — door gunner Lawrence Colburn and crew chief Glenn Andreotta — and gave an unthinkable order: if the American soldiers tried to harm the villagers, open fire on them. Then Thompson personally began evacuating survivors, while Andreotta waded into a ditch full of bodies and pulled out a small child still clinging to life.

Thompson could have kept flying. From the air, it would have been easy to tell himself he didn't fully understand what was happening below. Proverbs 24:11-12 strips away that excuse: "Rescue those being led away to death... If you say, 'But we knew nothing about this,' does not He who weighs the heart perceive it?"

The scripture warns us that God sees through our convenient ignorance. Every believer will encounter moments when injustice unfolds within reach — not on a battlefield, but in a workplace, a neighborhood, a family. The question is never whether we noticed. The question is what we did when we could no longer pretend we hadn't.