When Conscience Costs Everything

On March 16, 1968, twenty-four-year-old helicopter pilot Hugh Thompson Jr. flew low over the village of My Lai in South Vietnam's Quang Ngai Province. What he saw below defied comprehension. American soldiers from Charlie Company were killing unarmed civilians — women, children, the elderly. Bodies lay scattered across rice paddies. A drainage ditch was filling with the dead. Thompson set his helicopter down between the troops and a group of terrified villagers huddled near a bunker.…