[Mr.Buttocks]

[url=http://news.yahoo.com/s/usatoday/20060113/cm_usatoday/aheroscorned:b3f71]Link...[/url:b3f71]

[quote:b3f71]

In 1968, helicopter pilot Hugh Thompson flew into the thick of what he thought was a fierce battle in South Vietnam and discovered, instead, that a massacre was going on - of women, children and elderly men at the hands of U.S. soldiers. Horrified, he landed his helicopter between the soldiers and the civilians, ordered his crew to fire on any American who continued shooting, called for back-up and rescued victims, digging through corpses to scoop up one child.

An instant hero? It would be nice to think so. A year later, the public found out about the killings - infamous as the My Lai massacre, exposed by journalist Seymour Hersh. But Thompson, who died of cancer last week at age 62, received no honors then. He was made a pariah.

For years, when he walked into officers' clubs, they emptied out. He got threatening phone messages. Dead animals were left on his porch. When he was called to give closed congressional testimony, a senior lawmaker said that if anyone deserved to be court-martialed, it was him. As it was, only one officer, Army Lt. William Calley, was convicted, spending just three years under house arrest before President Nixon pardoned him.

In 1998, after a book and CBS' 60 Minutes told of Thompson's courage, the
Pentagon was shamed into giving him and his crew the Soldier's Medal, the highest award for bravery not involving conflict with an enemy. He was invited to lecture on military ethics at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.

What Thompson really deserved, and never got, is the hero's recognition afforded other national icons of moral courage, such as Rosa Parks. Not so much for his benefit as for the nation's. The mob mentality that took over at My Lai was an extreme manifestation of a common human instinct. It's just easier to go along with the crowd, rationalizing corrupt behavior, than it is to face the danger of stopping it. That was true at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison and at corrupt Enron.

Nobody likes a snitch. But when courageous people instinctively supply the moral compass missing higher up in their command - as Thompson did at My Lai, as a young soldier did at Abu Ghraib and as whistle-blower Sherron Watkins did at Enron - they deserve recognition.

When Hollywood takes up that kind of plot, in movies such as The Insider, it's easy to cheer. Too bad it's so different in real life.[/quote:b3f71]