Real Courage

This is the kind of courage it's going to take to stop the orange menace and his hate-mongering hordes.

Charlie Pierce:

The other (hero who died this week) was Larry Colburn, who was flying in a helicopter over a village in Vietnam called My Lai on the morning of March 16, 1968.

SNIP

Larry Colburn was 18 years old, manning a gun on a helicopter, when he heard his pilot, Hugh Thompson, tell the crew that, down on the ground, American soldiers were massacring non-combatants, including women and children, and that he, Thompson, was going to do something about it. Per The New York Times:

"Mr. Thompson was just beside himself," Mr. Colburn recalled in an interview in 2010 for the PBS program "The American Experience." "He got on the radio and just said, 'This isn't right, these are civilians, there's people killing civilians down here.' And that's when he decided to intervene. He said, 'We've got to do something about this, are you with me?' And we said, 'Yes.' " Mr. Thompson confronted the officer in command of the rampaging platoon, Lt. William L. Calley, but was rebuffed. He then positioned the helicopter between the troops and the surviving villagers and faced off against another lieutenant. Mr. Thompson ordered Mr. Colburn to fire his M-60 machine gun at any soldiers who tried to inflict further harm. "Y'all cover me!" Mr. Thompson was quoted as saying. "If these bastards open up on me or these people, you open up on them. Promise me!"

"You got it boss," Mr. Colburn replied. "Consider it done." Mr. Thompson, Mr. Colburn and Glenn Andreotta, the copter's crew chief, found about 10 villagers cowering in a makeshift bomb shelter and coaxed them out, then had them flown to safety by two Huey gunships. They found an 8-year-old boy clinging to his mother's corpse in an irrigation ditch and plucked him by the back of his shirt and delivered him to a nun in a nearby hospital.

To me, this always has been one of the more astonishing displays of courage of which I've ever heard, and I heard about it the way everyone else did, years later, because the Army did its best to cover the whole thing up and to slander the reputations of the helicopter crew involved. (Needless to say, the Nixon Administration was particularly venal in this regard.) Were we a truly vibrant and evolved republic, Larry Colburn's funeral would be on national television. Children would read about him in school. There would be memorials on the National Mall and at West Point.