Forty years ago today the people of a little village in Vietnam, called My Lai, were subjected to unspeakable atrocities at the hands of a group of young soldiers who were there to prosecute America’s war against communism. The massacre was ended by the heroic actions of a 24 year old helicopter pilot, Hugh Thompson, who stepped in to save the villagers, backed by his 18 year old gunner, Lawrence Colburn, and their 20 year old Crew Chief, Glenn Andreotta.

According to the Seattle Times, these were the conditions:

AFTER THREE MONTHS in Vietnam, Charlie Company (Task Force Barker, 11th Brigade, Americal Division), had suffered 28 casualties, including five killed, and was down to 105 men. All the casualties were from mines, booby traps and snipers rather than battles in which troops could clearly identify an enemy. The day after a booby trap killed a popular sergeant, Charlie Company was given orders to invade an area believed to be a North Vietnamese stronghold. Though it is generally agreed commanders ordered soldiers to destroy the villages and “neutralize” the area, there is controversy over whether the directive included killing civilians. The U.S. military’s official report found that “from 16-19 March 1968, U.S. Army troops massacred a large number of noncombatants in two hamlets of Son My Village, Quang Ngai Province, Republic of Vietnam. The precise number of Vietnamese killed cannot be determined but was at least 175 and may exceed 400.” Later reports tallied 504.

In the spirit of not forgetting, not papering over what war really does to people—civilians and soldiers, both—here are the words of Lawrence Colburn, recalling that day:

WE WENT OUT at 7:30 in the
morning. Village called My Lai 4. The military referred to it as
Pinkville. It was just another mission. Started out like all of them.

I remember flying between two treelines. You could smell the jungle, the fog rising up. It was a beautiful morning.

You know, we owned the day, they owned the night.

We
flew over the village a couple times. I remember seeing the slicks, the
Hueys, bringing Charlie Company in. Our objective was to make sure the
perimeter was clear.

It was Saturday, which was market day. We
saw a lot of people leaving the village with empty containers and
baskets, moving slowly, walking down this road, probably like they did
every Saturday morning for generations. We went outside the hamlet and
reconned around for 15 or 20 minutes and when we came back, those
people we saw on the road were still there, only they were all dead.
Women, children and older men.

Oh, the children. That’s what
struck all of us. It appeared to be automatic weapons fire, small arms,
from pretty close range. When a high-velocity round hits a child,
there’s not a lot of mass there and yeah, it was grotesque. Sure.
Babies. Lying with their mothers and grandmothers. Baskets right there.

That’s
when Mr. Thompson, we all, started trying to figure out what happened.
The last thing we wanted to admit to ourselves was that it was our own
men.

People had been herded up systematically, made to get down
in this irrigation ditch, and they were executed. We started marking
some of the bodies that were still alive with green smoke, (dropping
smoke grenades from the helicopter) so the medics on the ground could
help them. We marked this one woman who had chest wounds. She was
moving one arm, feebly, asking for help, so we marked her. Mr. Thompson
backed up 20, 30 feet and hovered there 10 feet off the ground because
he saw a soldier coming over to her. That was (Capt. Ernest) Medina. We
pointed down to her. He kicked her, stepped back and blew her away
right in front of us. That’s when we simultaneously said something
like: “You son of a bitch.” Then we knew. The mystery was solved. It
was people from Charlie Company.

Mr. Thompson was determined to
stop this. He landed and said to one of the soldiers standing by the
ditch, “What can we do to help these people out?”

The fellow said, “We can help them out of their misery.”

Hugh said, “C’mon man.”

As
we lifted off, we heard automatic weapons fire. Glenn said, “My God,
he’s firing into the ditch again.” Wounded people were climbing out of
the ditch and they were shooting them. We checked other people we’d
marked and sure enough, they’d been finished off. It felt like by
marking these bodies, we were indirectly killing them ourselves.

They
raped the women with M16s, bayonets. They sodomized children. They
decapitated people. They killed a monk, threw him down a well with hand
grenades. It was so obscene. They did everything but eat the people.

I didn’t join the Army to do that sort of thing, even if they were sympathizers.

Thompson, Colburn, and Andreotta went on to directly save the lives of
several My Lai villagers, including that of a young boy. Read more of
Colburn’s story, including his 2001 reunion with that boy, here.