The death of Hugh Thompson of cancer over the weekend in Louisiana takes from our country one of its noblest soldiers. An Army helicopter pilot, he set off, on the morning of March 16, 1968, on a routine scouting mission in support of an American task force, named Barker, which had been organized to drive the Viet Cong from an area around the South Vietnamese village of Son My. It turned out that all but a few of the Viet Cong soldiers who spent the night in the village were up and gone by dawn. At 7:24 a.m. the western part of the community came under American artillery fire. Minutes later, an American company landed by helicopter. It included a platoon under the command of a lieutenant named William Calley. By 8 a.m., as villagers tried to hide or flee, a massacre was under way in a part of Son My known as My Lai. Villagers were shot individually or in groups – as they ran, as they tried to surrender, or as they lay in ditches.

The evil that was unfolding dawned on Hugh Thompson and his two crewmen in stages as they buzzed the area, looking for the enemy. Thompson landed more than once in an effort to stop the slaughter, at one point ordering his his crew chief, Glenn Andreotta, and his door gunner, Lawrence Colburn, to shoot the Americans if they made a move to kill either the Vietnamese civilians or Thompson himself. When they flew over a ditch full of what turned out to be 170 dead or dying Vietnamese women, children, and old men Andreotta shouted that he could see something moving. Thompson set down his helicopter. Andreotta went into the ditch and lifted out, from beneath a bullet-riddled corpse, a five-year-old child who was whimpering with fear. With a dying woman clinging to his leg, Andreotta had trouble carrying the young child out of the ditch because he couldn’t get his footing in all the gore.

Thompson broke radio silence to report the massacre to his superiors and gained a cease-fire. His biographer, Trent Angers,* has written that he believes that had Thompson not stopped the massacre, the total of 504 dead would have grown by hundreds, even thousands in nearby hamlets. The army brass tried to cover up the killings. Andreotta was killed in action three weeks after My Lai, and Thompson himself was later wounded seriously enough to be sent home. Eventually, a courageous former GI, Ron Ridenhour, who had heard about the massacre from some of its participants, broke the story by writing to President Nixon and Congress in March 1969. Thompson himself would spend a good part of the next few years as a witness before Congress and courts martial. In the end, only one of the perpetrators, Calley, was ever convicted.

Several years ago, in connection with the publication of Mr. Angers’s biography, Thompson came to New York for a small dinner in his honor. In our newspaper career it’s hard to think of a more memorable evening. The dinner crackled with its share of anti-war talk and anger at the American military, but Thompson himself would have none of it. For all that he had seen, he never made the mistake of thinking that My Lai was a metaphor for the war itself. He was a modest man, who seemed to take what he had done as par for the course. What happened at My Lai will weigh on America’s name for generations, but however long My Lai is talked about it will also be remembered that, because of Hugh Thompson, it was an American who brought the slaughter to a halt and, in a few seconds and at enormous personal risk, saved the honor of his country.

* “The Forgotten Hero of My Lai: The Hugh Thompson Story,” by Trent Angers (Acadian House, 1999). The narrative for this editorial is based on Mr. Angers’s account and on a review of Mr. Angers’s book, “When the Killing Stopped,” by Seth Lipsky, published in the Wall Street Journal on November 2, 1999.