****Originally posted as a Facebook Note on May 28, 2009*****
(Washington, DC)--An event in Washington, DC, this week allows us to revisit a controversial time in our recent history. At a public ceremony near a high visibility memorial, three individuals received public recognition of the actions they took to save the lives of defenseless unwanted and unloved human lives. As you read the following description of the selfless acts of heroism prompting this public celebration, try to solve the puzzle of what historic antecedent is at issue.
In the moments before the heroic deed, two sets of "people" could be identified. To one side were those in whose hands was the power of life and death; to the other side, were a pitiful collection of human souls whose right to life was not only in doubt but actually denied by the former group.
The extermination began, awful, bloody, and without respect.
To accomplish such a slaughter of innocents, those who worked the mayhem had first worked within their own hearts and minds a "reductio sub hominem" -- that is, they had tamed their consciences to think of their victims as not human, as something less than human, something less than lives worth living. So as the, well for lack of a better word, "killing" commenced, the "killers" did not think that they were committing "murder," so to speak.
Now, bring in the heroes.
Add to the mix an outside group of agitators.
These were folk for whom the humanity of the dead, the dying and the threatened was never in doubt. Nor did they have any doubt that the proper moral course in the circumstance was to intervene for the purpose of stopping the "killing," of preventing further slaughter. Quite literally, these were folk who set down their own bodies between those who would kill and those who would have been killed. And, although on other frequent occasions they would be unable to prevent similar acts, and although, perhaps, on another day the lives they saved would nonetheless be lost, on the day of their rescue operation, they made a selfless, moral, Christ-like difference.
If we stop the story at this juncture, would you be able to identify the historical incident to which I have referred?
It reveals the political and social views of the writer to say so, but the above description sounds like the hundreds of abortion business blockades that occurred between 1988 and 1994, during the heyday of the national, anti-abortion movement known as Operation Rescue. And, this week, in fact, a trial was begun of a seminal legal challenge to the anti-abortion protest activities of Operation Rescue and many of its leading proponents. So, if you had concluded that I was describing an Operation Rescue blockade, you would be absolutely, completely, one hundred percent . . .
Wrong!
The historical incident to which I have adverted was not the life-saving endeavor of pro-life Americans in the late 1980s. Rather, I have been describing the heroism of another three pro-life Americans in the late 1960s.
For the public ceremony this week in Washington, D.C., honored three members of the United States Armed Forces for their selfless heroic actions that saved some lives in and stopped some of the slaughter in a little Vietnamese hamlet known as My Lai.
Back then, United States Army Lieutenant William Calley and the men under his command engaged in the pitiless murder of women, children and the elderly. To do these horrific deeds, they had long been conditioned to think of these Vietnamese as less than human, as "gooks."
After all, what thinking, reasoning human would choose to live in the circumstances in which Lt. Calley and his band of brigands thought they found the Vietnamese villagers? In fact, as bloody a deed as they did, if they had truly thought of themselves as murderers of the innocent, would they not have turned their weapons inward to root out the truly inhuman beasts? With some 500 dead and dying lying around, however, Calley and his command were not quite finished. It was at this point that Warrant Officer Hugh C. Thompson, Jr., and his crew, Larry Colburn and the late Glenn Andreotta, entered the picture.
As the citation accompanying the awards to Thompson, Colburn, and Andreotta tells the tale:
"Warrant Officer Thompson landed his helicopter in the line of fire between fleeing Vietnamese civilians and pursuing American ground troops and was prepared to open fire on those American troops should they fire upon the civilians. . . . His crew spotted movement in a ditch filled with bodies . . . . Thompson again landed his helicopter and covered his crew as they retrieved a wounded child from the pile of bodies. . . . Warrant Officer Thompson's relayed radio reports of the massacre . . . resulted in an order for the cease-fire at My Lai and an end to the killing of innocent civilians."
The little-known story of Thompson, Colburn, and Andreotta came to public light this week when a ceremony was held near the Vietnam Veterans Memorial publicly presenting the US Army's Soldiers Medal to Thompson and Colburn, and posthumously to Andreotta.
As I read the story in Col. Harry Summers' column in the Washington Times, I could not help but wonder when another group of American heroes would stand, perhaps near the American Abortion Holocaust Memorial and receive the long-overdue respects of a grateful nation for the selfless acts of courage that so closely mirrored the now rightly-praised actions of a helicopter pilot and his crew.
