He essentially halted the rape and murder orgy by American soldiers at the village of My Lai in Viet Nam during the Vietnam War by placing his chopper between the civilians and his own soldiers and telling them he’d mow their asses down if they continued the onslaught. He then flew the survivors to military hospitals for care. At least 500 Vietnamese non-combatants were brutally murdered at My Lai by US soldiers before Thompson intervened.
He was vilified by the Army and many of the American people for publicly exposing the Army’s actions at My Lai, and spent the rest of his life with ptsd, alcoholism, and severe nightmare disorder that contributed to his divorce. In other words, his own life was basically ruined by his heroic compassion. He died about 12 years ago at the age of 62 of cancer, and is buried in Lafayette, Louisiana, with full military honors.
He should be remembered.
Hail.
Reblogging this today, fifty years after March 16, 1968.
Thompson was awarded what’s called a “Distinguished Flying Cross” for his efforts that day, but the reasons for the award were misleading. It claimed that he’d rescued a Vietnamese child caught in the “cross fire” and that he helped to improve relations between America and Vietnamese people. Apparently he threw the citation in the garbage.
He and Lawrence Colburn, one of the two men he was with that day who helped him, remained friends until Thompson’s death. Colburn was at his bedside the day Thompson was removed from life support. Thompson, Colburn, and Glenn Andreotta, Thompson’s other crew member, were all awarded the Soldier’s Medal, Andreotta post-humously. Glenn unfortunately died in combat in Vietnam when he was only 20.
When Thompson and Colburn went back to Vietnam, according to Thompson, some of the women they rescued asked why the people who’d attacked them weren’t there. She wanted to forgive them.
Thompson and Colburn never stopped talking about military ethics or what happened that day.
“One of Pagourtzis’ classmates who died in the attack, Shana Fisher, “had 4 months of problems from this boy,” her mother, Sadie Rodriguez, wrote in a private message to the Los Angeles Times on Facebook. “He kept making advances on her and she repeatedly told him no.”
Pagourtzis continued to get more aggressive, and she finally stood up to him and embarrassed him in class, Rodriguez said. “A week later he opens fire on everyone he didn’t like,” she wrote. “Shana being the first one.”“
hot take but maybe those white boys going around shooting everyone shouldn’t have friends
sound like the kinda person that would be dangerous to be friends with cause you know they think it’s okay to shoot people to death when things aren’t going their way.
you know who else doesn’t have shit going their way who are bullied even more? black kids, jewish kids, trans kids, gay kids, native kids, and i can fucking go on.
you know who aint doing all these shootings? yeah, you fucking know.
drag me but i don’t respect these mass shooters and ain’t going to tote around the idea that they deserve friends and that it would have saved people.
people shouldn’t have to be friends with dudes that think its ok to murder innocent people
like how absolutely disgusting is it to demand friendship at gunpoint
I’m going to say something here, but before I do, I think I should qualify the following: I am a cisgendered white male, who in my high school years, identified as completely straight, as I was still not fully aware of demisexuality.
I was also very heavily bullied. I came from a poor home, with divorced parents, my dad was an abusive alcoholic and my mother lived with a fucking heroin addict who regularly stole the grocery money to feed his habit. I was also seeing the school counselor regularly because I was in a constant depressive state, with a side of anxiety. I was basically the poster child for everything the far right wants to portray as the things that make a school shooter, i.e; unstable home life, bullied, loner, poor, & mentally ill.
I want to make it clear, though, that I agree with everything stated above. Bullying made me angry sometimes, sure, but not once did I ever decide “Hey, killing everyone would solve my problems!”.
These mass murdering fuckheads are the problem. Stop blaming it on the people who won’t be friends with them, and start blaming it on the people who think that murder is an acceptable response to loneliness and/or bullying.
This is something fundamentally wrong with the shooters, not something wrong with the people around them. Blaming it on the kids who didn’t make an effort to be friends with the guy who thinks murder would solve his problems is the laziest possible way to avoid discussing the real problems aside from saying “thoughts and prayers” and then never discussing it again.
I think it’s also important to point out most of these people ARE THE BULLIES. The reason they don’t have friends isn’t random: they choose to be unlikeable people by being bullies.
The CBC is increasing security at its downtown Toronto headquarters following the discovery of a post on a popular “incel” message board that encouraged the “shooting up” of the building.
“The Toronto Police just stopped by the [Toronto Broadcast Centre] and are aware of the post as it was reported to them from a person in Montreal. They are going to be filing a report and I will have the report number soon,” Jason Stokes, Security & Life Safety Manager at BGIS, wrote in a Saturday afternoon email to the building’s senior security personnel and producers. BGIS is the company contracted by the CBC to provide property management services for the broadcast centre.
“We will be increasing security, I will confirm when the extra coverage has arrived onsite.”
Earlier Saturday, a post was published on the Incels.me message board with the subject line “[Serious] our next task: shooting up CBC headquarters.”
In the since-deleted post, user “Garbage” wrote that “our next task should be shooting up their headquarters and killing as many of those evil whores and normies reporters as possible.” He then gave the CBC’s Toronto address, adding “Become the hero that the incels deserve.”
Am I the only one who feels like saying misogyny is a “gateway drug to other forms of hate” is minimizing misogyny?
Does it not get serious enough with misogyny? Does the fact that misogyny is exclusively directed at women make it less serious, less fucked up, less horrific?
I get it, that it’s probably not meant that way. But the way misogyny is constantly dismissed as a side-issue that nobody really wants to talk about makes the wording of this feel very wrong.
Despite a great deal of evidence that connects the dots between these mass killers and radical misogynist groups, we still largely refer to the attackers as “lone wolves” — a mistake that ignores the preventable way these men’s fear and anger are deliberately cultivated and fed online.
Here’s the term we should all use instead: misogynist terrorism. Until we grapple with the disdain for women that drives these mass murderers, and the way that the killers are increasingly radicalized on the internet, there will be no stopping future tragedies.
Might be hard to believe but this is a factual account. In case anyone still wondering why a white mob with tiki torches is suspect and a potus who saw no problem with them is racist.
Hey so the legislation proposed by the March for our lives protest today includes a law that makes mental health professionals allowed and encouraged to share info with police
for everyone asking for sources, they want mental illnesses added to the NICS. being diagnosed with mental illness, as far as they’re concerned, is equivalent to being criminal.
there is nothing on this page connecting it to the March for our Lives movement. you didn’t provide a source that proves that this specific thing is what the March for our Lives movement wants.
This is the piece I’ve started reading so far. (They planned 10?)
It…is a lot. I’m not reading all of this. It calls for much more than the “March for Our Lives” 3 demands for legislatures (which, FYI, explicitly endorses US military and law enforcement’s continued use of “guns of war” that they describe as having “…no other purpose than to fire as many bullets as possible and indiscriminately kill anything they are pointed at with terrifying speed.” Like, FYI.)
The mental health professional who evaluated him over a year ago (after a peer counselor reported self-harm and a stated desire to buy guns), did not identify him as an imminent threat to himself and others at that time. Which was absolutely the right thing to do. Because, at that time, he expressed no clear plan to harm himself or others or that he had a means to do so. Putting him under an involuntary 72-hr hold would have been an abuse of power and violation of personal liberties with ZERO benefit. He would not have magically come out a less angry, NON neo-nazi white male.
Mental health professionals cannot cure “nazi fascist regime police state.”
Unfriendly fucking reminder that the best predictor of mass shootings is not mental illness, but being an angry young white man who has recently experienced rejection and has easy access to guns.
Bringing this back because it makes terrible people angry. And I’ll add a note to all the people saying “But you’d have to be mentally ill to do that!”: Mental illness is, by definition, abnormal. Does “mediocre white boy is so entitled that he resorts to violence when told no” really sound particularly unusual to you?
I devoted my entire graduate studies and thesis on mass school shootings, multiple murderers, and criminal psychology and I can tell you that this is in fact completely true and is suported by an unbelievable amount of emperical, quantifiable data that I slaved over for years. 💯
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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