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Flying over a nearby hamlet, the three captured two suspected Viet Cong, and marked several other possible combatants as wounded, planning to return to assist them. When they returned, the wounded men were dead.
After discovering the dead men, the three witnessed an officer on the ground, Captain Ernest Medina, prodding a wounded woman with his foot, turning, and then shooting her dead in cold blood.
Continuing on, the three discovered an irrigation ditch filled with dozens of bodies. Thompson radioed to surrounding airships on an open channel:
"It looks to me like there's an awful lot of unnecessary killing going on down there. Something ain't right about this. There's bodies everywhere. There's a ditch full of bodies that we saw. There's something wrong here."
Thompson then landed, and was confronted by two of the men who had participated in the massacre, including Lt. William Calley. They dismissed his concerns, and warned him to mind his own business.
As the three took off, they witnessed the soldiers on the ground methodically murdering the survivors in the ditch.
Soon the three discovered a group of nearly a dozen civilians running in the village, soldiers in pursuit. Thompson ordered the helicopter to land between the US soldiers and their intended victims.
As they landed, he told the two to train their machine guns on their fellow soldiers, and to pledge that if "If these bastards open up on me or these people, you open up on them. Promise me!"
Lawrence Colburn replied "You got it boss, consider it done," and trained his machine gun on the men.
With Colburn's machine gun trained on the soldiers, Thompson was able to rescue eleven Vietnamese from the bunker where they were hiding, as well as a child discovered among the dead and dying.
The three reported the incident upon their return to base, and an immediate cease fire was ordered.
Colburn, Andreotta, and Thompson were awarded medals after the massacre, but the particulars of the encounter were whitewashed and Thompson's signature was forged on the incident report.
Colburn returned home to Oregon after his deployment, and opened a ski repair shop.
He returned with Thompson to My Lai in 1998, and met several of the villagers' whose lives they had saved. (Andreotta had been killed in action a month after My Lai.)
A few years later he met Do Ba, the boy he had helped save from the ditch. Do Ba's mother, and two- and four-year-old siblings, had been murdered in the ditch that day.
At a 2003 Naval Academy speech, Colburn said "Combat is chaotic. Combat is primal… And it's very difficult to control. Your job as young officers is to monitor those men who are pulling the trigger to make sure that that primal instinct, you have to keep it in check somehow."
Lawrence Colburn died of cancer at his home in Canton, Georgia, in December 2016. He was survived by his wife and son.
Today would have been his seventieth birthday. Raise a glass.
(The beginning of the thread had to be stiched back together because of fixing a typo. It starts here:)
