Hugh Thompson, an Army helicopter pilot in Vietnam, is not from Louisiana. But he did spend the last several years of his life in Lafayette, making his way down to Acadiana on a well-worn path — meet a Cajun woman, retire, settle down in bayou country.
Before that, the Stone Mountain, Georgia native lived anything but an ordinary life. On the ground in one of the most destructive conflicts of the modern era, Thompson stepped into history when he and his crew stopped the Mỹ Lai Massacre of March 16, 1968 — kicking off a story that would one day converge in Lafayette, when the “forgotten hero” met an Acadiana journalist by the name of Trent Angers.
Mỹ Lai is infamous for being the largest documented mass killing of civilians by U.S. forces in the 20th century. It occurred during the war’s deadliest year, marked by shockwave events like the Battle of Huế City, which saw United States and South Vietnamese troops fighting from house to house in an effort to retake a city of over 100,000 people. The U.S. would eventually win the battle — but thousands of civilians died, and the conflict’s brutal nature had been captured on film for the world to see…