Fifty-six years ago, U.S. soldiers marched into the Vietnamese village of My Lai. By noon, they had raped women and girls, executed families in irrigation ditches, and set homes alight with people still inside. Five hundred civilians—mostly women, children, and elderly—were slaughtered in a single morning. Only one man stood in their way.

Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson, a U.S. Army helicopter pilot, landed his aircraft between the American troops and fleeing villagers. He trained his guns not on the Vietnamese, but on his fellow soldiers. He told them he would open fire if they didn’t stop the killing. He evacuated survivors, reported the massacre to his commanders, and later testified against the murderers in court.

For this, he was branded a traitor. His home was vandalised. He received death threats for decades. The Army buried the investigation until journalists forced it into the light. Of the 26 men charged, only one—Lieutenant William Calley—was convicted. He served three years under house arrest before Nixon pardoned him. Thompson lived the rest of his life with PTSD and nightmares, bearing the weight of being the lone voice of conscience in a machine built for annihilation. He died in 2006. His heroism was only broadly honoured long after the blood had dried.

Today, as Israel—armed, funded, and politically shielded by the United States—maintains its total siege of Gaza, we must ask: Where are the Hugh Thompsons?

It has now been more than 200 days of mass killing. Gaza’s children are being starved by design—200 of them dying every day, many from hunger and dehydration. Israeli soldiers film themselves humiliating prisoners. They bulldoze tent camps. They shell hospitals. They shoot people collecting flour. This isn’t a breakdown of military discipline—it is military doctrine. Genocide, televised.

So where are the soldiers refusing to load the bombs? The drone pilots grounding their craft in protest? The army mechanics who sabotage the tanks? Where is the officer who says: No more—and puts himself between the war machine and its victims? Not a single uniformed man or woman has stood in front of a bulldozer, blocked a sniper’s scope, or leaked the documents that would prove—beyond what is already plain—that this was premeditated.

Hugh Thompson proved that moral courage is possible, even inside a system that rewards cowardice and punishes humanity. But moral courage requires witnesses—people whose choices carry consequences. Gaza has been denied those for 76 years. When the victims are Palestinian, the world looks away. When the killers are allies of empire, accountability disappears.

My Lai was not an aberration. It was policy. Just like Gaza. The difference is that in 1968, there were still men like Thompson who refused to forget their humanity.

In 2025, we are left to wonder: Who will be Gaza’s Hugh Thompson? And why have none of us risen to be him?