Missing Wing

By JESSICA BUJOL, Associated Press Writer -- Saturday, Jan 7, 2006, 8:06 AM ET

    Hugh Thompson Jr., a former Army helicopter pilot honored for rescuing Vietnamese civilians from his fellow GIs during the My Lai massacre, died early Friday. He was 62.
    Thompson, whose role in the 1968 massacre did not become widely known until decades later, died at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Alexandria, hospital spokesman Jay DeWorth said.
    Trent Angers, Thompson's biographer and family friend, said Thompson died of cancer.
   "These people were looking at me for help and there was no way I could turn my back on them," Thompson recalled in a 1998 Associated Press interview.

Missing Wing

Honor, duty, country

United States of America

God is watching over you, Papa San

Home of the brave you were born

Taciturnly you returned from Nam

Helicopter rotor blades cut through the skies

Occulting light of your conscience

Maltreating GIs, dying children and women

Patriotism in your mind, compassion within your soul

Stopping the killing you did

Oral history has you in its place

Nameless feelings seized me in my former birthplace...

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