Lawrence Colburn, one of the two U.S. Army veterans who intervened in the infamous My Lai massacre during the Vietnam War, died of complications with liver cancer according to the Washington Post. He was 67.
Colburn, who died Tuesday at his home in Canton, Ga., received the Soldier's Medal three decades after his heroic intervention during the mass murder of an estimated 504 unarmed civilians in South Vietnam, March 16, 1968.
Recommended Videos
Colburn was an 18-year-old helicopter gunner when he and pilot Hugh Thompson, Jr. and Glenn Andreotta, their crew chief, said they witnessed babies machine-gunned before they landed the helicopter to intervene.
They protected a group of 10 Vietnamese civilians hiding from U.S. soldiers in a bunker and rescued an injured 8-year-old boy named Do Ba. He was under a mound of corpses clinging to his mother's corpse.
Andreotta died later in the war and Thompson died of cancer in 2006.
Colburn was running a medical supplies business in Atlanta when he traveled to Vietnam to meet with Do Ba in 2001. About seven years later, Colburn met his wife and 14-month-old daughter.
"I'm glad the United States and Vietnam have become friends," Ba told an Associated Press reporter in 2008. "But I still feel hatred for the soldiers who killed my mother, my brother and my sister."
The war crimes are "stark reminders to a weary public of what war does to people -- both the victims and the perpetrators," Colburn wrote for the Wicked Local Sherborn site in 2012. "War destroys people."