William L. Calley, Jr., the only American officer convicted of war crimes in Vietnam, died April 28 in Gainesville, FL, where he was in hospice care. No public announcement was made of his death, which was first reported by the Washington Post (William Calley, Army officer and face of My Lai Massacre, is dead at 80).
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William Laws Calley, Jr. was born in Miami, FL, on June 8, 1943. His father was a machine salesman. Calley was a poor student in high school and dropped out of Palm Beach Junior College after one semester. He worked as a bellhop, a dishwasher, and a switchman for the Florida East Coast Railroad. After some unpleasantness involving a train blocking five downtown Miami intersections during rush hour, he cleared out and headed west. He made it as far as Albuquerque, NM, where his car broke down, and he enlisted in the Army.
The war in Vietnam was heating up, and the Army needed officers. Calley had low aptitude scores and mediocre recommendations, but desperate times called for desperate measures, and that was enough to get him enrolled in the Army Officers’ Candidate School. He graduated and was commissioned into the Infantry. He was assigned to C Company, 1st of the 20th Infantry, 23d (Americal) Division at Schofield Barracks, HI. There was a brief training period, and the battalion arrived in Vietnam in December 1967.
On March 16, three months after Calley arrived in Vietnam, two companies of the Americal Division (C/1-20 and B/4-3 Infantry) swept through the hamlets of My Lai and My Khe. The sequence of events is more than a little unclear. Both units had suffered casualties; the area was briefed to the troops as being Viet Cong-friendly. The two companies arrived shooting, and by the time the last shot was fired, at least 504 men, women, and children had been killed. Instances of gang rapes accompanied the killings. The only bright spot in the sordid affair was when Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson, piloting an OH-23, intervened to prevent the slaughter of some Vietnamese. He reported the incident to his chain of command. But that was as far as it went.
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The incident did not go away. Despite the coverup, Congress got wind of it, and in 1969, the Army charged Calley with six counts of premeditated murder days before he was to be discharged. The press began looking into the incident. It is fair to say that Calley became a national figure on November 13, 1969, when Seymour Hersh published what may be the only accurate story of his career and made My Lai an inflection point of US involvement in Vietnam.
Calley was court-martialed, convicted, and sentenced to life in prison. President Richard Nixon ordered him moved to house arrest two days later. He served three and one-half years of house arrest before being paroled by the Secretary of the Army.
The idea of the President of the United States keeping a man convicted of killing “over 20” Vietnamese civilians out of prison is difficult for someone not alive at the time to understand. Nixon’s decision may have been controversial in the New York Times editorial suite, but with Middle America, it was a no-brainer. Today, Calley is a war criminal, and My Lai is a horrendous war crime. That was not the majority attitude at the time. Within a few days of its release, this song sold over a million copies.
Of the 26 officers and men tried for crimes at My Lai, Calley was the only one convicted. Rightly or wrongly, he was seen as a scapegoat for the manifest failures of the US Army in that war.
Calley tried to fade into obscurity. He lived quietly and refused interviews. That he was dead for three months before national media got a whiff of the story shows how determined he was.
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I met him once. He was the manager at V. V. Vick’s Jewelers at Cross Country Plaza on Macon Road in Columbus, GA, which was his father-in-law’s store. Lieutenants from the Infantry Officers Basic Course would make a pilgrimage up to Exit 6 off I-185. We’d sheepishly look around at the wares and shake the hand of the man behind the counter. He was short and unassuming. I didn’t speak; I don’t know anyone who did. Just a handshake.
I don’t think any of us thought he was right or My Lai was anything but murder, but we were well aware that not another officer was convicted of murder when there was more than one of them on the ground. He was always a reminder that we were expendable.