William Calley, 1943-2024

One of the most notorious war criminals in American history is dead at 80.

Washington Post, “William Calley, Army officer and face of My Lai Massacre, is dead at 80

William L. Calley Jr., a junior Army officer who became the only person convicted in connection with the My Lai Massacre of 1968, when U.S. soldiers slaughtered hundreds of unarmed South Vietnamese men, women and children in one of the darkest chapters in American military history, died April 28 at a hospice center in Gainesville, Fla. He was 80.

The Washington Post obtained a copy of his death certificate from the Florida Department of Health in Alachua County. His son, Laws Calley, did not immediately respond to requests for additional information. Other efforts to reach Mr. Calley’s family were unsuccessful.

The Post was alerted to the death, which was not previously reported, by Zachary Woodward, a recent Harvard Law School graduate who said he noticed Mr. Calley’s death while looking through public records.

Although he was once the country’s most notorious Army officer, a symbol of military misconduct in a war that many considered immoral and unwinnable, Mr. Calley had lived in obscurity for decades, declining interviews while working as a jeweler in Columbus, Ga., not far from the military base where he was court-martialed and convicted in 1971.

A junior-college dropout from South Florida, he had bounced around jobs, unsuccessfully trying to enlist in the Army in 1964, before being called up two years later. As the war escalated in Vietnam, he found a home in a military that was desperately trying to replenish its lower ranks.

Mr. Calley was quickly tapped to become a junior officer, with minimal vetting, and was soon promoted to second lieutenant, commanding a platoon in Charlie Company, a unit of the Army’s Americal Division. The company sustained heavy losses in the early months of 1968, losing men to sniper fire, land mines and booby traps as the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong launched coordinated attacks in the Tet Offensive.

On the morning of March 16, 1968, the unit was airlifted by helicopter to Son My, a patchwork village of rice paddies, irrigation ditches and small settlements, including a hamlet known to U.S. soldiers as My Lai 4. Over the next few hours, Mr. Calley and other soldiers in Charlie Company shot and bayoneted women, children and elderly men, destroying the village while searching for Viet Cong guerrillas and sympathizers who were said to have been hiding in the area. Homes were burned, and some women and girls were gang-raped before being killed.

An Army investigation later concluded that 347 men, women and children had been killed, including victims of another American unit, Bravo Company. A Vietnamese estimate placed the death toll at 504.

For more than a year and a half, the details of the atrocity were hidden and covered up from the public. A report to headquarters initially characterized the attack as a significant victory, claiming that 128 “enemy” fighters had been killed. Gen. William C. Westmoreland, the top commander in Vietnam, praised American forces at My Lai for dealing a “heavy blow” to the Viet Cong.

Meanwhile, Ronald Ridenhour, a helicopter gunner who was not at the scene but had heard of the killings weeks later, did his own probing. Back in the United States nearly a year after the massacre, he began writing letters to top political and military leaders about the bloodbath at My Lai — providing information that was credited with sparking official investigations.

Backed with photographs and witness testimony, the Army charged Mr. Calley with premeditated murder days before his scheduled discharge.

Although a four-paragraph Associated Press article appeared in September 1969, providing Mr. Calley’s name and reporting that he was being held for allegedly murdering an unspecified number of civilians, a more complete picture of the massacre was not revealed until that November, through articles by investigative reporter Seymour M. Hersh.

Acting on a tip by an antiwar activist, Hersh worked exhaustively to track down Mr. Calley. He finally located him in the unlikeliest of places for a man facing court-martial for what at the time was believed to be 109 murders: at the senior officers’ quarters of Fort Benning, now called Fort Moore, in Georgia.

Hersh’s articles, distributed to newspapers around the country by the independent Dispatch News Service, received the Pulitzer Prize for international reporting, shocked a nation that was already divided over the Vietnam War and thrust Mr. Calley into the national spotlight.

Almost from the very beginning, Mr. Calley polarized Americans who variously deemed him a war criminal or a scapegoat, a mass murderer or an inexperienced officer made to take the fall for the actions of his superiors. Defenders argued that he had been forced into a brutal conflict with an often invisible enemy, then blamed for the horrors of the war.

To some, he seemed like a convenient target for military prosecutors, the lowest link in a chain of command that included Capt. Ernest Medina, who was accused of bearing overall responsibility for the attacks, and Maj. Gen. Samuel W. Koster, the highest-ranking officer charged with trying to cover up the massacre.

Mr. Calley was convicted of murdering at least 22 noncombatants and sentenced to life at hard labor, after a military jury rejected his defense that he was just following orders. Amid appeals, he ultimately served about three years, much of it under house arrest.

“My Lai was the absolute low point in the history of the modern U.S. military,” said Pulitzer Prize-winning military correspondent Thomas E. Ricks, whose book “The Generals” traces the evolution of the post-World War II Army.

Beyond the atrocities committed by Mr. Calley, Ricks said it was important to remember that “there were 1,000 causes here, bad people doing bad things up and down the chain of command,” including the “second grave sin” of the coverup.

“My Lai forced a reexamination of the U.S. Army,” Ricks noted, referring to its central role in later studies about revamping military professionalism. “It was not just that hundreds of civilians had been murdered, and a score raped, but that the acts of the day were covered up by the Army chain of command.

“The incident was just not the work of a deranged lieutenant,” he continued. “Other officers were aware of what was going on. And the extensive coverup, including the destruction of documents, went all the way up to the rank of general, with two generals and three colonels implicated.”

l did a report on Calley and the massacre as an undergraduate cadet. Aside from the sheer monstrosity of what he and his men did that day, the thing that most struck me was that he never should have been commissioned in the first place. But the Army of the late 1960s was desperate for manpower and a sad sack like Calley, who would never have even gotten into an ROTC program or Officer Candidate School in the 1980s was somehow put into a position he never should have been.

And, of course, the officers above him in the chain of command, including career professionals who should have known better, engaged in a despicable cover-up. In hindsight, it very much reminds me of the actions of the leadership of the Roman Catholic Church in the wake of child molestation charges. Loyalty to the institution’s reputation triumphed over loyalty to the institution’s ostensible values.

Robert McFadden’s New York Times obit, “William Calley, Convicted of Mass Murder in My Lai Massacre, Dies at 80,” explores the issue that has fascinated me about the incident in more recent years: the political reaction to the conviction.

The White House and Congress were flooded with protests over the sentence, if not the verdict. Gov. Jimmy Carter of Georgia called it “a blow to troop morale.” Governors in Utah, Indiana and Mississippi denounced the verdict. Legislatures in Arkansas, Kansas, Texas, New Jersey and South Carolina asked for clemency. Gov. George C. Wallace of Alabama demanded a presidential pardon.

Days after the sentencing, President Richard M. Nixon spared the lieutenant from prison, allowing him to remain in his bachelor apartment at Fort Benning, pending appeals. In an ensuing roller-coaster of legal maneuvers, the fort’s commanding general reduced the life term to 20 years, and Secretary of the Army Howard Callaway cut it to 10 years and said Mr. Calley would be paroled after only one-third of that term.

In 1974, a federal judge in Georgia, J. Robert Elliott, overturned the conviction, saying Mr. Calley had been denied a fair trial because of prejudicial publicity. The Army appealed, and Mr. Calley was confined to barracks at Fort Leavenworth, Kans., for three months. He was then released on bail and never returned to custody.

In 1975, a federal appeals court in New Orleans reversed Judge Elliott and reinstated the conviction. And in 1976, the United States Supreme Court refused to review the case, letting the conviction stand and closing a bitter chapter of national history. By then, Mr. Calley had qualified for parole. His life term had been whittled down to slightly more than three years of house arrest and barracks confinement that had ended in 1974.

That even Jimmy Carter was defending him was something I only learned this morning. Aside from being widely regarded as a beacon of righteousness, he’s an Annapolis-educated man with an exemplary career in the Navy that was cut short by his father’s death. But the zeitgeist was that Calley was a victim of a horrible war and being scapegoated. It didn’t help matters that Calley was punished while the officers above him got off Scot free.

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James Joyner
About James Joyner
James Joyner is a Professor of Security Studies. He's a former Army officer and Desert Storm veteran. Views expressed here are his own. Follow James on Twitter @DrJJoyner.

Comments

  1. Jay says:

    . Aside from the sheer monstrosity of what he and his men did that day, the thing that most struck me was that he never should have been commissioned in the first place…And, of course, the officers above him in the chain of command, including career professionals who should have known better, engaged in a despicable cover-up.

    The only good thing that can be said about Calley is that while he was a despicable piece of feces he was far from the only one.

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  2. MarkedMan says:

    It was incidents like this as I was growing up that gave me my life long conviction that those beating their chest about their values the loudest are most likely phonies, and the exact opposite of what they claim to be. Not speaking of Calley here but rather all those phony “patriots” thumping their chests over the superiority of American virtues and the immorality of liberals that fell in behind a monster without a second’s hesitation.

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  3. OzarkHillbilly says:

    Almost from the very beginning, Mr. Calley polarized Americans who variously deemed him a war criminal or a scapegoat, a mass murderer or an inexperienced officer made to take the fall for the actions of his superiors.

    I pick e) All of the Above. Shown true by the fact that he was the only one convicted of any crimes.

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  4. Tony W says:

    I’m nearly the same age as James, and my father was born the same year as Calley. Not coincidentally, coming of age in the 1970s it was continuously reinforced to me by my parents that the worst possible career choice was the United States military. I remember my father saying that if he were drafted, we needed to be prepared to move to Canada. He avoided the draft several times in the 1960s by being a college student, then by being married, then by having a child (me), before he aged out of real eligibility.

    Being a 10-year-old kid in 1975 when all this settled out, I had no idea of the inner workings of military justice, but my parents saw a corrupt and cynical American military that they wanted no part of.

    Fast forward 25 years and I can report both of my children served their country in the military, and did so honorably. However, I still wouldn’t recommend military service to young people today. My son retired as an E7 with a broken body and a broken spirit. Over the last decade of his service, he was unable to report his injuries to his CO or the VA for fear of being relieved of duty before he qualified for retirement.

    The American military has done good work increasing professionalism and accountability, but they have a long way to go if they want to be anything other than a last-resort career choice for young people.

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  5. gVOR10 says:

    Had Ridenhour not taken it on himself to investigate, and then Seymour Hersh taken an interest, we’d have never heard of My Lai. One has to ask how many similar incidents went unreported.

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  6. Slugger says:

    Modern war inherently means destruction, wounding, killing, rape, and murder of noncombatant civilians. It is not the jousting of knights on a field of honor. A few days ago we saw a posting on this site about the decorations awarded at Wounded Knee. A slight spin of our attitude would have resulted in Gen. Westmoreland’s initial opinion of this event to become the official story and Calley being commended instead of condemned. That is just the way things work. At this time one does wonder what the aims of the war were and how anyone could think that war was the way to achieve those aims.

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  7. Kingdaddy says:

    A good summary of My Lai, Calley, and his defenders:

    https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2024/07/calley

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  8. SC_Birdflyte says:

    Immediately after Calley’s conviction was announced, I was walking across a central plaza on my university’s campus. I recall that Vietnam Veterans Against The War had hung a sign from a couple of trees: “Free Calley. Bring Westmoreland and Johnson to Trial.”

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  9. charontwo says:

    @Kingdaddy:

    Lots of people commenting over there, pretty interesting reading.

  10. Scott says:

    @OzarkHillbilly: That was exactly my thoughts upon reading those words.

    I often think how I would react or behave under trying circumstances. I’d like to think I would always do the right thing or know what the boundaries are but I don’t think any of us can know until faced with those choices.

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  11. Mister Bluster says:

    I have known a few Vietnam Veterans over the years. Met most of them at the taverns and roadhouses that I frequented in my drinking days. One guy was in a wheelchair. He told me that he had left both of his legs in the jungle. He had a tee shirt that he wore all the time.
    Southeast Asia War Games. Second Place.
    Last time I went looking for him his apartment was empty and the word was that he was strung out on heroin. I never saw him again.
    Another guy I met in the ’80s had done a tour in the ’60s. When I met him he was a volunteer counselor helping other Vietnam vets survive the trauma of their service to the country. He didn’t talk about the war much however I remember one time when he literally spat out the words in disgust “The things they made you do.”

    Lt. Calley
    RIP

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  12. OzarkHillbilly says:

    @Scott: but I don’t think any of us can know until faced with those choices.

    Nobody knows how they are going to react in moments of extreme stress. Even if one has done well in the past it is no guarantee of future performance.

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  13. JKB says:

    And yet today we are told children the same age as Calley when the massacre happened should not be held responsible for their anti-semitism and violence on campus by big time law and investment firms choosing not to hire them. And they aren’t even under the stress of a combat zone. But, they are college/law school students, not adults like an 18 yr old infantryman.

  14. James Joyner says:

    @JKB: You’re spouting pure gibberish here. It literally has no connection to reality.

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  15. inhumans99 says:

    @JKB:

    Protests on college campuses are not the equivalent of the My Lai massacre, c’mon dude, take a deep breath to calm down and gather your thoughts before you decide to hit post comment.

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  16. gVOR10 says:

    @Kingdaddy: The post you link to has a photo. In the post Erik Loomis describes the context of the photo, which is soul crushing.

    Also at LGM Paul Campos posts noting two other incidents in Vietnam and the Haditha Massacre in Iraq. For which no one was held accountable. Our military claim to now be much better about this. I hope they are.

    We have to hold the individuals responsible to account when we can. But these things always happen in war. If you start a war, you know these things will happen. But it’s a miracle if we hold the low level individuals responsible. We never hold responsible the people who decided to start the war, even pointless wars like Vietnam and the invasion of Iraq.

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  17. Bill Jempty says:

    Calley’s death not becoming public news for some time reminds me of the same happening after Rosie Ruiz died* a few years ago. Both people were infamous and apparently friends or family didn’t want their histories brought up again.

    *- She died on July 8 but obituaries didn’t appear till one month later. The NYT article I link to mentions how Ruiz’s passing away was discovered.

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  18. just nutha says:

    @JKB: In 1968, Calley was 25 years old. Hardly a child. Rethink your point and try again.

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  19. Mister Bluster says:

    @just nutha:..rethink
    This would suggest that Mr. JKB applied some sort of thought process to his original comment.
    Facts not in evidence.

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  20. steve says:

    I joined the military towards the end of the Vietnam war (never deployed there). The uncle who taught me to shoot was a Marine officer who did a couple of tours there. Later committed suicide by alcohol. It was a really ugly war. There weren’t clear battle lines. It was hard to tell who was the enemy and who was not. It was in the jungle and it was hot. It was pretty unclear why we were there and equally clear that the South Vietnam government sucked. (1,2,3, what are we fighting for?)

    Then remember we didnt send people over as entire units like we did for Desert Storm and later deployments. You could be patrolling with someone you didnt know well and the amount of experience among individual troops was variable. We lost a lot of troops, about 55k IIRC correctly and I dont know how many wounded. I do know we had enough amputees that in the hospital where I worked we had entire wards devoted to amputees.

    In the context of that kind of war soldiers totally dehumanized the enemy. They were gooks and not people. I think poor leadership let this spread into how troops treated and behaved towards all of the Vietnamese. That both made something like My Lai pretty likely but also made sure that at all levels it was ignored or covered up. I actually doubt another large massacre like this happened and was not discovered but I think it very likely similar events happened at a small scale and were never reported.

    Steve

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  21. Kurtz says:

    @steve:

    In the context of that kind of war soldiers totally dehumanized the enemy.

    This is a genuine question. Is this not true in general, rather than in the context of a specific kind of war?

    It seems like it is a common psychological response to stress, at least.

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  22. anjin-san says:
  23. anjin-san says:

    Looking at JKBs comment – really, nobody can be that stupid. Consider that JKB and Jack are here simply to disrupt threads and useful dialog. Maybe we should stop letting them do that.

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  24. a country lawyer says:

    I was back in the States when I read about the events at My Lai. I was familiar with the area from when I first got in country in late August 1967. In 1967 this was the area of operations (AO) of the 1st Marines for whom we provided air support. In late September the 1st Marines moved north and we went with them. The positions were taken over by the Americal Division. It was a purely non combat operation. As the Marines pulled out the Army moved into the Marine’s former positions. The Americal Division was new to country and it was apparent in the casual manner in which they moved into the former Marine positions. I read Erik Loomis article and while it wasn’t a vacation spot Quang Ngai province wasn’t as he described it as a free fire zone. The enemy there was Viet Cong not the NVA regular army we faced in northern I Corps. The VC didn’t operate in large units. They worked mostly at night and disappeared into the hills during the day. To clear the VC out a Vill as Calley’s unit was tasked was basically an impossible task because during the day the VC would be gone and those remaining in the Vill couldn’t be distinguished from the villagers. All a patrol could do would be to look for weapons and move on. That could be frustrating to the soldier or Marine but that’s where leadership is important which was obviously lacking in Calley’s case.

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  25. Just nutha ignint cracker says:

    @Mister Bluster: “I’ll withdraw the question, your honor.”

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  26. Mister Bluster says:

    @a country lawyer:..I was back in the States when I read about the events at My Lai.

    I’m glad you didn’t come home in a body bag.

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  27. Just nutha ignint cracker says:

    @anjin-san: Yeah, you’d think…
    But my experience teaching showed me that lots of people are… not stupid, per se, but thoughtless and driven by motivated thinking, so yeah, it’s possible that he believes what he’s saying in much the same way as Jack confuses conjecture and speculation with “fact” because he believes in the factuality of what he says.

    ETA: But. yeah, for the most part, they should probably just be ignored. The lurkers are mostly either aware of the BS or part of the cohort by now.

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  28. Just nutha ignint cracker says:

    @Kingdaddy: Reading Loomis’ post, I was intrigued by remembrance of The Battle Hymn of Lt. Calley and decided to see if it’s available to audition. Yes, it’s on YouTube. No, it’s not worth listening to unless you want a cynical laugh today and I turned it off at the start of stanza 2. What was most interesting about it was the releasing company’s name–Plantation Records.

    Freudian slip? Kinsley gaffe? Meh, whatever. Amazingly dreadful in any event.

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  29. Raoul says:

    I usually don’t comment on JKB but wow-comparing war protestors with war criminals- it is like he saying never listen to him anymore-sadly a more apt comparison is the war in Israel, since both Hamas and IDF have committed heinous acts.

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