William Calley

William Laws Calley
File:William-Calley.jpg
Nickname(s)	Rusty
Allegiance	United States of America
Service/branch	United States Army
Rank	Second Lieutenant
Unit	Company C, 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry Regiment, 11th Infantry Brigade, 23rd Infantry Division
Battles/wars	Vietnam War My Lai Massacre

William Laws Calley (born June 8, 1943) is a convicted American war criminal. He was the U.S. Army officer found guilty of ordering the My Lai Massacre on March 16, 1968, during the Vietnam War.

Early life

Born in Miami, Florida, William Calley came from an ordinary background. Nicknamed "Rusty", he stood five foot four inches tall and was reportedly undistinguished, other than that many people described him as "nice". His father was a United States Navy veteran of World War II. Calley graduated from Miami Edison High School in Miami. He attended Palm Beach Junior College from 1963 to 1964, but dropped out after receiving unsatisfactory grades, consisting of two Cs, one D, and four Fs. He then worked at a variety of jobs, including bellhop, dishwasher, salesman, insurance appraiser and train conductor. He did not hold any of these for long and was in San Francisco in 1966, when he received a letter from his Selective Service board requesting reevaluation of his medical condition. While attempting to return to Miami, his car broke down in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Calley reported to a recruiting sergeant there, and enlisted in the U.S. Army in Albuquerque on July 26, 1966.

Military career

Calley underwent nine weeks of basic combat training at Fort Benning, Georgia, followed by eight weeks advanced individual training as a company clerk at Fort Lewis, Washington. Having scored sufficiently high enough on his Armed Forces Qualification tests, he applied for and was accepted into Officer Candidate School (OCS). Calley began 16 weeks of junior officer training at Fort Benning in mid-March 1967. Graduating in OCS Class No. 51 on September 7, 1967, he was commissioned a Second Lieutenant of Infantry.

Calley was assigned to Company C, 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry Regiment, 11th Infantry Brigade, and began training at Schofield Barracks, Hawaii in preparation for deployment to the Republic of Vietnam. In Vietnam, the brigade became part of the Americal Division.

Calley was not highly regarded as a platoon leader. His Officer Evaluation Reports describe him as merely "average". Later, as the My Lai investigation progressed, a more negative picture emerged. Many men in his platoon told army investigators that Calley lacked common sense and could not even read a map or compass properly. Calley's men claimed he was so disliked that some even thought of "fragging" (killing) him.

Murder trial

Calley was charged on September 5, 1969, with six specifications of premeditated murder for the deaths of 104 Vietnamese civilians near the village of My Lai, at a hamlet called Son My, more commonly called My Lai in the U.S. press. As many as 500 villagers, mostly women, children, infants and the elderly, had been systematically killed by American soldiers during a bloody rampage in 1968. If convicted, Calley could have faced the death penalty.

Calley's trial started on November 17, 1970. After deliberating for 79 hours, the jury convicted him on March 29, 1971, of the premeditated murder of 22 Vietnamese civilians. Testimony revealed that Calley had ordered the men of 1st Platoon, Company C, 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry of the 23rd Infantry Division (Americal) to kill everyone in the village. Calley claimed he was following the orders of his immediate superior, Captain Ernest Medina. Whether this order was actually given is disputed; Medina was acquitted of all charges relating to the incident at a separate trial. On 31^st March 1971, Calley was sentenced to life imprisonment at hard labor.

Of the 26 officers and soldiers initially charged for their part in the My Lai Massacre or the subsequent cover-up, only Calley was convicted. He was seen by some as a scapegoat used by the U.S. Army for its failure to instill morale and discipline in its troops and officers. Others, knowing nothing about his education or background, sought to excuse his actions because of his allegedly low intelligence and cultural background. Many saw My Lai as a direct result of the military's attrition strategy with its emphasis on "body counts" and "kill ratios."

Many in America were outraged by Calley's sentence; Georgia's governor Jimmy Carter instituted "American Fighting Man's Day" and asked Georgians to drive for a week with their lights on. Indiana's governor asked all state flags to be flown at half-staff for Calley, and Utah's and Mississippi's governors also disagreed with the verdict. The Arkansas, Kansas, Texas, New Jersey, and South Carolina legislatures requested clemency for Calley. Alabama's governor George Wallace visited Calley in the stockade and requested that Nixon pardon him. 79% of Americans polled disagreed with Calley's verdict.

House arrest

On April 1, 1971, only a day after Calley was sentenced, U.S. President Richard Nixon ordered him transferred from prison to house arrest at Fort Benning, pending appeal. This leniency was protested against by Melvin Laird, the Secretary of Defense. The prosecutor, Aubrey Daniel wrote, "The greatest tragedy of all will be if political expedience dictates the compromise of such a fundamental moral principle as the inherent unlawfulness of the murder of innocent persons." On August 20, 1971, the convening authority — the Commanding General of Fort Benning — reduced Calley's sentence to 20 years. The Army Court of Military Review affirmed both the conviction and sentence (46 C.M.R. 1131 (1973)). The Secretary of the Army reviewed the sentence and findings and approved both, but in a separate clemency action commuted confinement to ten years. On May 3, 1974, President Nixon notified the Secretary that he had reviewed the case and determined he would take no further action in the matter.

Ultimately, Calley served only three and a half years of house arrest in his quarters at Fort Benning. He petitioned the federal district court for habeas corpus on February 11, 1974, which was granted on September 25, 1974, along with his immediate release, by federal judge J. Robert Elliott. Judge Elliott found that Calley's trial had been prejudiced by pretrial publicity, denial of subpoenas of certain defense witnesses, refusal of the United States House of Representatives to release testimony taken in executive session of its My Lai investigation, and inadequate notice of the charges. (The judge had released Calley on bail on February 27, 1974, but an appeals court reversed it and returned Calley to army custody on June 13, 1974.)

Calley was sent to the United States Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. At his release, the press eagerly awaited his arrival at the prison's South Gate, as promised by the prison commandant. Instead, at Calley's request, he was released at West Gate and taken directly to the Fort Leavenworth airfield, where his escort, an unnamed Georgia Congressman, had him flown home. The press were notified of his departure after the fact, much to the chagrin of the major news network reporters from Kansas City.

The Army appealed against Judge Elliott's decision to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals and asked an appeals judge to stay Calley's immediate release, which was granted. However, the full Court upheld the release pending appeal and decided the entire court would hear the appeal (normally not done in the first instance). The Army won a reversal of Judge Elliott's habeas corpus grant and a reinstatement of the judgment of the courts martial, with 5 judges dissenting. (Calley v. Callaway, 519 F.2d 184, 9/10/1975). In a long and extremely detailed careful opinion, the reviewing court disagreed with Judge Elliott on the law and significantly on Elliott's scope of review of the courts martial proceedings. The Court noted that although by now Calley had been "paroled" from confinement by the Army, that did not moot the habeas corpus proceedings.

After release

Sometime in 2005 or 2006, Calley divorced his wife Penny, whose father had employed him at the V.V. Vick jewelry store in Columbus since 1975, and moved to downtown Atlanta to live with his son, William Laws Calley Jr. In October 2007, Calley agreed to be interviewed by the UK newspaper the Daily Mail to discuss the massacre, saying, "Meet me in the lobby of the nearest bank at opening time tomorrow, and give me a certified cheque for $25,000, then I'll talk to you for precisely one hour." When the journalist "showed up at the appointed hour, armed not with a cheque but a list of pertinent questions", Calley left.

On August 19, 2009, while speaking to the Kiwanis Club of Greater Columbus, Calley apologized for his role in the My Lai massacre. According to the Ledger-Enquirer and a blog maintained by retired broadcast journalist Dick McMichael., Calley said:

There is not a day that goes by that I do not feel remorse for what happened that day in My Lai. I feel remorse for the Vietnamese who were killed, for their families, for the American soldiers involved and their families. I am very sorry....If you are asking why I did not stand up to them when I was given the orders, I will have to say that I was a 2nd Lieutenant getting orders from my commander and I followed them—foolishly, I guess.

In popular culture

Calley is mentioned by name in the first stanza of Pete Seeger's Vietnam protest song "Last Train to Nuremberg":

"Do I see Lieutenant Calley? Do I see Captain Medina? Do I see Gen'ral Koster and all his crew?"

The 1971 spoken song "The Battle Hymn of Lt. Calley" expressed support for the soldier.

See also

• Glenn Andreotta, Lawrence Colburn and Hugh Thompson, Jr. - U.S. helicopter crew members who intervened to stop the My Lai killings
• Seymour Hersh - Investigative journalist who broke the story of the massacre and coverup
• Major General Samuel Koster - Commanding officer of the Americal Division
• Captain Ernest Medina - Commanding officer of Charlie Company
• Terry Nelson - One-hit wonder who released "Battle Hymn Of Lt. Calley", a song about Calley in 1971

External links

• TRIAL : William Calley's trial
• Famous American Trials: The My Lai Courts-Martial 1970
• Beidler, Philip D., "Calley's Ghost", Virginia Quarterly Review, Winter 2003.
• BBC ON THIS DAY | 29 | 1971: Calley guilty of My Lai Massacre