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

William Calley was born in Miami, Florida. Nicknamed "Rusty", he stood 5 foot 4 inches (163 cm) tall. 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 on March 16, 1968. If convicted, Calley could have faced the death penalty.

Calley's trial started on November 17, 1970. It was the military prosecution contention that Calley, in defiance of the U.S. Military Rules of Engagement, ordered his men to terminate unarmed Vietnamese civilians despite the fact that his soldiers weren't under fire. 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. In presenting the case, the two military prosecutors, Aubrey Daniel and John Partin, were hamstrung by the reluctance of many soldiers to testify against Calley. Some refused to answer questions point-blank on the witness stand by citing the Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. However one holdout, a soldier in Calley's unit named Paul Meadlo, after being jailed for contempt of court by the presiding judge, Reid W. Kennedy, reluctantly agreed to testify. In his testimony, Meadlo described that during the day's events, he was standing guard over a few dozen My Lai villagers when 2Lt. Calley approached him and ordered him to shoot all the civilians. When Meadlo balked at the orders, Calley backed off 20 feet (6 m) or more and opened fire himself... Meadlo began firing too...

Another witness named Dennis Conti, who was also reluctant to testify, described the carnage, claiming that Calley had started it and the rest of the 105 soldiers of Charlie Company followed suit. Another witness, named Leonard Gonzalez, told of seeing one of the soldiers of Calley's unit herd some men and women villagers together and ordered them to strip off their clothing. When the villagers refused, the enraged soldier fired a single round from his M-79 grenade launcher into the crowd, killing everyone.

Calley's original defense that the death of the villagers was the result of an accidental helicopter or aerial airstrike was quashed by the few prosecution witnesses. In his new defense, 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 in August 1971. Taking the witness stand, Calley, under the direct examination by his civilian defense lawyer George Latimer, claimed that on the previous day, his commanding officer, Captain Medina, made it clear that his unit was to move into the village and that everyone was to be shot for they all were Viet Cong. 21 other members of Charlie Company also testified on Calley's defense corroborating the orders. But Medina publicly denied that he had ever given such orders and he had meant enemy soldiers, while Calley took the assumption that his orders, "kill the enemy" meant to kill everyone. In his personal statement, Calley stated that:

"I was ordered to go in there and destroy the enemy. That was my job that day. That was the mission I was given. I did not sit down and think in terms of men, women and children. They were all classified as the same, and that's the classification that we dealt with over there, just as the enemy. I felt then and I still do that I acted as I was directed, and I carried out the order that I was given and I do not feel wrong in doing so."

After deliberating for 79 hours, the six-officer jury (five of whom served in Vietnam) convicted him on March 29, 1971, of the premeditated murder of 22 Vietnamese civilians. On March 31, 1971, Calley was sentenced to life imprisonment of hard labor at Fort Leavenworth.

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.

Many others were outraged not at Calley's guilty verdict, but that he was the only one within the chain of command who was convicted. At the Winter Soldier Investigation in Detroit organized by Vietnam Veterans Against the War January 31-February 2, 1971, veterans including 1st Lt. William Crandell of the 199th Light Infantry Brigade, Americal Division expressed their outrage:

We intend to tell who it was that gave us those orders; that created that policy; that set that standard of war bordering on full and final genocide. We intend to demonstrate that My Lai was no unusual occurrence, other than, perhaps, the number of victims killed all in one place, all at one time, all by one platoon of us. We intend to show that the policies of Americal Division which inevitably resulted in My Lai were the policies of other Army and Marine Divisions as well. We intend to show that war crimes in Vietnam did not start in March 1968, or in the village of Son My or with one Lt. William Calley. We intend to indict those really responsible for My Lai, for Vietnam, for attempted genocide.

House arrest

On April 1, 1971, only a day after Calley was sentenced, U.S. President Richard Nixon ordered him transferred from Leavenworth 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 U.S. 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.

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. On November 9, 1974, 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 check 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 check 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.

In the 1992 film "A Few Good Men," Tom Cruise's character of lawyer Daniel Kaffee expresses disdain to his fellow lawyers about the two Marines they are charged with defending in a murder case being guilty on the grounds that the murder they inadvertently committed was the unfortunate result of actions "they were ordered to do"; following orders is what Marines do without question, especially so for those stationed at Guantanamo Bay Naval Station. Demi Moore's character of JoAnne Galloway counters with "Don't look now Danny, but you're making an argument," to which Kevin Pollack's character of Sam Weinberg follows up with the caveat "An argument that didn't work for the Nazis at Nuremberg... An argument that didn't work for Calley at My Lai."

The 1994 Dog Faced Hermans song "Calley" is written from the perspective of a journalist who travels to Calley's store in Columbus, GA to interview him. She is chased out of the store by an enraged Calley after asking about My Lai.

The trial was dramatized in a 1975 television movie produced by ABC called "Judgment: The Trial of Lieutenant William Calley." The film featured Tony Musante as Calley and an early performance by Harrison Ford. It won an Emmy Award for its editors.

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.co.uk | 29 | 1971: Calley guilty of My Lai Massacre