Calley

Today, word came out that William Calley died back on April 28.

The author of the single most notorious mass murder in the Vietnam War, we can’t look at Calley without considering the rotten awful system that made him. He was a genuinely horrible soldier who did an unspeakable thing. But the only thing surprising about it is that it wasn’t more common. And that’s on a chain of command that had given soldiers license to commit unspeakable atrocities in Vietnam.

Born in 1943 in Miami, Calley grew up in south Florida. His father was a World War II military officer. He grew up in that world of lionizing the World War II veterans. This was a big problem for boys of that era. Feeling they couldn’t live up to their fathers dominated much of their lives, never more so than in the ridiculous “Greatest Generation” claptrap Tom Brokaw started in the 1990s and which caught on so effectively because these Boomers who never felt they had lived up to their parents were now watching them die. Calley wasn’t much of a student and a pretty weak personality generally. He attended community college but dropped out shortly after enrolling. He drifted around, working any number of jobs from dishwasher to train conductor. He was a young man without much going on. So, he enrolled in the Army in 1967. But he was not his father. Not by any means.

By 1967, the Army was fully enmeshed in Vietnam. With more and more soldiers going overseas, the military had to push through potential officers who had absolutely no business serving in such a role. Calley became the most notorious example of this. He underwent basic training at Fort Bliss, then eight weeks of advanced training at Fort Lewis. Wanting to be like his father, he applied for Officer Candidate School and did well enough to be accepted. Officer training was 26 weeks of intense work, which one would have hoped might have driven some sense into his head, or at least made his superiors realize this guy was a complete clown. Alas. On September 7, 1967, he was commissioned as a second lieutenant and sent to Hawaii for additional training to lead troops in Vietnam. Even at this time, Calley was hardly seen as a super promising officer. His evaluations were average at best. But average at best was plenty good with a half million troops flooding into Vietnam. It got worse. Later, his troops said they guy couldn’t even read a map or compass properly. This was the kind of person the U.S. was sending over to defeat communism and protect a broken, corrupt military regime in South Vietnam.

On March 16, 1968, Lt. Calley led 1st Platoon, Company C, 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry of the 23rd Infantry Division into the village of My Lai. This was in Quang Ngai province, a beautiful place and a Viet Cong stronghold. Many American soldiers had died there as they tried to pacify it through idiotic ideas such as moving out civilians into fake villages under American control. Snipers, booby traps, heat, and mosquitoes took their toll. An unseen enemy didn’t help matters. Nor did the terrible leadership at the lower level of officers such as Calley. Racism was the common response of soldiers to the Vietnamese. Vietnam Beta, i.e., the Filipino War from 1898 to 1902, but really until the 1930s, had shown how quickly American soldiers would adapt the racism they had learned at home to the populations of Asia. The use of old racial epithets combined with brand new racial epithets in the Philippines in 1901 and Vietnam in 1968. In Quang Ngai, mostly a free-fire zone due to the VC presence, American troops, operating under the idea that they were saving the nation, were in fact just blowing everything away they could. The irony of this was not lost on either thinking soldiers or the journalists covering them. But American soldiers could in effect do whatever they wanted.

There was nothing exceptional about the company Calley led. They were all trained the same way—take orders, shoot first, don’t worry about the consequences. Calley did have a reasonably competent captain above him—Ernest Medina, a Mexican-American who had risen through the ranks and had a commitment to discipline, at least earlier in his career. He instilled the need to work together. But he could only do so much when someone such as Calley was in the field. Medina hated Calley. He called him “Lieutenant Shithead” behind his back. There were rumors that Calley’s men might shoot him, serious enough rumors that they were around before My Lai. He was utterly incompetent, vainglorious, stupid. Again, he couldn’t even read a map and got his troops lost in the field on multiple occasions, in a place where you really, really did not want to get lost. In short, Calley was the Vietnam War personified in one soldier.

Like many companies, Charlie Company started taking their frustrations out on the Vietnamese people. Men, women, or children were all the enemy and might be murdered if they were unfortunate to run across American troops. Rape became commonplace. Medina showed indifference to this violence, as did most of the military in Vietnam, and his failed leadership set the tone for even worse officers such as Calley. So when Calley told his soldiers to shoot any Vietnamese who didn’t stop—even though the Americans spoke such bad Vietnamese it is unlikely that any petrified Vietnamese couldunderstand them—it reflected awful leadership up and down the chain of command. When a booby trap killed one soldier and blew the legs off another, Calley’s troops beat to death the first Vietnamese person they saw, a woman. It was wanton murder.

On March 15, 1968, Medina gathered Calley and the troops under him to discuss going into the village of My Lai, a VC stronghold the next day. They decided that a move early in the morning would limit contact with civilians. But Lieutenant Colonel Frank Barker had given orders that he wanted My Lai cleared out of VC, not that anyone could tell who they were. Medina later said that Barker explicitly ordered the destruction of the village. That night, Calley’s men asked Medina just what was ordered. He was very explicit that women and children were not to be killed. That was confirmed by multiple sources in the aftermath of what was to come. Burning houses, killing livestock, destroying wells, and burning crops? Sure. But not killing women and children. But Medina did tell them that it was time to revenge all their dead and wounded comrades.

So when Calley led his men into My Lai the next day, the ground was laid for a massacre. Yes, Medina had said to leave women and children alone. But between fears of the VC and the desire for revenge, it hardly mattered who they saw. They were there to kill. When Calley and his men landed at about 7:40 am on March 16, they expected heavy resistance. The elephant grass was as tall as a man, great to shelter the enemy. But no one was around. The intelligence was bad or the VC had chosen not to fight. But they were nowhere around. When the American troops landed, they were already firing. Not a single Vietnamese bullet came back at them. Too bad, because it would have saved a lot of lives. The first man they saw was guy in a rice paddy. They blew him away with a machine gun. Part of the reason that there were supposed to be few civilians around was that it was supposedly market day. But that intelligence was evidently wrong too, because the civilians were all at home, not at the market. All the troops saw were civilians. They killed everything. They threw grenades into houses. They shouted orders in English and then shot the people when they didn’t understand the language.

That day, Calley and his troops slaughtered at least 504 people and probably many more. But here’s the thing about My Lai. The military has chain of command. But, as we have seen throughout many atrocities in American military history, you don’t have to participate in these horrors. There have been many cases of people refusing to participate in the mass slaughter of civilians, including in the genocidal wars against Native Americans. This was true of My Lai as well. Several soldiers refused to engage in the slaughter. One was Herbert Carter. He saw a mother holding a baby who came out of her hut. He remembered, “She came out of the hut with her baby and Widmer shot her with an M16 and she fell. When she fell, she dropped the baby and then Widmer opened on the baby with his M16 and killed the baby, too.” Another was Hugh Thompson, Jr. He was a helicopter pilot flying reconnaissance in support of the operation. Sickened by what he saw, he landed his helicopter between Calley’s men and the Vietnamese and told the soldiers that he had his helicopter gunner training his own gun on them. Probably he saved dozens of lives that day. He also told his own commander. Of course nothing came of that. Because the entire chain of command was in the end at least partially guilty of what happened at My Lai, it became something that no one on high wanted to investigate, fearful of what they might find, not to mention other massacres.

There were also mass rapes. This image leading this post is of a group at My Lai just seconds before they are to be machine-gunned. The horror on the old woman’s face is what really gets you. But the woman on the right? She’s buttoning up her shirt. That’s because she was just raped at gunpoint. Dozens of women were raped. To me, this really takes any kind of military equation out of it. These weren’t just men who mistook civilians for the enemy. They were seeking out women, taking time out of their killing, tearing off their clothing, pulling down their own pants, raping the women, and then killing them.

But not every soldier was equally guilty here. Many certainly engaged in this horrible behavior. Many others however gathered up civilians and placing them under guard. This is where Calley’s greatest crime comes into play. This infuriated him. He claimed that Medina had told him that not killing civilians interfered with the operation, forced the soldiers off, and then opened fire himself on the civilians, as well as ordering his men to do so. Some did, some didn’t. What everyone said was that it was clear that Calley himself was having the time of his life.

Soldiers knew all of this was a disaster. Testifying later, Michael Bernhardt, one of the soldiers who had objected to the murders, stated that “this breeds Viet Cong and this isn’t helping us at all. It is more hurting us.” He went on to note the racism among the soldiers: “What they thought were these people were a whole lot less than human. They knew, or they at least heard, of their value of human life.” 

The official report in the aftermath listed 128 people killed but only three guns recovered. This was ridiculous and should have turned higher-ups onto the massacre that took place there. But no one wanted to know. A very brief investigation took place of Hugh Thompson’s claims, but it was extremely perfunctory and everyone was let off without a single warning or reprimand, not to mention punishment. We also know that knowledge of this went way high in the command, at least as high as Major General Samuel Koster.

In April 1969, a soldier named Ron Ridenhour, who had heard about the massacre and went around collecting testimony, wrote letters to leading politicians of both parties in Washington about what he knew. Among them was William Fulbright, the anti-war senator from Arkansas, who responded with horror at what he read. This blew the lid off the cover-up. Ridenhour didn’t know Calley’s name precisely, but was able to give enough information, including about his own friends who had participated in the massacre, to implicate him. Lieutenant General William Peers led the investigation and felt utter disgust at the findings. The Peers Commission ripped the military for the lack of training in issues of human rights.

The military could no longer deny this was happening. After Peers issued its report, the Army filed war crimes and obstruction charges against two generals, four colonels, four lieutenant colonels, four majors, six captains, and eight lieutenants. On September 5, 1969, Calley was charged with 6 counts of premediated murder for the deaths of 109 unarmed Vietnamese. But the story was still covered up in the public. The journalist Seymour Hersh got hold of the story. He made it huge. Hersh published a huge expose on November 13. And then, in the December 5, 1969 issue of Life, the photographer Ron Haberle published his photos of the event, which he had sold to the magazine. This was now truly a national story, with all those horrific images that we remember today.  

However, despite all the original charges, Calley was the only one who stood trial. There were a few other punishments for the coverup. Koster was demoted all the way to brigadier general and his assistant, Brigadier General George Young, received an official censure. The horror. Everyone else had their charges dropped. So the question became whether Calley deserved all the blame for this.

Calley’s trial started in November 1970. The prosecution’s case rested on Calley ignoring the rules of engagement and slaughtering unarmed civilians. It was almost impossible to achieve convictions for war crimes in military trials. All the jurors were fellow Vietnam War veterans. They knew what it was like. They had heard all the same things from their superior officers. Some of them probably had murdered some Vietnamese civilians themselves. The reason that Calley was convicted was that the evidence was utterly overwhelming, particularly all the testimony about him personally ordering and then participating in the machine gunning of civilians that other of his men were protecting.

That year, General William Westmoreland testified before Congress about reports on violations against civilians. Westmoreland repeatedly talked about the training the soldiers had in the rules of war, the Geneva Conventions, and other such things. But this was a half-truth, at best. Yes, soldiers were very briefly introduced to these concepts as part of their training. But no one took them seriously and then they were completely forgotten about in the field. Westmoreland knew this. Soldiers were given wallet cards with rules that included such things as “Don’t attract attention by loud, rude, or unusual behavior” and “Treat women with politeness and respect.” That was it. OK.

Richard Nixon was, not surprisingly, sympathetic to Calley. He had him removed from prison and placed under house arrest at Ft. Benning. He wouldn’t go so far as a complete pardon—after all, it would look really bad on the international front and Nixon didn’t actually care about Calley personally. But he wanted to take advantage of the situation. It was catnip for Dick. He could hate the hippies and draw some of those white ethnic voters he loved away from the Democratic Party for the 72 elections.

When the prosecutor for the case, Aubrey Daniel, found out that Nixon was intervening to help Calley, he wrote a furious letter to the president:

“Sir: It is very difficult for me to know where to begin this letter as I am not accustomed to writing letters of protest,” he said in his statement. “I have been particularly shocked and dismayed at your decision to intervene in these proceedings in the midst of public clamor. . . . Your intervention has, in my opinion, damaged the military judicial system and lessened any respect it may have gained as a result of the proceedings. . . . I would expect the President of the United States . . . would stand fully behind the law of this land on a moral issue which is so clear and about which there can be no compromise.”

Well, it’s not as if Richard Nixon was overly concerned with the law of the land or morality.

Arguably even more shocking than the massacre of civilians was how many Americans defended Calley and saw nothing wrong with his action. The peak of this was Terry Nelson’s terrible 1971 country single “Battle Hymn of Lt. Calley,” which was a paean to Calley’s heroism. This song sold….1.8 million copies! Nelson became a one-hit wonder as a performer who went to be a country songwriter with some level of success, but why would anyone even listen to this song? The answer is obvious enough of course, which is that people want music that reflects their politics regardless of the quality, of which there is very little here. Calley promoted this own vision of himself, writing a memoir (well, telling it to someone who was reasonably literate) that not only became a significant seller, but remains in print a half-century later. Again, why would someone read this, outside of morbid curiosity?

It was hardly just bad country musicians and right-wing politicians. Centrists also took up the Calley case to separate themselves from those antiwar liberals. One of them was Jimmy Carter, the governor of Georgia and future president. He led a statewide initiative that created something called American Fighting Man’s Day and had Georgians drive with their light on during the day for a week as a symbol of their support for the war criminal. Flags were flown at half-staff in Indiana. Legislatures from South Carolina to New Jersey voted to request amnesty for Calley. George Wallace went even farther—actually visiting Calley in prison. No one was going to outmaneuver Wallace on this one. A telegram campaign to the White House urged a pardon by a 100:1 ratio.

Calley of course didn’t think he deserved to see a day in prison. He continued appealing his conviction. In February 1974, a judge for the District Court of the Middle District of Georgia granted Calley a writ of habeas corpus and let him free on bail, saying he had been improperly convicted due to all the pre-trial publicity. As he awaited his retrial, Secretary of the Army Howard Callaway reduced his sentence to 10 years. In 1976, still out on bail, Gerald Ford pardoned one of the vile criminals in American history. Wait, that was Richard Nixon. Oh, he also pardoned one of the worst war criminals in American history, maybe the single worst. In total, Calley served only a few months at Fort Leavenworth for leading one of the worst massacres by American troops in the nation’s history and the single most deadly since the conquest of the Philippines in the first decade of the twentieth century. Like the Filipinos though, the Vietnamese were barely seen as people by many Americans and so Calley was more a hero than a murderer in the public mind.

But the flip side of all of this was the anti-war movement also excusing Calley. For many of them, the real criminals were Westmoreland and Nixon and Kissinger. Calley was just following immoral orders. Benjamin Spock for instance said, “[I]t’s too bad that one man is being made to pay for the brutality of the whole war.” There was certainly something to say for the fact that no one above Calley had to pay for their crimes. That was disgusting. But Calley deserved no defense. Not at all. In the division of Vietnam-era America, Calley just ended up serving the needs of whatever position anyone already held in these debates.

After Calley’s release, he largely disappeared from public view, for understandable reasons. He married the daughter of a jewelry store owner in Georgia. He worked for his father-in-law and became a gemologist. He also eventually got his real estate license after having that denied due to his criminal record.  In the mid-2000s he divorced and later moved to Florida. For some reason, he gave a talk in 2009 to the Kiwanis Club of Columbus, Georgia, where he actually expressed regret for his mass murders for the first time publicly. I imagine over the years he did indeed feel regret. I also don’t care. You know who else feels regret? The survivors of My Lai and the orphans and all the other people who suffered because of Calley and Medina and Nixon and Johnson and every other American who participated in that horrifying and unjust war.

Calley is now gone. In fact, the entire Vietnam War generation is going the way of their ancestors. When the World War II generation passed on, the nation engaged in a gigantic wave of nostalgia. That is most certainly not going to happen with the Vietnam generation. And yet, the battles over Vietnam amazingly still frame American politics well over a half-century later. The culture wars of the 1960s are now the culture wars of the 2020s. Calley may have disappeared from public view. But the divisions his case exposed have not, even if those most committed to fighting them are as old as he is. While the world burns and everyone born after 1970 waits to have their shot to fix the world, right-wing media flames passions among the elderly about a changing America that supposedly threatens their supremacy over the world. I have no idea about Calley’s contemporary politics, though I can certainly guess. But what he represented—a violent fear of the rest of the world that led to a massive defense of his unspeakable actions among large sectors of white America—remains as powerful today as it was in 1971. This is a nation that refuses to reckon honestly with its past, preferring complete lies such as that antiwar soldiers spat upon soldiers when they returned home, something fabricated out of whole cloth in the early 1980s that became conventional wisdom, than just admitting that it did horrible things in a nation where it did not belong. It’s a sad state of affairs, as is much about this nation, in 1971 and in 2024.

For the fullest exploration of My Lai, I highly recommend James S. Olson and Randy Roberts’ My Lai: A Brief History with Documents, which is not only a great teaching tool, but also a collection of primary sources that will blow the mind of anyone reading them on their own. Several bits of this obituary are borrowed from this book.