William Calley Biography | William Calley

William Calley (full name: William Laws Calley Jr.) is a former United States Army officer convicted by court-martial of murdering 22 unarmed South Vietnamese civilians in the My Lai Massacre on March 16, 1968, during the Vietnam War. While not technically exonerated, after three and a half years of house arrest, Calley was released pursuant to a ruling by federal judge J. Robert Elliott who found that Calley’s trial had been prejudiced by pre-trial 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. His initial conviction faced widespread public opposition both due to the campaign circumstances of civilian embedded Viet Cong and due to Calley being singled out as the sole officer convicted with respect to the massacre.

William Calley Age

William Laws Calley Jr. is 75 years old as of 2018. He was born on 8 June 1943, in Florida, United States

William Calley Children

  William Laws Calley Jr. has one son child named William Laws Calley III

William Calley Early life

Calley was born in Miami, Florida. His father, also William Laws Calley, was a United States Navy veteran of World War II. Calley Jr. graduated from Miami Edison High School in Miami and then attended Palm Beach Junior College in 1963. He dropped out in 1964 after receiving unsatisfactory grades, consisting of one C, two Ds, and four Fs.

Calley then worked at a variety of jobs before enlistment, including as a bellhop, dishwasher, salesman, insurance appraiser, and train conductor.

William Calley Image

William Calley Wife

In 1975 Calley married Penny, with whom he has one son. The couple divorced in 2005 or 2006. He studied and became a gemologist, working at his father-in-law’s jewelry store.

William Calley Today

William Calley is still alive. Who? Remember Second Lieutenant William Calley, the platoon leader in Vietnam, who, on March 16, 1968, swept into the little village of MyLai and murdered 500 civilians, mostly old people, women, and children? That William Calley. After weeks in which two of his men had been killed by snipers and a bomb, but he had not had the opportunity to confront the enemy, who was lurking in a vast network of underground tunnels, The MyLai massacre was his response.

He lives on in two ways. Though convicted of 22 murders in 1971 and sentenced to life in prison, after three years under lax house arrest on military bases he was paroled in 1974. Now a chubby, 5’4”, Colonel Sanders goateed ex- jeweler, pushing 70 years and wearing a Stetson, he has been considered a respectable citizen. He has been giving paid lectures on his war experiences, and, after a broken marriage, lives in Atlanta, Georgia. When British reporters from the Daily Mail sought to interview him in 2007, he asked for — and didn’t get — $25,000. His friends say he has no remorse.

Second, his spirit lives in recent news stories from Iraq and Afghanistan — including, according to commentators, the tortures at Abu Ghraib and the November 19, 2005 party of Marines who murdered 24 civilians — including mothers, children, and an old man in a wheelchair — at Haditha. Only one man faced a capital charge; he pleaded guilty to a lesser charge, was reduced in rank to private and set free.

Between January and March 2010 five soldiers in western Kandahar province allegedly formed a “kill team” which singled out innocent Afghan civilians to be killed for sport. I wrote about this in “Kill Zone” (11/8/10) and The New York Times Magazine has updated it in Luke Mogelson’s “A Beast in the Heart of Every Man” (5/1/11). Finally, The London Tablet (3/17/12), in Robert Fox’s “Why Good Men Go Bad,” has tried to address the questions that gnaw at us every time this happens. His essay is inspired by the case of Staff Sergeant Robert Bales, 38, charged with 17 counts of murder, shooting and stabbing Afghan families in the night, a crime throwing the whole relationship between America and Afghanistan into question.

Why do they do this? What can we do about it? Each man’s ultimate motivation is a mystery, but certain themes keep coming back.

1. Bad leadership. Scrutiny of Calley’s record does not show him well suited to lead. According to Mogelson, in the 2010 Afghanistan case, where Afghan civilians were targeted for sport, both the platoon leader and his sergeant were considered weak leaders, “lacking confidence, self serving, focusing on wanting to be liked by the soldiers and failing to enforce standards, and not engaged in the platoon’s daily activities.”

A majority of the third platoon was getting stoned several times a week. The local nationals who worked on the base were also getting high and would supply drugs to troops in exchange for a porno mag. A new sergeant, Calvin Gibbs, 25, was a natural leader by certain standards, a poster for “GoArmy.com.” He just had “sinister hobbies” he brought over from Iraq: staging false encounters to provide an excuse to kill an innocent Afghan farm boy.

2. Stress. Deployed without rest for over a year, men become tired and disoriented. They question the value of the mission itself. Calley’s men, in spite of President Lyndon Johnson’s win their “hearts and minds” slogan, came to see every Vietnamese person as an enemy. At this stage in Afghanistan, in spite of our “nation building,” the native population see NATO forces as aliens, writes Fox, “inexplicably configured with goggles and helmets, and seemingly joined to their machines, tanks, and carriers, like robotic centaurs.”

One commander stressed the need for “safety valves,” a time to let soldiers “let off steam.” Every four or five days he tried to allow alcohol in moderation to help the troops relax. One psychologist suggests that the Abu Ghraib staff went “feral” because of the inhumane living and work conditions and timetable. This was compounded by the American guards losing their sense of purpose and belief in the Iraq mission.

3. The mission. Although the American people were led to believe that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, he didn’t. Meanwhile, many American troops in Iraq were lead to believe that Saddam Hussein had been responsible for the destruction of the World Trade Center.

Did the government lie in order to motivate soldiers? Mogelson’s article ends with the observation that this generation of Americans may have read about all the atrocities, but the American people don’t feel any personal responsibility for what has happened. Stjepan Metrovic, a sociologist who specializes in war crimes, excoriated the tendency of the army and to blame these crimes on “a few bad apples” or a “rogue platoon.” These acts “open a window onto the corroding conflicts themselves.”

Other questions remain. Nixon pardoned Calley because he thought was what the people wanted. To what extent have war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan not been punished because the silent public holds itself more responsible than it does the perpetrators of the crimes? I answer that both the leaders and the troops share full responsibility. Weak leaders are responsible for the crimes of those in their charge. But the sergeants and privates to witness and tolerate the killing of innocents, insofar as they have acted freely, must be punished. Bur one lesson must be learned: From Vietnam to today, these crimes tell us that our armies should not be there.

Editor’s note (March 21, 2019): The original version of this story said that Lieutenant Calley “was pardoned by President Nixon in 1974.” In 1971, Mr. Nixon did order the release of Mr. Calley from a military stockade while Mr. Calley appealed his conviction by a military court of premeditated murder and his life sentence, but he did not grant a pardon.

Mr. Calley’s life sentence was reduced to 10 years by a military board, and he served a little more than three years in military quarters under house arrest (mostly at his apartment at Fort Benning) before Howard H. Callaway, the secretary of the Army, announced in November 1974 that he would be paroled after serving one-third of his sentence. Before that happened, he was released on bail when a Federal District Court judge overturned the murder conviction. In 1976, the Supreme Court let the conviction stand, but Mr. Calley was never returned to house arrest to serve the 10 days remaining before he would be technically eligible for parole.

William Calley Military career

Calley underwent eight weeks of basic combat training at Fort Bliss, Texas, followed by eight weeks of advanced individual training as a company clerk at Fort Lewis, Washington. Having scored high enough on his Armed Forces Qualification tests, he applied for and was accepted into Officer Candidate School (OCS).

He then began 26 weeks of junior officer training at Fort Benning in mid-March 1967. Upon graduating from OCS Class No. 51 on September 7, 1967, he has commissioned a second lieutenant of infantry. He was assigned to 1st Platoon, Company C, 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry Regiment, 11th Infantry Brigade, and began training at Schofield Barracks, Hawaii, in preparation for deployment to South Vietnam.

Calley’s evaluations described him as average as an officer. Later, as the My Lai investigation progressed, a more negative picture emerged. Men in his platoon reported to army investigators that Calley lacked common sense and could not read a map or compass properly.

A number of men assigned under Calley claimed he was so disliked that they discussed fragging him.

In May/June 1969 near Chu Lai Base Area, Calley and 2 other Americal Division officers were in a jeep that passed a jeep containing 5 Marines. The army jeep pulled the Marines over and one army officer told the Marines “You soldiers better square away!” One of the Marines replied, “We ain’t soldiers, m***********, we’re Marines!” The Army lieutenants dismounted for further discussion of the matter. The ensuing fight ended only after one of the officers pulled his pistol and fired a round into the air.

Two of the officers were briefly hospitalized while Calley was merely beaten up. The Marines pleaded guilty at special courts-martial, in each of which it was stipulated they had not known the soldiers had been officers.

William Calley Quotes

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 …

William Calley Movie

Judgment: The Court Martial of Lt. William Calley

William Calley Murder trial

Photo taken by the Army photographer Ronald L. Haeberle on March 16, 1968, during the My Lai massacre, showing mostly women and children dead on a road

The events in My Lai were initially covered up by the U.S. Army. In April 1969, nearly 13 months after the massacre, Ron Ridenhour, a GI who had been with the 11th Brigade, wrote letters to the President, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Secretary of Defense and 30 members of Congress. In these letters, Ridenhour described some of the atrocities by the soldiers at My Lai that he had been told about.

Calley was charged on September 5, 1969, with six specifications of premeditated murder for the deaths of 109 South Vietnamese civilians near the village of Sơn Mỹ, at a hamlet called My Lai, simply referred to as “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. Upon conviction, Calley could have faced the death penalty. On November 12, 1969, investigative reporters Seymour Hersh and Wayne Greenhaw^[12]broke the story and revealed that Calley had been charged with murdering 109 Vietnamese.

Calley’s trial started on November 17, 1970. It was the military prosecution’s contention that Calley, in defiance of the rules of engagement, ordered his men to deliberately murder unarmed Vietnamese civilians even though his men were not under enemy fire at all. Testimony revealed that Calley had ordered the men of 1st Platoon, Company C, 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry of the 23rd Infantry Division to kill everyone in the village.

In presenting the case, the two military prosecutors, Aubrey M. Daniel, III and John Partin, were hamstrung by the reluctance of many soldiers to testify against Calley. In addition president Richard M. Nixon made public statements prior to the trial that was prejudicial to the defense, resulting in a letter from Daniel taking the president to task. Some soldiers 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 Lieutenant Calley approached him and ordered him to shoot all the civilians.

When Meadlo balked at the orders, Calley backed off 40 feet (12 m) or more and opened fire on the people himself, and Meadlo joined in. 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 order 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 airstrike, was overcome 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 W. 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, saying that they all were Viet Cong.

Twenty-one other members of Calley’s “Charlie” Company also testified in Calley’s defense and corroborated the orders. But Medina publicly denied that he had ever given such orders and stated that he had meant enemy soldiers, while Calley assumed that his order to “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 had 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 and hard labor at Fort Leavenworth, which includes the United States Disciplinary Barracks, the Department of Defense’s only maximum security prison. Calley was the only one of the 26 officers and soldiers initially charged for their part in the My Lai Massacre or the subsequent cover-up. Many observers^[who?] saw My Lai as a direct result of the military’s attrition strategy with its emphasis on body counts and kill ratios.

Many in the United States were outraged by Calley’s sentence. Georgia’s Governor, Jimmy Carter, future President of the United States instituted American Fighting Man’s Day and asked Georgians to drive for a week with their lights on. Indiana’s Governor Edgar Whitcomb asked that all state flags be flown at half-staff for Calley, and the governors of Utah and Mississippi also publicly disagreed with the verdict. The legislatures of Arkansas, Kansas, Texas, New Jersey, and South Carolina requested clemency for Calley.

Alabama’s governor, George Wallace, visited Calley in the stockade and requested that President Richard Nixon pardon him. After the conviction, the White House received over 5,000 telegrams; the ratio was 100 to 1 in favor of leniency. In a telephone survey of the American public, 79 percent disagreed with the verdict, 81 percent believed that the life sentence Calley had received was too stern, and 69 percent believed Calley had been made a scapegoat.

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 expressed their outrage, including 1st Lt. William Crandell of the 199th Light Infantry Brigade, Americal Division:

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 Lieutenant William Calley. We intend to indict those really responsible for My Lai, for Vietnam, for attempted genocide.

In a recollection of the Vietnam War, South Korean Vietnam Expeditionary Forces commanding officer Chae Myung Shin stated, “Calley tried to get revenge for the deaths of his troops. In a war, this is natural.” Conversely, Colonel Harry G. Summers Jr. declared that Calley and Medina should have been hanged, drawn, and quartered, with their remains placed “at the gates of Fort Benning, at the Infantry School, as a reminder to those who pass under it of what an infantry officer ought to be.”

House arrest

On April 1, 1971, only a day after Calley was sentenced in prison at Fort Leavenworth, President Richard Nixon ordered him transferred from Leavenworth prison to house arrest at Fort Benning, pending appeal.

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 determined that Calley’s trial had been prejudiced by pre-trial 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 Elliott’s ruling and returned Calley to U.S. Army custody on June 13, 1974. Consequently, his general court-martial conviction and dismissal from the U.S. Army were upheld; however, the prison sentence and subsequent parole obligations were commuted to time served, leaving Calley a free man.

After release

In 1975 Calley married Penny, with whom he has one son. The couple divorced in 2005 or 2006. He studied and became a gemologist, working at his father-in-law’s jewelry store.

On August 19, 2009, while speaking to the Kiwanis Club of Greater Columbus, Calley issued an apology for his role in the My Lai massacre. 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 Second Lieutenant getting orders from my commander and I followed them—foolishly, I guess.

William Calley Apology

Calley apologizes for role in My Lai massacre
After nearly 40 years of silence, the convicted ex-Army officer says he’s sorry

COLUMBUS, Ga. — Speaking in a soft, sometimes labored voice, the only U.S. Army officer convicted in the 1968 slayings of Vietnamese civilians at My Lai made an extraordinary public apology while speaking to a small group near the military base where he was court-martialed.

“There is not a day that goes by that I do not feel remorse for what happened that day in My Lai,” William L. Calley told members of a local Kiwanis Club, the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer reported Friday. “I feel remorse for the Vietnamese who were killed, for their families, for the American soldiers involved and their families. I am very sorry.”

Calley, 66, was a young Army lieutenant when a court-martial at nearby Fort Benning convicted him of murder in 1971 for killing 22 civilians during the infamous massacre of 500 men, women and children in Vietnam.

Though sentenced to life in prison, Calley ended up serving three years under house arrest after President Richard Nixon later reduced his sentence.

After his release, Calley stayed in Columbus and settled into a job at a jewelry store owned by his father-in-law before he moved to Atlanta a few years ago. He shied away from publicity and routinely turned down journalists’ requests for interviews about My Lai.

But Calley broke his long silence Wednesday after accepting a longtime friend’s invitation to speak at a meeting of the Kiwanis Club of Greater Columbus.

Answered Kiwanis’ questions
Wearing thick glasses and a blue blazer, he spoke softly into a microphone answering questions for a half-hour from about 50 Kiwanis members gathered for their weekly luncheon in a church meeting room.

“You could’ve heard a pin drop,” said Al Fleming, who befriended Calley about 25 years ago and invited him to speak. “They were just slack-jawed that they were hearing this from him for the first time in nearly 40 years.”

Both Fleming and Lennie Pease, the Kiwanis president, told The Associated Press in phone interviews Friday that Calley’s apology came at the beginning of his brief remarks before he began taking questions.

William George Eckhardt, the chief prosecutor in the My Lai cases, said Friday he was unaware of Calley ever apologizing before. Eckhardt said that when he first heard the news, “I just sort of cringed.”

“It’s hard to apologize for murdering so many people,” said Eckhardt, now a law professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. “But at least there’s an acknowledgment of responsibility.”

Didn’t deny taking part
Calley didn’t deny taking part in the slayings on March 16, 1968, but insisted he was following orders from his superior, Capt. Ernest Medina — a notion Eckhardt, the former prosecutor, rejects.

Medina also was tried by a court-martial in 1971; he was acquitted of all charges.

When asked if he broke the law by obeying an unlawful order, the newspaper reported, Calley replied: “I believe that is true.”

“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 second lieutenant getting orders from my commander and I followed them — foolishly, I guess,” Calley said.

Pease said the Kiwanis Club tried to keep Calley’s appearance quiet, not wanting to attract outside attention. He said it was obvious that Calley had difficulty speaking to a group, though he addressed every question head-on — and received a standing ovation when he finished.

“You could see that there was extreme remorse for everything that happened,” Pease said. “He was very, very soft-spoken. It was a little difficult to hear him. You could see he was labored answering questions.”

The last listed phone number for Calley in Atlanta has been disconnected. Fleming declined to give his number to an Associated Press reporter.

Fleming said he’s spoken several times with Calley about his combat experiences in Vietnam. He describes Calley as “a compassionate guy,” despite his infamous role at My Lai.

“I think he may feel like it was time to say something,” Fleming said. “Over the years, I have come to know him so well that it doesn’t seem like a great big thing anymore. But I guess it is.”