William Laws Calley Jr. (June 8, 1943 – April 28, 2024) was a United States Army officer who was convicted by court-martial of the murder of 22 unarmed South Vietnamese civilians in the My Lai massacre on March 16, 1968, during the Vietnam War. Calley was released to house arrest under orders by President Richard Nixon three days after his conviction. The United States District Court for the Middle District of Georgia granted him a new trial, but that ruling was overturned by the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. His initial life sentence having been modified to a term of 20 years and then further reduced to ten, Calley ultimately served three years of house arrest for the murders. Public opinion at the time about Calley was divided. After his dismissal from the U.S. Army and release from confinement, Calley avoided public attention.
Calley died on April 28, 2024, at the age of 80. His death went publicly unnoticed for three months until it was discovered in public records.
Calley was born on June 8, 1943, in Miami, Florida. His father, William Laws Calley Sr., 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, having failed a majority of his classes.
Calley then had a variety of jobs before his U.S. Army career, including as a bellhop, dishwasher, salesman, insurance appraiser, and train conductor.
Calley enlisted in the U.S. Army on July 26, 1966, and 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 was commissioned a second lieutenant in the infantry. He was assigned to 1st Platoon, Company C, 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry Regiment, 11th Infantry Brigade, 23rd Infantry Division "The Americal Division", and began training at Schofield Barracks, Hawaii, in preparation for deployment to South Vietnam.
Calley's officer evaluations described his performance as average. 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 use a compass properly.
In May or June 1969 near Chu Lai Base Area, Calley and two other Americal Division lieutenants were involved in a physical confrontation with five enlisted members of the United States Marine Corps. The fight ended after one of the Army officers pulled his pistol and fired a round into the air; the two other officers were briefly hospitalized, while Calley was "merely beaten up." The Marines pleaded guilty at special courts-martial, where they said they had not known that they were fighting officers.
On March 16, 1968, Calley led around 100 soldiers of Charlie company into the village of My Lai. Although they faced no resistance, they entered the village shooting. Using automatic weapons, grenades and bayonets, they murdered hundreds of civilians consisting mostly of South Vietnamese elderly men, women, children, and infants. Infants and children were killed with bayonets, and females were raped and shot.
The official American estimate of those murdered was 347, but a Vietnamese memorial at the site lists 504 names, with ages ranging from 1 to 82. In the My Lai museum in Vietnam, a marble plaque lists the names and ages of the victims. Included in the 504 were 60 elderly men and 282 women, 17 of whom were pregnant. A total of 173 children were killed; 53 were infants.
The events in My Lai were initially covered up by the U.S. Army. In April 1969, nearly 13 months after the massacre, Ronald 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 committed by the soldiers at My Lai that he had been told about.
Due to Article 4 of the Fourth Geneva Convention excluding allied civilians from the status of protected persons in an international armed conflict, Calley and his fellow soldiers could not be legally tried as war criminals. Calley was instead charged on September 5, 1969, with six specifications of premeditated murder under Article 118 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) for the deaths of 109 South Vietnamese civilians near the village of Son My, at a hamlet called My Lai. On November 12, 1969, investigative reporters Seymour Hersh and Wayne Greenhaw broke the story and revealed that Calley had been charged with murdering 109 people.
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. Testimony revealed that Calley had ordered the men of 1st Platoon 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. Some soldiers refused to answer questions on the witness stand by citing their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.
One holdout, Private First Class Paul David Meadlo, having been granted immunity, was ordered by Judge Reid W. Kennedy to testify or face contempt of court charges. Meadlo took the stand and recounted that as he stood guard over some 30 villagers whom he, along with Private Dennis Conti, had gathered at a defoliated area at the hamlet's southern tip, he was approached by Calley and told, regarding the civilians, "You know what to do with 'em." Meadlo took that as orders to only keep watch over them. Calley, however, returned ten minutes later and became enraged by the fact that the villagers were still alive. After telling Meadlo that he had wanted them dead, Calley backed up about 20 feet, opened fire on them himself and ordered Meadlo to join in, which he did. Meadlo then proceeded to round up more villagers to be killed.
Conti's testimony corroborated that given by Meadlo, and laid the blame on Calley not only for the initiation of the massacre but also for the participation in it by his subordinates. Another witness, Leonard Gonzalez, told of finding seven women, all naked, all dead, killed by several M-79 grenade launcher rounds.
Calley's original defense, that the death of the villagers was the result of an accidental airstrike, was overcome by 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, 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. 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. On direct examination during his court martial, Calley stated: