By Harrison Smith, Emily Langer, Brian Murphy and Adam Bernstein
July 29, 2024 at 7:38 p.m. EDT

William L. Calley Jr., a junior Army officer who became the only person
convicted in connection with the My Lai Massacre of 1968, when U.S. soldiers
slaughtered hundreds of unarmed South Vietnamese men, women and children in one
of the darkest chapters in American military history, died April 28 at a hospice
center in Gainesville, Fla. He was 80.

The Washington Post obtained a copy of his death certificate from the Florida
Department of Health in Alachua County. His son, Laws Calley, did not
immediately respond to requests for additional information. Other efforts to
reach Mr. Calley’s family were unsuccessful.

The Post was alerted to the death, which was not previously reported, by Zachary
Woodward, a recent Harvard Law School graduate who said he noticed Mr. Calley’s
death while looking through public records.

Although he was once the country’s most notorious Army officer, a symbol of
military misconduct in a war that many considered immoral and unwinnable, Mr.
Calley had lived in obscurity for decades, declining interviews while working as
a jeweler in Columbus, Ga., not far from the military base where he was
court-martialed and convicted in 1971.

A junior-college dropout from South Florida, he had bounced around jobs,
unsuccessfully trying to enlist in the Army in 1964, before being called up two
years later. As the war escalated in Vietnam, he found a home in a military that
was desperately trying to replenish its lower ranks.

Mr. Calley was quickly tapped to become a junior officer, with minimal vetting,
and was soon promoted to second lieutenant, commanding a platoon in Charlie
Company, a unit of the Army’s Americal Division. The company sustained heavy
losses in the early months of 1968, losing men to sniper fire, land mines and
booby traps as the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong launched coordinated attacks
in the Tet Offensive.

On the morning of March 16, 1968, the unit was airlifted by helicopter to Son
My, a patchwork village of rice paddies, irrigation ditches and small
settlements, including a hamlet known to U.S. soldiers as My Lai 4. Over the
next few hours, Mr. Calley and other soldiers in Charlie Company shot and
bayoneted women, children and elderly men, destroying the village while
searching for Viet Cong guerrillas and sympathizers who were said to have been
hiding in the area. Homes were burned, and some women and girls were gang-raped
before being killed.

An Army investigation later concluded that 347 men, women and children had been
killed, including victims of another American unit, Bravo Company. A Vietnamese
estimate placed the death toll at 504.

For more than a year and a half, the details of the atrocity were hidden and
covered up from the public. A report to headquarters initially characterized the
attack as a significant victory, claiming that 128 “enemy” fighters had been
killed. Gen. William C. Westmoreland, the top commander in Vietnam, praised
American forces at My Lai for dealing a “heavy blow” to the Viet Cong.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2024/07/29/william-calley-dead-my-lai-massacre/

Everyone in the chain of command from Westmoreland down to Medina and Calley
should have gone to prison for life.