William Calley dead at 80: The only person convicted over 1968 atrocity in which US troops killed hundreds of unarmed South Vietnamese died in a hospice
- American soldiers killed 504 people on March 16, 1968 during the My Lai massacre
William Calley, the only army officer convicted of the mass murder of Vietnamese civilians, including children, in the My Lai massacre, has died at the age of 80.
The Washington Post was first to report Calley’s death on Monday, which occurred in April, according to a death certificate the newspaper cited. The New York Times, citing death certificates from the Social Security Administration, also reported Calley’s death.
Neither newspaper reported a cause of death. Phone calls to the numbers listed for Calley’s son, William L. Calley III, were not returned.
American soldiers killed 504 people on March 16, 1968, in Son My, a cluster of hamlets between the central Vietnamese coast and a ridge of misty mountains, in an incident known in the West as the My Lai massacre. The killings shocked the United States and galvanized the antiwar movement.
Calley was initially charged by an Army court-martial with 102 counts of murder, but was sentenced to life in prison in 1971 for the murders of 22 civilians. He had been incarcerated for three days before then-President Richard Nixon released him to house arrest.
William Calley, pictured here in 1970, the only person convicted in connection with the mass murder of Vietnamese civilians in what became known as the My Lai massacre, has died at the age of 80
Despite being told that My Lai was a hotbed of communist National Liberation Front guerrillas, U.S. troops encountered no serious armed resistance and found few weapons, according to the Army Historical Foundation. Still, they killed nearly everyone there and raped women and girls.
Four soldiers were charged with involvement in the massacre, but only Calley was convicted.
Calley spent three years under house arrest in his apartment at Fort Benning, Georgia, where he was visited by his girlfriend, before being released and discharged from the Army.
Calley continued to insist he had merely followed orders and viewed himself as a scapegoat, becoming a lightning rod for a country deeply divided over the unpopular Vietnam War.
In later years, Calley, a successful businessman in Columbus, Georgia, refused to talk to reporters or historians about My Lai.
However, friends said he admitted to the acts he was accused of and had come to terms with them, and in 2009 he apologized publicly for the first time.
“There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t regret what happened that day in My Lai,” Calley told a Kiwanis club in Columbus, Ohio. “I’m sorry for the Vietnamese who were killed, for their families, for the American soldiers involved and their families. I’m so sorry.”
William Laws Calley Jr. was born on June 8, 1943, the only son and fourth child of a Miami businessman. He attended four high schools in four years, including two military academies. After failing junior college, he worked as a bellhop, dishwasher, insurance inspector and train conductor.
He went bankrupt in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in 1966, joined the Army and excelled. Despite a poor school record, Calley graduated from Officers’ Candidate School at Fort Benning, just one year before the My Lai incident.
After his discharge from the Army, Calley married Penny Vick in 1976 and went to work for her father in the jewelry store in Georgia, where he became a certified gemologist. They had one son and later divorced.