GAINESVILLE, Florida — William L. Calley Jr., who as an Army lieutenant commanded the American soldiers who killed hundreds of Vietnamese civilians in the My Lai massacrethe most notorious war crime in modern American military history, has died. He was 80.
Calley died April 28 at a hospice center in Gainesville, Florida, The Washington Post reported Monday, citing his death certificate. The Florida Department of Health in Alachua County did not immediately respond to requests from the Associated Press for confirmation.
Calley had lived in obscurity for decades since his 1971 court-martial and conviction, the only one of the 25 men originally charged to be found guilty of the Vietnam War massacre.
On March 16, 1968, Calley led American soldiers from Charlie Company on a mission to confront an elite unit of their Viet Cong enemies. Instead, in a matter of hours, the soldiers killed 504 unarmed civilians, mostly women, children, and elderly men, in My Lai and a neighboring community.
The men were angry: two days earlier, a sergeant had been killed, a soldier blinded, and several others wounded in a booby trap while Charlie Company was on patrol.
Soldiers eventually testified before the U.S. Army Board of Inquiry that the killings began shortly after Charlie Company’s first platoon led into My Lai that morning. Some were bayoneted to death. Families were herded into bomb shelters and killed with hand grenades. Other civilians were slaughtered in a drainage ditch. Women and girls were gang-raped.
It wasn’t until more than a year later that news of the massacre became public. And while the My Lai massacre was the most notorious massacre in modern American military history, it was no aberration: estimates of civilian deaths during the U.S. ground war in Vietnam from 1965 to 1973 range from 1 million to 2 million.
The U.S. military’s own files, kept for three decades, detailed 300 other cases of what could reasonably be described as war crimes. My Lai stood out for its shocking death toll in a single day, its stomach-turning photographs, and the gruesome details uncovered by a high-level U.S. military investigation.
Calley was convicted in 1971 of killing 22 people in the massacre. He was sentenced to life in prison, but served only three days because President Richard Nixon ordered his sentence reduced. He served three years of house arrest.
After his release, Calley remained in Columbus, working in his father-in-law’s jewelry store. He then moved to Atlanta, where he avoided publicity and consistently declined journalists’ requests for interviews.
Calley broke his silence in 2009, at the urging of a friend, when he spoke to the Kiwanis Club in Columbus, Georgianear Fort Benning, where he had been court-martialed.
“There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t regret what happened that day in My Lai,” Calley said, according to a report of the meeting reported by the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer. “I’m sorry for the Vietnamese who were killed, for their families, for the American soldiers involved and their families. I’m so sorry.”
He said his mistake was following orders, which he had defended when he was tried. His superior was acquitted.
William George Eckhardt, the lead prosecutor in the My Lai cases, said he was unaware that Calley had ever apologized before that 2009 appearance.
“It’s hard to apologize for killing so many people,” Eckhardt said. “But at least there’s an admission of responsibility.”