THE NEW YORK TIMES – William L. Calley Jr., who as a young Army lieutenant during the Vietnam War was the only American convicted in the murder of hundreds of unarmed, unresisting Vietnamese civilians in the atrocity known as the My Lai Massacre, died on April 28 in Gainesville, Fla. He was 80.
His death, at a hospice, was confirmed on Monday night by Social Security Administration records. The cause was not publicly disclosed.
More than 56 years after the killings of as many as 500 women, children and older men by Americans who attacked with automatic weapons, grenades and bayonets; raped girls and women; mutilated bodies; killed livestock, and burned the village, My Lai (pronounced mee LYE) still reverberates as one of the worst outrages of a brutal and divisive war.
On the morning of March 16, 1968, Second Lieutenant Calley, a 24-year-old platoon leader who had been in Vietnam just three months, led about 100 men of Charlie Company into My Lai 4, an inland hamlet about halfway up the east coast of South Vietnam.
The Americans moved in under ambiguous orders, suggesting to some that anyone found in the hamlet, even women and children, might be Vietcong enemies.
“The soldiers are mostly silent, although Calley is talkative, saying that ‘gooks are gooks.'” – In the Lake of the Woods by Tim O’Brien
While they met no resistance, the Americans swept in shooting. Over the next few hours, horrors unfolded. Witnesses said victims were rousted from huts, herded into an irrigation ditch or the village center and shot.
Villagers who refused to come out were killed in their huts by hand grenades or bursts of gunfire. Others were shot as they emerged from hiding places. Infants and children were bayoneted and shot, and an unknown number of females were raped and shot. A military photographer took pictures.
Although Lieutenant Calley’s immediate superiors knew generally what had happened, the atrocity was covered up in military reports, which called it a successful search-and-destroy mission …
