William Calley, of My Lai, dead

July 29, 2024 8:59 PM

Calley was the only person convicted in the Vietnam War massacre. Obit
posted by NotLost (41 comments total)

End of an era.
posted by ovvl at 9:00 PM on July 29

Violence in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas summarizes Hunter Thompson's novel, including its two mentions of Lt. Calley.
posted by Rash at 9:13 PM on July 29 [5 favorites]

Calley by the Dog Faced Hermans
posted by kokaku at 9:24 PM on July 29 [3 favorites]

I took a university course on the Vietnam War and we had one section My Lai, first topic was Calley. My teacher who served in the Korean War said:
it's not so much the question would you follow a man into battle who could not read a compass or whether you would disobey or obey and indirect or order to murder or the courage to not commit a war crime and suffer the consequences.
It's the blind realization that you've become the enemy to your enemy and yourself and your country will do whatever it can to justify killing in the name of liberation.
posted by clavdivs at 9:36 PM on July 29 [9 favorites]

I’ll take this as a cue to think about Hugh Thompson Jr.
posted by house-goblin at 9:54 PM on July 29 [31 favorites]

The Washington Post has a long obituary focused on his warcrimes, as does the NY Times (both ungated).
posted by Rumple at 10:00 PM on July 29 [3 favorites]

That WaPo link is gated for me, and is mistakenly repeated in the NYT href. Here is the NYT obit, which does not appear to be paywalled. Also, from their archives, here is the NYT article from March 1971 when he was found guilty.
posted by intermod at 10:05 PM on July 29 [1 favorite]

https://www.nytimes.com/1971/04/04/archives/gallup-finds-79-disapprove-of-verdict.html

Do you disapprove of the verdict because you think what happened at Mylai was not a crime or because you think others beside Lieutenant Calley share the responsibility for what happened? (Figures based on those who disapprove of the Calley verdict.)

Twenty percent say not a crime

~20% of this country have never had their heads on straight
posted by torokunai at 10:16 PM on July 29 [8 favorites]

Calley’s friends in the officer corps at Fort Benning, many of them West Point graduates, are indignant. However, knowing the high stakes of the case, they express their outrage in private.

“They’re using this as a Goddamned example,” one officer complained. “He’s a good soldier. He followed orders.”

Milgram experiment
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 11:00 PM on July 29 [1 favorite]

reminded me of what we did in vietnam, in current affairs a few years ago:

"It essentially says “Well of course, everybody knows there was an atmosphere of atrocity in which commanders swept war crimes under the rug, and that the only thing unusual about My Lai was its scale.” That may be the consensus among serious scholars of the war, but it’s not the dominant American perception, and My Lai is often seen as a kind of “exception that proves the rule.”"

(uhm content warning on that link: it's the sort of article where the author needs to say "I am not sure how much detail to go into on how this horror unfolded on the ground.")
posted by busted_crayons at 2:08 AM on July 30 [11 favorites]

Erik Loomis at Lawyers, Guns, and Money has a long-ish article about Calley’s life and crimes, balancing his culpability with that of the military and civilian structures that enabled him. He does a good job of describing how, while Calley was clearly made and directed by the US military, others in his unit took deliberate action to not kill and even protect civilians, Calley could have done differently.
posted by GenjiandProust at 3:48 AM on July 30 [12 favorites]

You can see why people so desperately want to believe in the existence of an afterlife and Hell after reading about the actions of people like Calley.
posted by lalochezia at 3:59 AM on July 30 [1 favorite]

When I was an infantry officer in training in Columbus GA in the early 90s, Calley was working in a jewelry store nearby. We all knew what he had done and where he worked and stopped in the parking lot to look at him through the window. He looked like everyone else.
posted by procrastination at 4:04 AM on July 30 [10 favorites]

No dots for mass murderers.

Many things went wrong en route to the massacre and afterwards, and Calley is not to blame for the malfeasance, calumny, and deception that followed, but he was a convicted mass murderer. War is Hell, and terrible things happen in wartime, but, again, Calley committed an atrocity. Most of us will, thankfully, never be in the position to have to make the choice he made, but he made the wrong one.
posted by cupcakeninja at 4:30 AM on July 30 [9 favorites]

busted_crayons, thank you for sharing the article What We Did In Vietnam.

> The evidence is very clear that United States forces committed major atrocities, including the widespread use of chemical weapons on civilians, routine violations of the laws of war and the rules of engagement, and the dehumanization and terrorization of ordinary Vietnamese people. Yet there has been much less national reflection on these outrages than on My Lai, the one event that can be most easily classified as an aberration. Perversely, [...] My Lai has actually managed to make Americans feel better about themselves rather than worse, by convincing them that the massacre was the crime rather than the war.
posted by are-coral-made at 5:19 AM on July 30 [11 favorites]

Bluesky thread on Thompson by MeFi's own garius
posted by Pallas Athena at 6:06 AM on July 30 [6 favorites]

~20% of this country have never had their heads on straight.

Look into the number that thought murdering unarmed kids at Kent State was perfectly OK. Somewhere around 40-50% of every US generation is at least sympathetic to fascism, I think.
posted by ryanshepard at 6:56 AM on July 30 [4 favorites]

Calley being convicted is justice, Calley being the only one convicted is fuct.

No dot for mass murders, indeed.
posted by Frayed Knot at 7:38 AM on July 30 [11 favorites]

The My Lai Massacre had such an impact on me and my political, social and personal views of governments. Such a dark, dark time.
posted by bluesky43 at 8:32 AM on July 30 [5 favorites]

This is your regular reminder that the widely revered Colin Powell launched his career by participating in the coverup of the My Lai massacre.
posted by Carcosa at 8:38 AM on July 30 [29 favorites]

Thank you for the Hugh Thompson Jr. pointer, house-goblin. In 1999 and 2001 I co-taught a college class on the American war in Vietnam, and several people contacted me to support getting Thompson more recognition.

There's so much going on with this story: the rottenness of the Americal division; Calley's direction; Thompson's epic heroism. Americans supporting Calley and his vanishing into civilian life. The trial for murdering "Oriental persons." Tim O'Brien's novel and Seymour Hersh's dogged reporting.
posted by doctornemo at 8:42 AM on July 30 [3 favorites]

Yes, no dots for mass murderers (even if his being the only convicted one was an injustice--not to him, but to the victims), but when talking about the system that produced him, let us focus on Hugh Thompson Jr., who threatened to fire on his own troops to get them to stop.

Oblivion is too good for Calley.
posted by praemunire at 8:47 AM on July 30 [6 favorites]

Calley is another perfect example of the banlaity of evil and the overwhelming rage of being confused, certain, angry at pointless death and the meat grinder mixed with a feeling of helplessness while being armed to the teeth. The path to horrendus individual/small unit actions is terrifyingly visible in terms of conditioning, culture and situation.

The coverup is so predictable as to be horribly expected. The system, any system, will do damage control after the fact rather than before even when the results are obvious. (This is what happens when you inculcate, as all armies do, the idea that the enemy isn't human)

But, Calley shouldn't have been the only one to be brought to justice (as little as it was).

I know in my bones I wouldn't have been Hugh Thompson, as much as I would like to think I would. I fear that steeping in that toxic stupid soup would have pushed me out of what I believe would do - being one of the "good guys" getting people away.
posted by drewbage1847 at 9:40 AM on July 30 [4 favorites]

Came here to say that about Colin Powell and to draw the line between our failure as Americans to do anything beyond convicting the one man over My Lai and Powell's later involvement in the Iraq war. In terms of "my country, right or wrong," etc. this was one of the things we did not put right.
posted by gentlyepigrams at 9:46 AM on July 30 [3 favorites]

It’s about damn time. The US really ceded the moral high ground in war during Viet Nam, and My Lai is a prime example. There was actually a top-40 song defending him, The Battle Hymn of lt. Calley.
posted by TedW at 9:48 AM on July 30 [1 favorite]

The whole thing still makes me sick to my stomach. I was too young to know the goings-on of the trial and subsequent appeals etc. but learned about it in a niche history/psychology class in my high school less than twenty years after it happened. Nobody in the class had heard a thing about the atrocity.

And thank you for that article, busted_crayons. I am just now realizing that at some point my brain scrambled the helicopter pilot whistleblower with some stories about what a friend's dad (an army colonel) witnessed AND a famous scene in Apocalypse Now. Jesus.
posted by queensissy at 9:50 AM on July 30 [4 favorites]

Okay, so intel tells you that this village has VC disguised as civilians. Cool. You get there and it doesn't seem to be the case, so maybe, just maybe, you detain the adults until you can verify. Maybe, if you've lost your humanity, you murder the adults out of fear because you have been conditioned to see the bad guy everywhere. But rape? Murder of children? There's absolutely nothing you can do to justify that EVEN if the VC were there in droves? Like the level of sick fuck you have to be to go along with an order that says rape the women and murder them and the kids? Nope, not a single dot for you or anyone who gave or followed those orders.
posted by teleri025 at 10:01 AM on July 30 [4 favorites]

> "my country, right or wrong"

That whole mini-brouhaha regarding that prime Thought-Terminating Cliche in the 19th century was prompted by a reasonably*-decent German-American (one of the typical old-school Liberal Germans who fled the continent after the failed revolutions of 1848), Carl Schurz.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/my_country,_right_or_wrong

says the Senator realigned this saying to: “My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right.”

Fortunately this is not entirely a Liberal vs. Conservative fight:

“‘My country, right or wrong,’ is a thing that no patriot would think of saying. It is like saying, ‘My mother, drunk or sober.’” — G. K. Chesterton

*As Secretary of the Interior his Indian Affairs policies could have been more enlightened perhaps . . . at any rate one of the few Good Republicans in that Pantheon I guess
posted by torokunai at 10:09 AM on July 30 [3 favorites]

One tin soldier rides away.
posted by SPrintF at 10:12 AM on July 30 [8 favorites]

Lt. Calley, passed on to the next court.
posted by corb at 11:26 AM on July 30 [5 favorites]

Any mention of his name always takes me back to my formative years when at one point my brothers and I had a babysitter - an "old" scowling woman with resting bitch face and a nasty disposition who was ever eager to dish out some kind of corporal punishment - whose name was Calli. I must have been nine, we called her Lieutenant Calli.

Also, kinda shocked to see no mention of the audacity of criminal Nixon's intervention on his behalf, sparing him from his life sentence.
posted by thecincinnatikid at 11:42 AM on July 30 [4 favorites]

Another gender-neutral toilet facility soon to come.
posted by adrienneleigh at 12:06 PM on July 30 [3 favorites]

Another good Vietnam-commentary is In The Year Of The Pig; it's a sort of found-footage documentary, a collection of newsreels and foreign-press interviews, starting from the late 1940s up through the French "War in Indochina" up through 1969. It's bad enough that people like Calley were "good soldiers who followed orders" - it's worse that the people giving those orders had no idea what the fuck they were doing.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 12:26 PM on July 30 [1 favorite]

I remember it. My brother was a pilot in Viet Nam. My other brother was resisting the draft. The coverage of My Lai helped turn the tide against a war that had an active draft and was killing a lot of people. The idea was to fight communism, didn't work then, hasn't worked anywhere, as far as I know. When people talk about Just War, as they sometimes do, My Lai should be brought up.

My brother the pilot was wounded and survived, I wonder if his death from cancer is related to Agent Orange. MY draft resisting brother got arrested but the case was dropped on a technicality because the war was increasingly unpopular. Dinner table discussion was seldom dull.

The Trumprs and their flags and their USA, No Matter What do not study history.
posted by theora55 at 1:14 PM on July 30 [2 favorites]

I'm an old crone so I lived through this shame and horror. I posted about this once for anyone interested in the topic - surprisingly some of the links are still valid: Massacre at Pinkville.

I recently visited Viet Nam for 3 weeks. My niece was going and I asked if I could join her. I didn't do a lot of war rehashing in my mind before the trip, but I have been somewhat obsessed since. In fact, I was just reading about My Lai last week and made a mental note to look up Calley, Medina, and some of the other principals - so this post was timely, thanks NotLost.

The Viet Nam war was the backdrop to my high school, college, and early adult years. I didn't have anyone close to me who died there, but count many who were profoundly psychologically wounded among friends and relatives.

It was wonderful to see such a thriving country today and experience how resilient, kind, welcoming, and generous the Vietnamese people are. I visited several of the war museums, which had me weepy to see the horrors we inflicted on the Vietnamese people and what we put our own young men through. One elderly local man took my elbow and said, "don't be sad anymore, it was a long time ago." I wasn't the only weepy westerner in the war museums - there were many men from my age group who were very moved.

I didn't go there to be a war tourist, I had a lovely trip through a beautiful country and met some wonderful people. But my heart felt so much lighter when I left.
posted by madamjujujive at 1:18 PM on July 30 [11 favorites]

I remember reading an interview with Noam Chomsky about the Mai Lai massacre, twenty or so years ago (the reading; I don’t remember the date of the interview). I can’t find the quotation now but in reference to the helicopter pilots and potentially countless other massacres which were not prevented, Chomsky says something like, “a system in which people have to take heroic action just to function normally is doomed to fail.”

This line has haunted me.
posted by gauche at 2:04 PM on July 30 [9 favorites]

From Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland:

On April 1 Nixon made the call to Admiral Thomas Moorer of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (“That’s the one place where they say, ‘Yes, sir,’ instead of ‘Yes, but'”). The House of Representatives broke out in spontaneous applause at the news. And a man convicted by fellow army officers of slaughtering twenty-two civilians was released on his own recognizance to the splendiferous bachelor pad he had rented with the proceeds of his defense fund, as featured in the November 1970 Esquire, complete with padded bar, groovy paintings, and comely girlfriend, who along with a personal secretary and a mechanical letter-opener helped him answer some two thousand fan letters a day.”

And here’s the blistering letter that Capt. Aubrey Daniel, lead prosecutor in the Calley court-martial, sent to Nixon in response.
posted by non canadian guy at 3:18 PM on July 30 [9 favorites]

All this talk about My Lai here, made me remember an image on a magazine cover from the past, when Alfred E. Neumann was the model for Calley. Mad magazine artist, but not on Mad.
posted by njohnson23 at 5:52 PM on July 30 [4 favorites]

The Viet Nam war was the backdrop to my high school, college, and early adult years. I didn't have anyone close to me who died there, but count many who were profoundly psychologically wounded among friends and relatives.

Same here, madamjujujive. The war was omnipresent for many, or at least the lists of dead soldiers at the height of the war. I don't recall much of anything being reported at the time about dead Vietnamese, unless it was supposedly done by the VC. But it was already mostly a political issue-you took sides about the war, but unless you or someone in your family was drafted, it didn't have day to day effects on families, not like, say, World War II.

I grew up near Cleveland, where the local newspaper, the Plain Dealer, was one of the first to report on this massacre. The "my country right or wrong" or "love it or leave it" crowd would first find ways to doubt the reporting, or treat the massacre as an aberration and then rear their ugly heads again two years later with the Kent State killings, and anti-war protests were usually attributed to those commies at nearby Oberlin College. The fact that a local kid, Bill Schroeder, would be one of the Kent State victims was of little consequence to those convinced the US government and military could do no wrong. People cheered Nixon and the asshole governor, Jim Rhodes, who sent the National Guard* to Kent State. And honestly, the worship of the military and law enforcement has only gotten worse amongst many of these people.

*My father was a member of another National Guard unit who was on alert for Kent State that weekend.
posted by etaoin at 8:35 PM on July 30 [3 favorites]

etaoin, Kent State was an unthinkable event to occur! Protesting students being gunned down! A little more than a week after that, police killed demonstrators on the Jackson State campus, too.

It must’ve been stressful for your dad, too! Tons of people who chose the National Guard did so just to avoid the draft.
posted by madamjujujive at 3:48 AM on July 31 [1 favorite]

In 1999 and 2001 I co-taught a college class on the American war in Vietnam, and several people contacted me to support getting Thompson more recognition.
When I try to think about the many reasons Hugh Thompson should be more well known, I get a mental block for the ages (wink to Kokaku). Glad to hear about others wanting the same thing.

Ironically enough, and I may be wrong, but I think even broken_crayon’s link got it wrong about Hugh Thompson. While he was the heli pilot who intervened to stop the massacre, I believe it was heli pilot Ron Ridenhour (who wasn’t there but heard about it, gathered evidence, and ultimately got the investigation going) who got vilified.

Anyhow, if anybody read that article and thought they needed a more Vietnamese perspective on the Vietnamese War, I recommend Bao Ninh’s The Sorrow of War and Dang Thuy Tram’s Last Night I Dreamed of Peace.

I also notice the dates you taught your course were just a few years shy of when the Toledo Blade did their series on the war crimes of Tiger Force, which seems like something you would have covered.

Finally, here comes an anecdote for the Madam and etaoin. I was once fortunate enough to meet an older guy who I learned had been active in protesting the war. When I asked him about the stories of vets getting spat upon, he told me he never saw or heard about anything like that, that far as he knew the policy was to reach out to the vets, that they wanted their support, that he was never more proud than when he marched behind the vets, and that what he did see was vets, marching for peace, getting the living shit absolutely beat out of them by cops.
posted by house-goblin at 7:40 PM on July 31 [6 favorites]