US Army Officer Convicted for Role in Vietnam's My Lai Massacre Dead at 80

Facts

• The Washington Post broke the news this week that US Army Lt. William L. Calley Jr., the only American convicted in connection with the Vietnam War's My Lai massacre in 1968, died on April 28 at a hospice in Gainesville, Fla., at the age of 80.^[1]
• This comes as the outlet obtained a copy of his death certificate from the Florida Department of Health, after Harvard Law School graduate Zachary Woodward noticed the then unreported death while looking through public records.^[2]
• On March 16, 1968, Calley led Charlie Company's first platoon into My Lai on a mission to confront Viet Cong fighters; it ended in the most notorious massacre in US modern history, as soldiers killed 504 unresisting civilians, mostly women, children, and elderly men.^[3]
• The US Army court-martialed Calley with six specifications of premeditated murder for the death of 109 civilians in 1969, but the incident only became public a year later, thanks to Seymour Hersh's Pulitzer-winning report in the New Yorker.^[4][5]
• He was sentenced to life in prison in 1971 for killing 22 civilians, but served only three days in jail, as then-Pres. Richard Nixon intervened to reduce his sentence to house arrest. Calley was released on parole after three and a half years.^[5][6]
• In 2009, he broke his decades-long silence in a meeting of the Kiwanis Club of Greater Columbus, near the military base where he was court-martialed, saying that he felt 'remorse for what happened that day in My Lai' in an extraordinary public apology.^[7]

Sources: ^[1]New York Times, ^[2]Washington Post, ^[3]ABC News, ^[4]New York Post, ^[5]BBC News, ^[6]CNN and ^[7]NBC.

Narratives

• Narrative A, as provided by Military.com. Lt. Calley spent most of his life being demonized as a war criminal, becoming one of the most infamous US Army officers ever due to his role in the shameful My Lai massacre. In retrospect, however, it's clear that he was merely a scapegoat — just another officer that had been told by his superiors to raze the village and kill anything that moved.
• Narrative B, as provided by Reason.com. The now-deceased Lt. Calley became a perverse kind of folk hero for many due to his actions in My Lai, with most Americans opposing a life sentence for him despite agreeing his killing of civilians was wrong. He may have acted under the orders of his superiors, but that doesn't make him less of a war criminal — he even rejected calls to stop the massacre.