William Calley, the only US officer who was convicted in the My Lai massacre, has died, according to reports in popular outlets, citing official death records. He was 80 years old. He led the army platoon that carried out the mass murder of a Vietnamese village during the Vietnam War. Although 26 soldiers were charged for the massacre, only Calley was convicted.
William Calley’s death was first reported by the Washington Post. He died on April 28, according to records in Florida. Calley was convicted and given a life sentence years after the My Lai massacre. He served a three-and-a-half-year term under house arrest and barrack arrest after US President Richard Nixon commuted his prison sentence. His conviction polarized the nation as some considered him to be a scapegoat while others called him a war criminal.
William Calley married Penny Wick in 1976. She was the daughter of a jewelry store owner in Columbus, Georgia. They had a son named William Laws Calley III. The couple divorced in the mid-2000s.
On March 16, 1968, US troops conducted one of the worst war outrages when they moved into My Lai 4, a hamlet on the east coast of South Vietnam. 24-year-old Lieutenant Calley led the platoon of about 100 men of Charlie Company.
The Americans reportedly had ambiguous orders that the village might be Vietcong enemies. The Vietnamese say that about 500 women, children, and older men were killed by the American soldiers, ages from 1 year old to 82 years old.
The soldiers raped girls and women and mutilated bodies. They also killed livestock and burned the hamlet. Americans officially estimated the number killed to be 347.
The atrocity was covered up, and military reports described it as a search-and-destroy mission. However, an independent investigative journalist, Seymour Hersh, and a few soldiers unmasked the horrors of the mission by persistent probes. The journalist won a Pulitzer Prize.
William Calley was the only US officer to get convicted in November 1970, and his conviction was house arrest. In 2009, he offered an apology which read, “I feel remorse for the Vietnamese who were killed, for their families, for the American soldiers involved and their families. I am very sorry.”
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