William Rose Calley Jr., who as an Army lieutenant led U.S. soldiers who killed hundreds of Vietnamese civilians in the My Lai massacre, the most notorious war crime in modern U.S. military history, has died. He was 80 years old.
According to Florida death records, Carey died on April 28 and was living in an apartment in Gainesville.
His death was first reported Monday by The Washington Post, citing a death certificate.
Calley lived in obscurity for decades after being convicted at a military court in 1971. He was the only one of 25 people originally convicted in the massacre that transformed public opinion against the Vietnam War.
On March 16, 1968, Carrie led American soldiers from Charlie Company on a mission against elite Viet Cong forces.
Instead, over the course of several hours, the soldiers killed 504 unresisting civilians – mostly women, children and elderly – in My Lai and nearby areas.
The soldiers were angry: Two days earlier, a booby trap had been set during a Charlie Company patrol that had killed a sergeant, blinded one American, and wounded several others.
Soldiers eventually testified to a U.S. Army investigation committee that the killings began shortly after Carey led Charlie Company’s First Platoon into the village of My Lai that morning.
Some were bayoneted to death, families were herded into bomb shelters and killed with grenades, other civilians were massacred in drainage ditches, women and girls were gang-raped.
News of the massacre became public more than a year later. The My Lai massacre is the most notorious massacre in modern US military history, but it was not unusual. An estimated one to two million civilians were killed during the US ground war in Vietnam between 1965 and 1973.
The U.S. military’s own records, kept for 30 years, listed 300 other cases that could be considered war crimes.
The My Lai incident drew attention because of the shocking daily death toll figures, stomach-churning photographs and gory details revealed by an investigation by a senior US military official.
The investigation into the massacre and allegations of a Pentagon cover-up was launched following allegations by helicopter pilot Hugh Thompson Jr., who rescued 16 Vietnamese children from the village and later testified against Curry.
Many other soldiers at the scene spoke out after the scandal broke, with some saying civilian deaths were inevitable in a war where the enemy could be anywhere.
Critics say the attack should not have targeted just Curry, who is charged with killing 109 civilians.
“Culley didn’t kill the 109 men by himself. He had a whole company there,” said Herbert Carter, a soldier from Houston. “We went through a village. We didn’t see any Viet Cong. People would come out of their huts and the soldiers would shoot them and burn the huts. Or they would burn the huts and shoot the people who came out. … This went on all day. Some of them seemed to be having fun.”
Curry was convicted of killing 22 people during the riots in 1971. He was sentenced to life in prison, but only served three days in prison thanks to a commutation order from President Richard Nixon. He was under house arrest for three years.
Without offering an apology or even an admission of guilt, Curry reflected on the massacre’s legacy in an exclusive interview with The Associated Press as he awaits his sentence.
“I can’t be proud of being in My Lai or of taking part in the war, but I would be very proud if My Lai could show the world what war is and that the world must do something to stop it,” he said. “I hope that the incident in My Lai will be an eye-opener, not a tragedy…The incident in My Lai happens in every war, even in Vietnam, it’s not an isolated incident.”
After his release, Carrie married, worked in her father-in-law’s jewelry store in Columbus, Georgia, and had a son, before divorcing and moving to Atlanta, where she lived in hiding and regularly declined interview requests from journalists.
In 2009, at the urging of a friend, Carey broke his silence and spoke at the Kiwanis Club of Columbus, near Fort Benning, where he was facing a court-martial.
“Not a day goes by that I don’t feel remorse for what happened that day in My Lai,” Curry said, according to the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer. “I feel remorse for the Vietnamese who were killed, their families, the American soldiers who were involved and their families. I am truly sorry.”
He claimed he had made a mistake by following orders, and that was his defense at trial. His superiors were acquitted.
John Partin, an assistant prosecutor at the court-martial, learned of Curry’s death Tuesday through a call from an Associated Press reporter.
He recalled being disappointed with Nixon’s reaction to Calley’s conviction and rejected the idea that Calley had simply been made a scapegoat for failures of commander-in-chief decisions or U.S. policy.
“He, like other officers, claimed he was just following orders, but he was essentially acting on his own initiative,” Partin said. “His responsibility as an officer was not to follow illegal orders, but the orders they allegedly received were illegal.”
Partin said one of the most important outcomes of the My Lai massacre was the recognition that U.S. troops needed to be better trained on the rules of engagement and the legal ramifications of combat actions.
“It became the standard to provide better education to our troops,” he said.
In a 1976 interview with The Associated Press, the former Army colonel who presided over Currie’s court-martial said that although Currie thought he was doing the right thing in My Lai, he was still guilty and that others who knew about and were involved in the killings should also have been found guilty.
Carrie was born in South Florida on June 8, 1943, and as a child was nicknamed “Rusty” by friends.
He eventually dropped out of Palm Beach Junior College and worked as a dishwasher, a bellboy, a railroad switchman, a salesman and an insurance adjuster before enlisting in the Army in 1966.
During his time in the Army, Curry, who stood about 5 feet 3 inches tall and weighed about 120 pounds, didn’t stand out.
Fellow cadets told The Associated Press in 1969 that there was nothing wrong with him, but his military career had been going smoothly until the scandal erupted.
A few months after the massacre, he returned home and then returned to duty, eventually being wounded and earning a Purple Heart and two Bronze Star medals.
Dawn, who lived with her father in a trailer home in Hialeah, told reporters during the trial that her brother was a “kind, sensitive person.”
Messages left with his son and ex-wife on Tuesday were not immediately returned.
