A Quiet Death and the Memory of Many Violent Deaths it Stirred Up

The first notices of the death in Gainesville, Florida of William L. Calley, formerly First Lieutenant of the US army, began to appear only late in July, 2024. By then Calley had been dead for three months. The Washington Post, which happened to carry the first obit, reported on July 29 that it had been “alerted to the death,…not previously reported, by…a recent Harvard Law School graduate, who said he noticed Mr Calley’s death while looking through public records”. 

Knowing that Calley was a disgraced former officer convicted in 1970 of war crimes, one would think that such invisibleness was not surprising. But consider this: a firestorm of protest against Calley’s conviction had swept through much of US for several weeks; governors of the states of Indiana, Utah and Mississipi denounced the conviction; Georgia governor (and future president) Jimmy Carter, a Democrat, called it “a blow to troop morale” and ordered all government flags flown at half mast; legislatures in Arkansas, Texas, New Jersey, Kansas and South Carolina passed motions calling for clemency for Calley; and governor George Wallace of Alabama, like Carter a Democrat, pleaded for a presidential pardon. The outpouring of support for Calley was so massive that a Terry Nelson song (“Battle Hymn of Lt Calley”) marking Calley’s conviction became wildly popular, the disc soon selling more than a million copies. Calley’s original sentence by a military court– a life term with hard labour – was soon whittled down first to 20 years, then to 10.

Eventually he was paroled after only three years. Of those three years, again, Calley spent precisely three days in prison, thanks to President Nixon’s swift intervention after the sentencing: Nixon decided that keeping Calley behind the bars was unnecessary (presumably also unfair), and that house arrest would meet the ends of justice just as well. Calley later married, raised a family, and managed his father-in-law’s jewelry business successfully. He died on 28 April 2024 aged 80. Except by way of a brief and somewhat ambivalent message he delivered at a club in Columbus in 2009, Calley altogether avoided talking about, much less express regret for, the ghastly crime of which he had been convicted: his role in the abomination that was the My Lai massacre.                    

March 16, 1968 was a balmy mid-spring day in My Lai (pronounced ‘ mee LAI), an inland village of about 700 inhabitants lying halfway up the east coast of what then was South Vietnam. By 8 in the morning, most able-bodied men of the hamlet had gone out to work, women were cooking their rice breakfast on open fires outside the huts, older men were lazing about, and  children were frisking around courtyards. It was a day almost like any other  – except that, at that point, about 100 infrantymen of the C company, attached to Task Force Barker of the 11th Brigade of US army’s Americal Division, entered the scene. Everything was to change inexorably from then on.

The Tet Offensive of January-February 1968 had stunned the US and its client South Vietnamese state and left the American political leadership mighty nervous. General Westmoreland, commander of the US army in Vietnam, requisitioned nearly a quarter million fresh American boots on the ground. Despite escalating resistance against the war across the US, Westmoreland also doubled down on his policy of attrition. His strategy consisted of using humongous fire-power (both artillery and from the air) on a largely rural country and a high enemy ‘body count’. The body counts were regulary and triumphantly touted as progress towards the US’ war objectives. Soon, numbers were being fudged across all fronts and ‘progress’  loudly claimed. The really dreadful aspect of this policy, however, was the inevitable blurring of the line between military and civilian casualties, and soon civilian deaths became indistinguishable from combatant deaths. Atrocities on unarmed, unresisting civilian communities swiftly spread across South Vietnam. American soldiers were known to joke about how “Anyone dead but not white is a VC”.  VC, or Viet Cong, was how Americans and their South Vietnamese flunkies derisively referred to the National Liberation Front(NLF), whose guerrilla army was waging one of the most heroic, and unequal, battles in recorded history.

For context, US army aircraft dropped over 7 million tonnes of bombs on Vietnam during 1965-75, the largest bombardment of any country in history, and more than twice the total tonnage  Allied air forces dropped across all theatres of war in World War II. A 1995 estimate released by Vietnamese authorities put civilian deaths in the Vietnam War at more than 2 million.                           

US army intelligence had alerted (wrongly, as it turned out) 11th Brigade leaders to a heavy presence of NLF fighters in and around My Lai in March 1968. The mission planned for the 11th Brigade’s C company was to search for and destroy those NLF guerrilas on that fateful day. “Destroy anything that is walking, crawling or growling”, Captain Edwin Medina, who led the C Company on the mission, was later reported to have told his troops in his pre-mission briefing. ‘‘Asked if that included women and children’’, the Washington Post wrote in its Calley obit on July 29, 2024, Medina replied that ‘‘according to military intelligence, ordinary villagers should be at a nearby market’’ at the material time and ‘’anyone left behind was either a guerrilla or a sympathiser’’. ‘’They’re all VC, now go and get them’’, was Medina’s snap advice as he closed the briefing.

With those words ringing in their ears, 3 platoons of the C Company descended on My Lai, expecting to run into stiff resistance. When, instead, they encountered a peaceful rural community getting ready for breakfast, they thought it was a trap laid just for them. Fanning out among the huts and trees, the men in Lt Calley’s platoon searched for ‘VC’ fighters, and unable to locate any, threw grenades into some huts anyway to blow them apart, shooting anyone who rushed out to save themselves. An elderly man who remonstrated was dumped into a well and a grenade hurled after him to blow him to pieces. Another man was bayoneted when he shrieked. Next Calley herded children, women – some of whom cradled babies – and sick men into groups and shoved these groups towards an irrigation ditch bordering the village. He then ordered his men to shoot them. A few soldiers hesitated, a few refused – whereafter Calley  himself and Private Paul Meadlo began shooting directly into the ditch from a mere seven or eight feet away. When a four-year-old child, somehow left unharmed, extricated itself from the bleeding mass of bodies and began to run, Calley pulled it back, threw it back into the ditch, and shot through its head.  

The carnage went on for about four hours. Scores of women were raped and mutilated, huts and brick houses were burnt to the ground as were barns and grain-stores, all livestock destroyed, and every well in the village was poisoned. When the victors sat down to lunch  not far from where the dead and the dying lay in heaps, it was around 11.30. In all, 504 Vietnamese civilians, many more women and children than men, had been massacred. One eye-witness, an American soldier, later testified at Calley’s trial that he didn’t “remember seeing one military-age male in the entire place, dead or alive”.

Mission over, the C Company duly reported on ‘the liquidation of 128 VC combatants and the capture of 3 enemy weapons’. Brigade and Division headquarters cheerfully spread word about the ‘successful’ mission. There was, it is true, just a hint of embarrassment over the pitifully thin arms cache recovered (128 VC dead and a mere 3 weapons) – but, all in all, it seemed God was in his heaven and all was right with the world. 

Or was it? Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson, a helicopter pilot from Company B of the Americal Division’s Aviation Battalion, had been detailed to provide close-air support to the ground operations at My Lai that day. As he circled overhead, Thompson and his crew saw what they thought was a large number of dead and wounded civilians strewn across the village. Shocked, Thompson landed his helicoper near a ditch to investigate, and witnessed chilling scenes of   survivors, howling in pain, being repeatedly shot through their heads and an unarmed woman being kicked and shot dead at point-blank range. Several civilians holed up in a bunker were about to be flushed out by some grenade-wielding US soldiers, when Thompson, by now at the end of his tether, stepped in. Calling out to his men to shoot at the soldiers if they prevented him from getting the trapped villagers out of the bunker, Thompson went inside, coaxed between 12 and 16 cowering civilians out, and made sure they were flown out to safety. His men later reached a few injured survivors to an army medical facility. After returning to base later in the day, he reported the massacre to his superiors. By then, the killing spree at My Lai was over. 

Thompson’s report was escalated to eventually reach the Divisional commander, and possibly also General Westmoreland, but everyone in the chain of command did their best to kill it. The official report stuck with the ‘successful mission’ narrative faithfully, and that was the story that reached Washington. William Calley was promoted to first lieutenant and awarded a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart. It looked as though the coverup had been accomplished with elan.

The man to throw a spanner in the works was Ronald Ridenhour, a helicopter gunner from Phoenix, Arizona,  who, though he was not at My Lai that day, soon heard about the atrocities, made his own enquiries, and was outraged by what he discovered. Choosing to bide his time till his discharge a year later, he wrote a detailed letter about the atrocities in March 1969 and sent it to President Nixon, the Pentagon, the State Department, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and many Congressmen and Senators. Most recipients simply ignored the letter, but Morris Udall, the Democratic Congressman from Arizona, pushed hard for a full-scale investigation of Ridenhour’s allegations. The coverup began to unravel at that point.

The Pentagon was obliged to set up a review panel ‘to look into the My Lai’ incident’ under the stewardship of Lt General William Peers, a 3-star general who had spent more than two years in Vietnam. Over a 4-month period, the Peers Commission diligently examined 398 witnesses ranging from General Koster, the commander of the Americal Division, to the Gis of the C Company, and accumulated twenty thousand pages of testimony and more than 500 explanatory/supporting documents. It then recommended framing of charges against a total of 26 armymen (16 of them officers, including General Koster) for a wide range of crimes including the killing of unarmed civilians, mendacious and misleading reporting of facts, and dereliction of duty including conducting clearly inadequate investigation of serious misdemeanour. Incredibly, however, the charges against most of the accused were dropped by the Pentagon, to General Peers’ consternation (he called it a ‘whitewash’), and the only officer to be seriously tried by a military court was Lt Calley. 

While the Peers investigation was proceeding in camera, ordinary Americans and the world outside got their first hints of what had happened at My Lai thanks to the labours of the intrepid freelance journalist Seymour Hersh who had been tipped off by an anti-war activist. Hersh’s meticulous reports were based on his own extensive interviews covering a large number of army personnel who were either involved in My Lai or had knowledge about it. Hersh’s extraordinarily detailed reporting became cover stories in both Time and Newsweek. After that, the My Lai massacre burst into the open. And as much as it tried, the Nixon administration now found it hard to pretend that My Lai was ‘an unfortunate aberration’.

We have already gone over the melancholy story of how Calley’s sentencing turned into a charade, how what was to be a hard-labour life term metamorphosed into just three years under house arrest. Perhaps the person most affected by this travesty was Aubrey Daniel, the young military counsel who was the lead prosecutor in the Calley case. Daniel worked long and hard on building  an iron-clad case against Calley. He marshalled his witnesses masterfully, and presented the court with a staggeringly large body of evidence of the criminality of Calley’s actions at My Lai. His summing-up was delivered with great eloquence and passion, obliging the jury – comprising six senior military officers – to return a verdict of guilty on all counts in a rare instance of armymen unequivocally ruling against one of their own. The steady watering down of the sentence in the following months deeply saddened Daniel, but Nixon’s intervention in granting Calley exemption from incarceration was the last straw. In April 1970, Daniel shot off a scathing letter to the President which, in part, read as follows:

“…Your intervention has, in my opinion, damaged the military judicial system and lessened any respect it may have gained as a result of the proceedings (in the Calley case).

“I would expect that the President of the United States, a man I believed should and would provide the moral leadership of the nation, would stand fully behind the law of this land on a moral issue which is so clear and about which there can be no compromise…

“…(T)he greatest tragedy of all will be if political expediency dictates the compromise of such a fundamental moral principle as the inherent unlawfulness of the murder of innocent persons…”

Daniel threw up his job as an army counsel soon after this episode. Two weeks after the Calley verdict became public, a Harris Poll reported that, for the first time, a majority of Americans opposed the war in Vietnam. 

Anjan Basu can be reached at basuanjan52@gmail.com.