William Laws Calley Jr, the only person convicted over the notorious My Lai massacre by US soldiers during the Vietnam war, has died at the age of 80.
A lieutenant during the war, Calley was a member of Company C, which alongside his superior, Ernest Medina, he commanded during the search for Viet Cong combatants in the south Vietnamese village of My Lai and its neighbouring hamlets on 15 March 1968.
Without provocation, the unit massacred several hundred villagers, the majority of them women, elderly men and children.
On top of the killings, the soldiers committed acts of mutilation and rape, the youngest confirmed victim of which was 10 years old. Despite his later claims that he was only following orders, testimony from soldiers involved in the killings claim that Calley actively encouraged other soldiers to shoot villagers, and that he himself shot unarmed civilians, including children.
The atrocities only came to an end when an American helicopter crew led by Hugh Thompson, an army officer, intervened and threatened to shoot anyone who continued the violence. My Lai remains the largest killing of civilians by the US army in the 20th century.
Whilst internal investigations led to Calley and a handful of other officers being court martialed, the massacre initially went unreported and was largely covered up by the military until whistleblowing by another soldier, Ronald Ridenhour, and later reporting from the American journalist Seymour Hersh led to a public outcry.
Calley was the only officer found guilty. He was convicted for 22 murders and sentenced to life imprisonment, though he was transferred to house arrest after less than a week, following the intervention of the president, Richard Nixon. His sentence ultimately lasted only three and a half years before his full release.
Calley lived the rest of his life largely out of the spotlight, marrying and starting a family, and settling first in Columbus, Georgia, and then Gainesville, Florida. In a 2009 speech, Calley expressed regret for his role in the massacre, having previously shown no remorse in the years immediately following it.
Claiming that “not a day that goes by that I do not feel remorse for what happened that day in My Lai”, Calley said he was “very sorry” and that he felt empathy for both the Vietnamese civilians murdered and the American soldiers who killed them. The apology was described as “terse” by a survivor.
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The massacre marked a turning point in the Vietnam war for the US, sparking anger and disgust. It preceded a gradual and eventually full withdrawal of troops in a major blow to American standing during the cold war.