Fannie Flono: Calley’s stunning apology, 41 years later
It’s been 41 years since the My Lai Massacre in Vietnam, 40 since Seymour Hersh’s reporting revealed to the world what happened. But I was still stunned to read that William Calley, the former Army lieutenant convicted on 22 counts of murder in the infamous massacre, spoke out on the matter and apologized.
“There is not a day that goes by that I do not feel remorse for what happened that day in My Lai,” Calley reportedly told members of the Kiwanis Club of Greater Columbus (Ga.) last month. Calley’s voice reportedly started to break when he added, “I feel remorse for the Vietnamese who were killed, for their families, for the American soldiers involved and their families. I am very sorry.”
Well, now.
A decade or so after My Lai, I sought out Calley in hopes of getting just such a confession. I was a cub reporter for the Columbus Ledger Enquirer — the same newspaper that finally got that admission from Calley — and in all my zealous righteousness felt compelled to confront the man who showed so little remorse for an act of unbelievable horror. He wouldn’t talk.
I tracked him to his Columbus home and the jewelry business where he worked for his father-in-law. He wouldn’t talk.
But talk he did to that Kiwanis group — and it turns out he’s been haunted by My Lai for the past four decades.
He continued to cling to his defense that he was following orders, acknowledging there was no armed resistance in the village but that he’d been warned if he left anyone behind his soldiers would be endangered.
So he gave the order to kill them all. More than 500 men, women, children and babies were herded into ditches and summarily executed.
Witnesses would later tell of bayoneting old men, shooting women and children in the back of their heads, raping young women and killing them afterward. One soldier told of a young child, no more than 3, who survived the initial bloodletting tucked beneath his mother. But as he climbed out of the ditch, Calley ordered him shot. When the soldier wouldn’t, Calley ran behind the child and calmly killed him.
The Kiwanis audience peppered him with questions. One asked if obeying an unlawful order was not itself an unlawful act? He replied, “I believe that is true. If you are asking why I did not stand up to them when I was given the orders, I will have to say that I was a second lieutenant getting orders from my commander and I followed them — foolishly, I guess.”
A government report later concluded that numerous soldiers had been involved in the unlawful slayings, and that 30 senior officers had been negligent in their duties. Fourteen of those officers were charged with crimes, but only Calley was convicted. He was sentenced to life but served three years of house arrest before President Nixon pardoned him.
Today, he lives in Atlanta with his son, who is doing doctoral work in electrical engineering at Georgia Tech.
Calley reportedly got a standing ovation from the Kiwanis audience. You probably won’t be surprised to hear that in Vietnam he’s viewed differently. One report from the Asia Times calls him a mass murderer akin to the recently freed Libyan sentenced in 2001 to 27 years in prison for the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Scotland.
I was in high school when My Lai happened, but I well remember the horror of the massacre and the somber seriousness of those Vietnam years. Friends and relatives agonized over their draft status. Some who went to war didn’t return. Many who came back, came back — different.
I admire those who serve in the military, especially during war time. They do heroic work.
But events like My Lai magnify the hell that war is. No one involved emerges unscathed. As Calley’s belated apology reminds us, many come home with the blood of innocents on their hands, and must live forever with the memories.
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ABOUT THE WRITER
Fannie Flono is a Charlotte Observer associate editor. Readers may send her e-mail at fflonocharlotteobserver.com.
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