William L. Calley Jr., as a young U.S. Army lieutenant, became a central figure in the My Lai massacre, one of the most infamous incidents of the Vietnam War.
Then he largely disappeared from the public eye for decades. So much so that his death, in a Florida hospice center at age 80 in late April, wasn’t publicly reported until last week.
He quietly lived most of those intervening years in Georgia, some in midtown Atlanta but particularly in Columbus, near Fort Moore where he had been court-martialed and convicted of premeditated murder of Vietnamese civilians.
He had seemed “ordinary,” “quiet,” “respectful,” according to two Georgia attorneys who knew him some — one who represented him and another who prosecuted him for the massacre.
Not that Calley didn’t have some turmoil in his later life. He went through a divorce, filed for personal bankruptcy protection and dealt with health issues.
But Calley didn’t serve the life sentence with hard labor that a court-martial panel of six Army officers gave him for his crimes.
On March 16, 1968, in a cluster of hamlets in Vietnam, U.S. troops, who had been directed to search for Viet Cong fighters and destroy their resources, killed, often at close range, hundreds of civilians, mostly women, children and elderly men over a few hours.
Calley, then a young lieutenant who had been deployed to Vietnam only about three months earlier, ordered his men to kill unresisting, unarmed villagers. According to an appeals court record, Calley also repeatedly fired on detained civilians who were along a trail and others who were forced into a ditch, where they were killed as they knelt and squatted. He also was found guilty of murdering a man who appeared to be a monk and of trying to murder a child of about two years old who had attempted to flee, before Calley allegedly threw the child back into the ditch and fired.
Calley said he was following orders. He was convicted of premeditated murder of at least 22 civilians and assault with intent to murder a child. He was the only person ever convicted in the massacre.
The slaughter and Calley became touchpoints in the public’s deeply polarized view of the overall conflict. Some at the time believed he was a scapegoat for higher-ranking officers. For others, his culpability was undeniable, and that if there were illegal orders to kill civilians, he had a duty to not carry them out.
His initial life sentence was sharply reduced and President Richard Nixon shifted him to house arrest. Calley was paroled after about three years.
He remained in Columbus, married, had a son, went to work at his in-laws’ jewelry store and learned how to evaluate gems. Decades later, he and wife Penny Vick separated.
Lynn Grogan, a Columbus divorce attorney whom Calley hired, said early on she asked her new client about his Vietnam past.
“He didn’t want to talk about it,” she remembered in a recent interview with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “He made it very clear that was a different part of his life, and he was not going to relive it.”
Grogan has trouble reconciling “the awful things” Calley did with the soft-spoken client. “A gentle man. That’s the one I knew,” she said.
For decades, Calley politely declined occasional interview requests from reporters.
But one of his key duties at the Columbus jewelry store had been to greet customers, which was difficult for him at first, given how he felt people viewed his actions at My Lai, Grogan said he later confided. With time, “that got easier and easier. People became more accepting of him.”
John Partin, who had been the military’s assistant prosecutor in the murder cases against Calley, said every once in a while he would see Calley around Columbus, sometimes while dining in the same restaurant. “It was odd because he was a free man despite what he was found guilty of.”
In those interactions, “we were respectful of each other,” doing little more than greeting each other.
Partin, now 80, said he protested the reduction in Calley’s sentence. “He should have served an appropriate time to recognize the seriousness of the crimes he committed.”
Beyond Calley being a quiet man, Partin saw him as “an ordinary person, an individual who in the worst circumstance, did not act appropriately.”
Decades after the court-martial, Partin represented Calley’s then-wife in the couple’s divorce case. Vick did not respond to requests for comment from the AJC.
Years before the divorce was completed, Calley moved to Atlanta, where he lived with his son as the younger Calley sought a Ph.D. in engineering from Georgia Tech. The son, Laws Calley, did not respond to requests for comment.
Father and son lived together in a home off Juniper Street, about three blocks from Piedmont Park. In 2013, the older Calley made a Chapter 7 bankruptcy court filing. Nearly 70 years old at the time, he reported relying solely on Social Security for regular income and reported receiving a $40,000 personal loan from his son.
The following year, his divorce was finalized, and Calley was awarded half the value of a house he and his wife had previously shared in Columbus, plus half of the money in his former wife’s IRA, according to a final order Grogan shared.
While Calley remained publicly quiet most of his life, he did speak out at least once in recent decades. At the invitation of a friend in Columbus, he returned to the city in 2009 to speak to a local Kiwanis Club. A retired journalist was at the gathering and later reported what Calley said.
“I feel remorse for the Vietnamese who were killed, for their families, for the American soldiers involved and their families. I am very sorry,” Calley said.
Later, a member of the audience asked about whether obeying an unlawful order is itself unlawful. Calley reportedly said, “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.”
There’s no indication he ever again spoke publicly on the subject.
Calley eventually was diagnosed with prostate cancer and had other health issues, according to a Smithsonian Magazine article in 2018, citing an earlier legal brief.
Later in life, Calley, who had grown up in south Florida, moved back to the state. He settled in Gainesville, the same Florida city where his three sisters had lived, at least for a time, and where his father had died while the younger Calley was under house arrest.
Partin, the former prosecutor, said that he believes many people alive today have never heard of Calley or what happened at My Lai. But he said he’s proud of the case that was brought against the lieutenant and is glad for broader changes in military training as a result.
Grogan, Calley’s divorce attorney, said for years after she finished representing him, he’d send her thoughtful cards. The notes were “just telling me he was doing fine, thanking me for helping him.”
