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His case became a kind of litmus test for American values, a question not only of who was to blame for My Lai, but how America should conduct war and what constitutes a war crime. Out of the roughly soldiers who were dropped into the village that day, 24 were later charged with criminal offenses, and only one was convicted, Calley.
He was set free after serving less than four years. Since that time, Calley has almost entirely avoided the press. Now 74 years old, he declined to be interviewed for this story. But I was able to piece together a picture of his life and legacy by reviewing court records and interviewing his fellow soldiers and close friends. I traveled to Son My, where survivors are still waiting for him to come back and make amends.
And I visited Columbus, Georgia, where Calley lived for nearly 30 years. I wanted to know whether Calley, a convicted mass murderer and one of the most notorious figures in 20th-century history, had ever expressed true contrition or lived a normal life. The landscape surrounding Son My is still covered with rice paddies, as it was 50 years ago. There are still water buffalo fertilizing the fields and chickens roaming.
Most of the roads are still dirt. On a recent Wednesday afternoon, ten young men were drinking beer and smoking cigarettes at the side of one of those roads. Tran Nam was 6 years old when he heard gunshots from inside his mud and straw home in Son My. It was early morning and he was having breakfast with his extended family, 14 people in all. The U. Army had come to the village a couple of times previously during the war.
So the family kept on eating. People collapsed one by one. Nam saw the bullet-ridden bodies of his family falling—his grandfather, his parents, his older brother, his younger brother, his aunt and cousins.
He ran into a dimly lit bedroom and hid under the bed. He heard more soldiers enter the house, and then more gunshots. When the heat grew unbearable, Nam ran out the door and hid in a ditch as his village burned. Of the 14 people at breakfast that morning, 13 were shot and 11 killed. Only Nam made it out physically unscathed. The six U. They killed some civilians straight off—shooting them point blank or tossing grenades into their homes.
I did it. A lot of people were doing it, and I just followed. I lost all sense of direction. Soldiers gathered together villagers along a trail going through the village and also along an irrigation ditch to the east. Calley and year-old Pvt. First Class Paul Meadlo mowed the people down with Ms, burning through several clips in the process. The soldiers killed as many as people in those two areas of Son My, including 79 children.
Witnesses said Calley also shot a praying Buddhist monk and a young Vietnamese woman with her hands up. When he saw a 2-year-old boy who had crawled out of the ditch, Calley threw the child back in and shot him.
Truong Thi Le, then a rice farmer, told me she was hiding in her home with her 6-year-old son and year-old daughter when the Americans found them and dragged them out. When the soldiers fired an M into their group, most died then and there. At the strategic level, the Army reinvigorated the teaching of professional ethics and values. Loyalty, duty, respect, selfless service, honor, integrity, and personal courage were required of all men and women and it is no accident that, when read in sequence, the first letters of these values spell LDRSHIP.
Casey, Jr. Military Academy at West Point. Known today as the Center for the Army Profession and Ethic or CAPE, its mission is to increase in every soldier an understanding—and internalization—of what it means for the Army to be a profession and for soldiers to be professionals of character. In the early s, Major General George S. Trobaugh, the division commander and his staff.
After Grenada, the JAG Corps recognized that reviewing operations plans was not sufficient; judge advocates must deploy with commanders if timely and accurate legal advice was going to be available. Today, this means that uniformed lawyers are with commanders to ensure that all military operations are conducted in accordance with the Law of Armed Conflict, thereby contributing to the prevention of another My Lai.
They take an active part in the planning and execution of operations, and are often found in the tactical operations center, where they might advise on the lawfulness of attacking specific targets to ensure that collateral damage to civilians is minimized.
These judge advocates also assist in the preparation of and training on rules of engagement. Commanders are still the decision-makers, but the advice they receive from lawyers is almost universally viewed as a good development. As for My Lai itself, the incident remained a cautionary tale, especially for senior Army commanders who had served in Vietnam.
There also has been no hesitation in using the war crime as a vehicle for teaching. Some years ago, instructors at the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation the former School of the Americas set out the facts and circumstances of My Lai and then discussed with students the moral and ethical failures arising out of it.
All this was done with a view toward challenging students to think about how the failure of Calley and his men to distinguish between combatants and non-combatants might be similar to military operations in their home countries, especially those involving fighting against gun-toting drug traffickers who hide in the larger civilian community.
The Army of was a very different institution from the Army of Additionally, the deployment of Army lawyers on military operations has ensured that commanders have advice and counsel when they need it. Finally, it must be said that the trust of the American public in the Army has been restored; American citizens generally have great respect and admiration for soldiers and soldiering.
The bottom line is that today, some genuine good has come from a tragic event of fifty years ago. A postscript on some of the My Lai participants: Calley is still alive; he lives in Florida. Meadlo could not be tried by the Army for his war crimes because he had been honorably discharged and there was no longer any military criminal jurisdiction over him. Ron Ridenhour, whose letters triggered the investigation, also is deceased. As for then Major General Koster, he was never court-martialed; charges against him were dismissed after a pre-trial investigation.
However, Secretary of the Army Stanley R. Koster retired in and died in at the age of eighty-six. Fearing that one of those grenades would soon roll into their bunker, a mother grabbed her young children, took a chance and bolted. One of the Americans then wheeled around and fired at his mother, killing her. Many more were killed on that October day in Two of the soldiers involved were later court martialled but cleared of murder.
Last year, the Pentagon kicked off a year programme to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the war. An entry on the official Vietnam War Commemoration website for My Lai describes it as an "incident" and the number killed is listed as "" not Speedy Express is referred to as "an operation that would eventually yield an enemy body count of 11,". In a presidential proclamation on the website, Barack Obama distils the conflict down to troops slogging "through jungles and rice paddies… fighting heroically to protect the ideals we hold dear as Americans… through more than a decade of combat".
Despite what the president might believe, combat was just a fraction of that war. The real war in Vietnam was typified by millions of men, women, and children driven into slums and refugee camps; by homes, hamlets, and whole villages burnt to the ground; by millions killed or wounded when war showed up on their doorstep. President Obama called the Vietnam War "a chapter in our nation's history that must never be forgotten".
But thanks to cover-ups like that of Speedy Express, few know the truth to begin with. A Pentagon spokesman, when asked for a statement about the evidence presented, said he doubted that more than 50 years after the US went to war in Vietnam, it would be possible for the military to provide an official statement in "a timely manner.
US Army helicopters pour machine-gun fire into the tree line to cover the advance of ground troops.
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