William Calley, face of the My Lai massacre, dies at the age of 80

A former US officer who was the only person convicted in connection with the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam War has reportedly died.

William Calley died on April 28 at the age of 80, the Washington Post and the New York Times reported, citing official death records.

Calley led the U.S. Army platoon that carried out the mass murder of hundreds of civilians, including women and children, in the Vietnamese village of Son My in 1968.

He was sentenced to life in prison in 1971 for the killing of 22 civilians, but served only three days behind bars after then-President Richard Nixon ordered his release under house arrest.

The My Lai massacre is considered one of the worst war crimes in American military history. The killings shocked the American public at the time and mobilized the anti-Vietnam War movement.

According to the Vietnamese government, 504 people were killed in the massacre.

Calley, a junior college dropout from South Florida, joined the Army in 1964.

He was quickly promoted to junior officer and then to second lieutenant, at a time when the U.S. Army was in desperate need of soldiers.

On the morning of March 16, 1968, Calley’s unit was airlifted into a village in Son My – then known to U.S. soldiers as My Lai 4 – to search for and kill Viet Cong members and sympathizers.

When officers arrived, they encountered no resistance from the villagers, who were caught cooking breakfast over open campfires, according to a 1972 report by journalist Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker.

Mr. Hersh said that in the hours that followed, Calley and his unit began killing the civilians. Many were rounded up in small groups and shot, he said. Others were pushed into a sewage ditch and shot or killed in or near their homes.

Women and girls were raped and then murdered by American officers, Hersh reported.

The massacre was initially covered up, but became public knowledge a year and a half later, thanks largely to Mr. Hersh’s reporting, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize.

Calley was one of 26 soldiers charged with crimes and the only one convicted.

His conviction polarized Americans. Some considered him a war criminal, others believed the young officer had been used as a scapegoat to shift blame for a massacre that was ultimately the responsibility of his superiors.

Although he was sentenced to life in prison, Calley served only three and a half years under house arrest after President Nixon commuted his sentence.

Calley married Penny Vick, the daughter of a jewelry store owner in Columbus, Georgia, in 1976. The couple had one son, William Laws Calley III, and divorced in the mid-2000s.

He rarely spoke about his role in the My Lai massacre and refused to meet with historians and reporters.

In 2009, he apologized in a speech to the Kiwanis Club of Greater Columbus.

“Not a day goes by that I don’t feel remorse for what happened that day in My Lai,” he said. “I feel remorse for the Vietnamese who were killed, for their families, for the American soldiers involved and their families.”

The Washington Post first reported on Calley’s death on Monday after receiving a tip from a Harvard Law School graduate who discovered the incident in public records.

No cause of death was given.