Individual Responsibility in War: William Calley, Jr. and the Vietnam War

William Calley (“United States v. William L. Calley, Jr.”) represented the Vietnam War as almost no one else did. During the period of his imprisonment, I recall a huge banner hung from a building in Bridgeport, Connecticut that read: “Help Free Calley.” Calley died in Florida on April 28, 2024 (New York Times, July 30, 2024). More

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William Calley (“United States v. William L. Calley, Jr.”) represented the Vietnam War as almost no one else did. During the period of his imprisonment, I recall a huge banner hung from a building in Bridgeport, Connecticut that read: “Help Free Calley.”

Calley died in Florida on April 28, 2024 (New York Times, July 30, 2024).

As a war resister to that war, and eventually a veteran, but not of the Vietnam War, but of the Vietnam era, I recoiled at how enough support could be generated to produce and sponsor a message such as the one noted above that flew in the face of everything that had been learned as a result of World War II and an individual’s responsibility in wartime to refuse orders that involved the murder of civilians and the gross immorality of attacks against civilians in war.

An untold number of war resisters countered the Vietnam War, perhaps as many as over 100,000 men and women.

Rumors of mass atrocities in Vietnam were common before William Calley led his men into My Lai and perpetrated a massacre that was only different from others in Vietnam by its magnitude. I found that Four Hours in My Lai (1993) covered the massacre in detail.

Seymour Hersh’s investigative reporting in “The Massacre at My Lai” (New Yorker, 1972), on the massacre and Calley’s role in it was groundbreaking!  Calley’s half-assed apology decades later could not begin to address the mass atrocity he led in Vietnam. His, and his men’s actions that day, were a reflection, but not a defense of, the demand for “enemy” body counts by senior commanders however those counts were achieved. If the helicopter pilot Hugh Thompson (The Forgotten Hero of of My Lai, 2014) had not intervened in that massacre, the death toll of women, children, and old men would have been greater.

The massacre at My Lai was made even more prominent by the massacre of unarmed students at Kent State and Jackson State in May 1970. Those protests were in answer to Richard Nixon’s ongoing war in Cambodia. The US was willing to do stateside what it had done in Vietnam on a lesser, but lethal scale. It was after those massacres that I became a war resister. I knew that the Nuremberg Principles, the Geneva Conventions, and the UN Charter banned the kinds of war crimes that were carried out in the mass hysteria of anticommunism that pervaded the US and the Cold War during the Vietnam War. That those crimes were sanitized by Ronald Reagan with his “noble cause” rhetoric only worsened the wounds left by the Vietnam War era and its mass atrocities.

As if the death of unarmed students did not soothe the US mass psyche for revenge against protesters, the mass beatings of protesting students on Wall Street and beyond four days after the Kent State massacre, as recounted in The Hardhat Riot (2020) by David Paul Kuhn, demonstrated that no amount of bloodletting was enough.

The Winter Soldier Investigation (1971) testimonies by veterans and later writing about atrocities during the Vietnam War such as are depicted in Nick Turse’s Tiger Force (2006) and NPR’s “‘Anything That Moves”: Civilians And The Vietnam War” revealed additional information about US conduct in that war. That no formal attempt was ever made to address these facts of atrocities tells much about militarism here and this nation’s and government’s absence of interest in any kind of honest assessment of the grotesque lack of adherence to any rules of engagement in Vietnam.

Perhaps it is a cliché, but the lessons not learned from the mass murder at My Lai and beyond were repeated in differing degrees and places.

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