{"id":78642,"date":"2024-07-30T16:34:43","date_gmt":"2024-07-30T16:34:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/one.sightlinemg.com\/airforcetimes\/uncategorized\/2024\/07\/30\/william-calley-leader-of-notorious-my-lai-massacre-dead-at-80\/"},"modified":"2026-08-08T15:59:59","modified_gmt":"2026-08-08T15:59:59","slug":"william-calley-leader-of-notorious-my-lai-massacre-dead-at-80","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/one.sightlinemg.com\/airforcetimes\/news\/your-air-force\/2024\/07\/30\/william-calley-leader-of-notorious-my-lai-massacre-dead-at-80\/","title":{"rendered":"William Calley, leader of notorious My Lai massacre, dead at 80"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

GAINESVILLE, Fla. \u2014 William L. Calley Jr., who as an Army lieutenant led the U.S. soldiers who killed hundreds of Vietnamese civilians in the My Lai massacre<\/a>, the most notorious war crime in modern American military history, has died. He was 80.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Calley died April 28 at a hospice center in Gainesville, Florida, The Washington Post reported Monday, citing his death certificate. The Florida Department of Health in Alachua County didn\u2019t immediately respond to Associated Press requests for confirmation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Calley had lived in obscurity in the decades since he was court-martialed and convicted in 1971, the only one of 25 men originally charged to be found guilty in the Vietnam War massacre.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On March 16, 1968, Calley led American soldiers of the Charlie Company on a mission to confront a crack outfit of their Vietcong enemies. Instead, over several hours, the soldiers killed 504 unresisting civilians, mostly women, children and elderly men, in My Lai and a neighboring community.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The men were angry: Two days earlier, a booby trap had killed a sergeant, blinded a GI and wounded several others while Charlie Company was on patrol.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Soldiers eventually testified to the U.S. Army investigating commission that the murders began soon after Calley led Charlie Company\u2019s first platoon into My Lai that morning. Some were bayoneted to death. Families were herded into bomb shelters and killed with hand grenades. Other civilians were slaughtered in a drainage ditch. Women and girls were gang-raped.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It wasn\u2019t until more than a year later that news of the massacre became public. And while the My Lai massacre was the most notorious massacre in modern U.S. military history, it was not an aberration: Estimates of civilians killed during the U.S. ground war in Vietnam from 1965 to 1973 range from 1 million to 2 million.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The U.S. military\u2019s own records, filed away for three decades, described 300 other cases of what could fairly be described as war crimes. My Lai stood out because of the shocking one-day death toll, stomach-churning photographs and the gruesome details exposed by a high-level U.S. Army inquiry.<\/p>\n\n\n\t