Calley can't escape without one more look at My Lai massacre
Public servants like Harrison Freer don't come along very often
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William Laws Calley Jr. died quietly in Gainesville, Florida in hospice care on April 28. There was no notification or announcement of his passing. His death was only reported last week after the Washington Post discovered his death certificate.
That is the right of the infamous and it is understandable in Calley's case.
For a time in 1969 and over the next few years, First Lieutenant Calley's actions were the subject of much consternation over his role in an attack on the little village of My Lai in March 1968.
For those of us of a certain age, My Lai will be a reminder of not only the brutality of war, but the bestiality of man no matter what country you represent.
On December 5, 1969, some 8 million subscribers received their Life magazine with a photograph of an African Antelope on the cover. Inside, were some of the most disturbing war photographs ever.
Only now do I realize the editors decided the images were too graphic for the front page, too horrible to be palatable to the general public.
I'm not sure running them inside changed that.
As an 11-year-old, I remember looking at the photos, studying them. They seemed unreal in their brutality and me confused about how it could have happened.
The story in Life began on Page 36 with the headline "The Massacre at Mylai." But it is the full page color photograph of Vietnamese women and children huddled together with a look of sheer terror that grabs you by the throat.
Even now.
Ron Haeberle was a combat photographer embedded with the Charlie Company in the 20th Infantry Regiment when they landed near the hamlet of My Lai on March 16, 1968.
The caption next to the photograph of the huddled women and children gave this account from Haeberle:
"Guys were about to shoot these people," Photographer Ron Haeberle remembers. "I yelled, 'Hold it,' and shot my picture. As I walked away, I heard M16s open up. From the corner of my of my eye I saw bodies falling, but I didn't turn to look."
In the succeeding pages were photos of the bodies of women and children along a dirt road and of the village burning.
We didn't want to look either.
Accounts revealed the American soldiers swept into the village and began shooting immediately. There was no resistance. The horror unfolded over the next few hours.
Hours!
Accounts by soldiers in Charlie Company said victims where taken from their huts, herded into irrigation ditches and shot. Others were shot as they emerged from hiding places. Infants and children were bayoneted and shot. An estimated 20 women were raped, then killed. The village was burned to the ground.
The carnage only ended when an American helicopter crew intervened and threatened to shoot anyone who continued the violence.
An official Army report later reported 347 civilians killed. A memorial at the site says more than 500 died.
Second Lieutenant William Calley, just 24, led about 100 men into My Lai under orders that there might be Vietcong enemies there. Calley said at his trial that he was just following orders.
What happened at My Lai was covered up in military reports. It was described as a successful "search-and-destroy mission." But when soldiers came forward to report the massacre, the Army eventually investigated. Seymour Hersh, an investigative journalist, began investigating My Lai after reading a New York Times article about Calley being accused of murder of an unspecified number of Vietnamese civilians.
Hersh's story - Point-Blank Murder - and Haeberle's photos were published in some 20 newspapers across the country in November 1969, including the Cleveland Plain Dealer.
Three weeks later, Life published Haeberle's photos for its 8 million readers.
I remembered the ensuing debate.
That Calley was just following orders.
That the civilians might have been Vietcong sympathizers.
It became a political story that went all the way to the Nixon White House and became a referendum on the eroding support of the Vietnam War.
Calley was charged with pre-meditated murder and 25 other officers and enlisted men were also charged.
That's where I remembered the story ending with justice about to be served.
But when Calley died in April, it was revealed Calley never served that life sentence and went on to lead a pretty ordinary, peaceful life.
Looking back, no one was really punished for My Lai.
The charges against two generals involved in the cover-up were dropped.
Then the charges against 10 other officers and seven enlisted men accused of murder or suppressing evidence were also dropped.
Six men were subsequently court-martialed. All were acquitted except for Calley.
Calley was accused of personally killing 102 civilians in a trial at Fort Benning, Ga. in November 1970.
Many soldiers refused to testify.
The eight that did offered shockingly graphic testimony about Calley herding "sobbing, cowering villagers into a ditch" and having them shot.
He ordered his men to do the same.
Calley testified for three days.
He showed no remorse.
He insisted he was just following orders from his captain to kill all the villagers.
Calley was convicted of premeditated murder of at least 22 Vietnamese and sentenced to life in prison. He was the only soldier convicted in the My Lai massacre.
Washington politicians were flooded with protests.
Georgia Gov. Jimmy Carter called it "a blow to troop morale."
Other governors denounced the verdict and Alabama Gov. George Wallace demanded a presidential pardon.
Various state legislatures asked for clemency for Calley.
President Richard Nixon finally did intervene, transferring Calley to house arrest at his Fort Benning apartment while he awaited on appeals of his conviction.
Later, the fort's commanding general reduced Calley's life term to 20 years and then the secretary of the Army cut it to 10 years. Ultimately, Calley served just three and a half years of house arrest before being freed.
In 1974, a federal judge in Georgia overturned the conviction saying Calley had been denied a fair trial due to prejudicial publicity.
Odd things happen in times of war.
Calley married Penny Vick in 1976 and went to work as a jeweler for his father-in-law. They had one son. They divorced 30 years later and Calley moved to Gainesville.
Over the years, Calley repeatedly turned down interview requests.
In 2009, he agreed to speak to the Kiwanis Club in Columbus, Ga. and offered this apology:
“There is not a day that goes by that I do not 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. I am very sorry.”
I looked again at the cowering women and children in Life magazine and I thought about William Calley dying in hospice, quietly, perhaps even peacefully in Florida.
It didn't seem right.
Freer will be missed
What was obvious to us on The Post-Star editorial board in 2013 was that Harrison Freer was not your usual Town Board candidate.
He graduated from the Air Force Academy and served 24 years while flying combat missions in the Middle East. When he was done with that he did two tours of duty at the Pentagon, then a stint in the private sector with Boeing. He might have mentioned something about a classified satellite program, too.
Despite all that, Ward 2 voters elected Brian Clements that year. Clements was eventually voted out of office four years later after being involved in a partisan email scandal in the Town of Queensbury.
But Freer tried again in 2019.
"When you are done listening to Harrison Freer's resume, you are exhausted," the editorial board wrote while endorsing Freer that fall. "Ward 2 residents should not let him slip away a second time."
They didn't.
Freer died this past week when he suffered what his riding partner JP Fasano believes to be a heart attack while cycling in Bolton. Fasano corrected my early version of the story where I said Freer had been “killed.”
Fasano wrote that he attempted CPR after Freer was stricken, but was unable to contact emergency services because there was no cell phone reception. When a car finally came by, the driver went to a nearby house to call 9-1-1.
Freer, 70, was an active cyclist.
Train donations
Thank you readers for contributing another $150 to the Hometown Trolley Project.
The Upstate Model Railroaders and the Chapman Museum are combining forces on this community project to resurrect a 1900 vision of downtown Glens Falls with a historically accurate diorama of the downtown buildings and the brand new trolley line.
The Post-Star did a story this past week about this community project. Check it out.
You can go on the Chapman Museum Website to donate. We have $500 of the $1500 needed to complete the project.
Jimmer update
After three straight losses, the United States' 3X3 basketball team won its first game against France on Friday with a buzzer-beating two-pointer.
Unfortunately, Jimmer Fredette's injury problems continued and he did not play for the second straight game.
Without Jimmer, the U.S. team beat China on Sunday before being routed by the Netherlands. It eliminated them from the tournament with a 2-4 record.
An opportunity
With the prison closing in Comstock, Warren County officials saw an opportunity to address the worker shortage they are experiencing.
It was reported in the weekly Warren County newsletter that the Personnel Committee discussed efforts to let workers at Great Meadow Correctional Facility know about Warren County job opportunities.
Erin Brockovich
People are still asking Erin Brockovich for help.
You may remember the 2000 movie of the same name where Julia Roberts played Brockovich as a whistleblower and para-legal who helped get the corporate bad guys who were poisoning residents with chemicals. The film was nominated for five Academy Awards.
Brockovich continued her environmental work after that and has become a symbol for getting corporate polluters.
She wrote an opinion piece for the New York Times last week where she wrote this:
People like to talk about the risks of federal oversight and regulations. But without those basic guardrails in place, large companies get to do whatever they want, and hard-working Americans get sick.
Some much needed action was taken on PFAS at the national level recently. In April, the E.P.A. mandated that municipal water systems remove six PFAS chemicals from tap water. Such efforts are now at risk.
Under the Supreme Court’s recent Chevron ruling, federal judges get the final say on how laws including the Clean Water Act and the Safe Drinking Water Act should be applied. This weakens the ability of regulatory agencies to do their jobs protecting the public’s health from problems such as PFAS. Future pollution cases could meander through the federal court system for years while drinking water remains contaminated.
If we could just get Brockovich to take up the issue of acid rain in the Adirondacks.
Ken Tingley spent more than four decades working in small community newspapers in upstate New York. Since retirement in 2020 he has written three books and is currently adapting his second book "The Last American Newspaper" into a play. He currently lives in Queensbury, N.Y.
Harrison Freer was an advocate for bicycle recreation, tourism, and commuting. He was an advocate for the environment, for water quality, for sustainability and resilience. That work manifested in lakefront septic regulations, in work toward municipal septic for Assembly Point on Lake George, in Queensbury being part of the Climate Smart Community program, and more.
Harrison was a hard worker, but a quiet one. He didn’t toot his own horn. He was a team player, and yes, he was part of the team at the Pentagon that developed military GPS, the civilian side of which has become integrated in all of our lives.
In recent months Harrison had been focused on the mundane issue of sidewalks in Ward 2, specifically in providing sidewalks for pedestrian safety for kids walking back and forth between Glens Falls high school and the Morse athletic fields across the city line in Queensbury. While it is more prosaic than satellites in space it is an issue that came with its own sets of problems and Harrison was working those problems one at a time.
In my mind the work Harrison did that he was not generally recognized for was in promoting diversity in government, specifically in recruiting women to serve in elected and appointed public office in Queensbury, a town with an atrocious record for women in leadership positions. Yes, there is the town clerk, but in roughly 21 other offices (supervisor, town board, county supervisor, planning board, ZBA) at any one time in the last couple of decades the number of women in those positions was often zero. Sometimes the number was (off the top of my head) as many as 3. Maybe 4 counting alternates. I believe at the moment that out of those 21 seats there is one woman serving as an alternate on the planning board or ZBA. She may have been promoted to a regular seat recently. Harrison worked hard to change that. He had a hand in recruiting nearly every Democratic woman running for office in Queensbury in more than a decade.
I've read a lot of WWII books in the last year. And war is tough.. and there are situations where your best friend was killed.. I haven't read many VietNam books, but I assume many things are similar.
This is NOT a defense of Calley, but I often wonder how one doesn't become a savage during war.