News of the death of William Calley arrived this week. It turns out that the one-time second lieutenant, who in 1968 led the massacre of Vietnamese at the village of My Lai in Vietnam, died in obscurity in April. He was 80 years old when he left this mortal coil at a hospice at Gainesville, Florida. The death was reported this week by the Post newspaper at Washington. The news offers a moment for reflection for the Vietnam generation. 

It would not be too much to say that the massacre at the hamlet of My Lai, in Quang Ngai Province in Vietnam, stained the good name of the United States Army for a generation. Yet one of the important things to comprehend about the crime — in which 504 Vietnamese, including women, children, and elderly men were slain  — is not only that it was perpetrated by Americans. It is also that it was stopped by Americans.

We made that point 25 yeas ago in reviewing a biography, by Trent Angers, of a United States warrant officer named Hugh Thompson. He was the American helicopter pilot who — with crew chief, Glenn Andreotta, and a helicopter gunner, Lawrence Colburn — was flying an observation pattern over My Lai. The day had started out routinely, we wrote in the review of the book. At 7:24 a.m. the western part of the community came under U.S. artillery fire. 

“Minutes later,” we wrote in our review in the Wall Street Journal, “Charlie Company, under the command of Lt. William Calley, landed by helicopter. By 8 a.m., as villagers tried to hide or flee, the massacre was underway. Villagers were shot individually or in groups, as they ran, as they tried to surrender, or as they lay in ditches. The evil unfolding dawned on Mr. Thompson and his crew in stages as they buzzed the area, looking for the enemy.”

“Mr. Thompson landed more than once in an effort to stop the slaughter, at one point ordering his door gunners to shoot the Americans if they made a move to kill either the Vietnamese civilians or Mr. Thompson himself. When Mr. Thompson flew over a ditch full of what turned out to be 170 dead or dying Vietnamese women, children and old men, Glenn Andreotta shouted that he could see something moving.”

That is when Thompson set down his helicopter and Andreotta went into the ditch and “lifted out, from beneath a bullet-riddled corpse, a five-year-old girl who was whimpering with fear. With a dying woman clinging to his leg, Mr. Andreotta had trouble carrying the little girl out of the ditch: He couldn’t get his footing in all the gore. Breaking radio silence, Mr. Thompson frantically reported the massacre to his superiors and gained a cease-fire.”

After the war — and after a cover-up was defeated — the United States finally put Calley on trial. He was convicted of multiple counts of murder and sentenced to life in prison with hard labor. President Nixon, though, commuted his sentence, in several steps, to three years of house arrest. Calley spent much of the rest of his life working for his father-in-law’s jewelry store, refusing to talk of what happened in Vietnam.

Then, in 2009, Calley was invited to speak to a Kiwanis Club in Georgia. “There is not a day that goes by that I do not feel remorse for what happened that day in My Lai,” the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer quoted Calley as saying. “I feel remorse for the Vietnamese who were killed, for their families, for the American soldiers involved and their families.” A friend said: “You could’ve heard a pin drop. They were just slack-jawed.”

Wherever Calley disembarks on the other side of the River Styx, there are those who will suggest that what happened at My Lai was typical of Vietnam or war in general. Yet what happened in My Lai was, in our experience, not typical. We like to focus on the Americans who landed their observation chopper, dismounted and  leveled their weapons at the killers, and went into the ditch to try to rescue the few still alive. And saved the honor of their country.