Obituaries

[Kiwithrottlejockey]

from The Washington Post…

Sonny Barger, biker outlaw and founder of Hells Angels, dies at 83

For decades, he was the public face of a nationwide counter-culture tribe
of bearded, denim-clad road warriors memorialized in literature and film.

By PAUL W. VALENTINE | 8:16AM EDT — Thursday, June 30, 2022


Hells Angels chieftain Ralph "Sonny" Barger and his then-wife Sharon are shown after his release on $100,000 bond in San Francisco in 1980.
He had spent more than a year in jail on federal racketeering conspiracy charges. — Photograph: Robert H Houston/Associated Press.

SONNY BARGER, the bigger-than-life godfather of the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club, equal parts brawler, bully, braggart, rule breaker and shrewd huckster of his own outlaw mystique, died on June 29 at his home in Livermore, California. He was 83.

A statement on his official Facebook page read: “If you are reading this message, you'll know that I'm gone. I've asked that this note be posted immediately after my passing.” His former lawyer, Fritz Clapp, confirmed the death and said the cause was liver cancer.

For decades, the stocky, muscular Mr. Barger stood not only as the founder of the original Oakland, California, Angels chapter in 1957, but for decades after that also as the public face of a nationwide counter-culture tribe of bearded, denim-clad road warriors memorialized in literature and film — roaring down the open highway and through crossroads towns, shocking the locals with their boisterous, often menacing presence.

It was a rowdy, frequently lawless brotherhood bound, in no particular order, by machismo, tattoos, winged death-head insignia, booze, dope, rides to nowhere on thundering Harley-Davidson hogs and a lust for the unfettered freedom found on the open road.

“Discover your limits by exceeding them,” Mr. Barger urged.

Woven into the Hells Angels history was a tradition of crime and violence — much of it involving Mr. Barger, a fact he boastfully acknowledged. He once referred to himself as belonging to a band of “card-carrying felons.”

He was convicted in 1988 of conspiracy to kill members of a rival club in Kentucky and blow up their headquarters, serving five years in federal prison.

A confessed cocaine addict who supported his habit by selling heroin in the 1960s and 1970s, he served stints totaling eight years for assorted drug and firearms charges.

The Hells Angels — as a corporate entity with chapters from California to New York — faced incessant federal investigation on criminal enterprise and racketeering offenses. In 2013, authorities obtained convictions against 16 members and hangers-on in South Carolina for a conspiracy involving drug distribution, gun­running, money laundering and arson.

In 1979, Mr. Barger and other leaders beat a similar conspiracy rap in which they were accused of running a mammoth methamphetamine (“biker’s coffee”) operation out of Oakland.

Most infamous in Hells Angles lore was their role in the chaotic 1969 Rolling Stones concert at Altamont, California, where a pistol-wielding 18-year-old concertgoer, Meredith Hunter, was stabbed to death by a Hells Angel — all captured on film in the 1970 documentary “Gimme Shelter”.

The Angels, hired to provide security, were fighting off fans rushing the stage, according to Mr. Barger, who was present. The drug-fueled crowd pressed against the Angels' security line, damaging some of their bikes, and Angels waded into the crowd swinging fists and cue sticks.


In 1965, the members of the Oakland Hells Angels chapter, from left are: Cliff Workman, treasurer; Mr. Barger, president; Tiny Walter, sergeant at arms;
Ron Jacobson, secretary; and Tom Thomas, vice president, seated far right. — Photograph: Associated Press.

In his autobiography “Hell's Angel — The Life and Times of Sonny Barger and the Hell's Angels Motorcycle Club”, Mr. Barger accused Stones guitarist Keith Richards of delaying the band's performance to work up the crowd. He claimed that he pressed a pistol to Richards's ribs and ordered him to start playing immediately.

Richards complied, but the crowd, including Hunter, kept swarming toward the stage, according to Mr. Barger. Hunter fired a single shot, winging a Hells Angel, Mr. Barger said. Other Angels quickly subdued Hunter, punching and kicking him. One Angel was charged with fatally stabbing him but was acquitted after claiming self-defense.

Over the years, Mr. Barger served as a technical consultant for biker movies and appeared in several, including “Hells Angels on Wheels” (1967), a low-budget exploitation film featuring Jack Nicholson.

For the real-life Hells Angels Motorcycle Club, he drew inspiration from an earlier movie — the 1953 classic “The Wild One” with Marlon Brando playing a strangely sensitive gang leader. Mr. Barger preferred Lee Marvin's more aggressive performance as a biker.

Mr. Barger's rough and anarchic manner belied a disciplined entrepreneurial streak. He promoted his renegade brand, carefully marketing Hells Angels-themed T-shirts, yo-yos, sunglasses and California wines. He registered trademarks on club logos and designs, and retained an intellectual property rights lawyer to sue poachers, a frequent occurrence.

To give the Angels a little gloss, he initiated periodic charity drives for children's toys and clothes.

“He's smart and he's crafty, and he has a kind of wild animal cunning,” author Hunter S. Thompson told The Washington Post in 2000. Thompson spent a year with the Angels researching his seminal book “Hell's Angels: A Strange and Terrible Sagaof the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs” (1966).

RALPH HURBERT BARGER Jr. was born in Modesto, California, on October 8, 1938. His mother ran off with a Trailways bus driver when Sonny was 4 months old. His father, a day laborer loading ships and trucks at the Oakland docks, spent his nights and much of his money at waterfront bars, often bringing Sonny with him.

There, according to his autobiography, Sonny filched pretzels and hard-boiled eggs, and learned his first cuss words from an obscenity-squawking parrot.

His father married a second time. Like the first wife, she ran off, taking everything including the family radio and encyclopedia, according to Mr. Barger.

He hated school and was repeatedly suspended for mouthing off and occasionally hitting his teacher. “I never liked being told what to do,” he said.


Mr. Barger signs autographs during an event at a Harley-Davidson dealership in Quincy, Illinois in 2003. — Photograph: Scott Olson/Getty Images.

For a time, he came under the care of his paternal grandmother, a strict Pentecostalist. In quick order, he rejected what he called the “tongue-yammering Holy Rollers,” smoked his first marijuana cigarette at 14, dropped out of high school at 16 and joined the Army with a forged birth certificate.

Fourteen months later, military authorities discovered the subterfuge and ousted him. Back home, he drifted from job to job — janitor, pipe threader, potato chip assembly-line worker. “I couldn't get a grip on this nine-to-five working stuff,” he wrote.

He joined his first biker group, the Oakland Panthers, in 1956 and formed the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club in Oakland the next year. “I needed a close-knit club of men who could jump on their bikes, ride cross-country if they wanted to, and not abide by rules or clocks,” he said.

Over the next several decades, he grew his single club into a financially sustainable network with thousands of members in the United States, Canada, Europe and elsewhere. Despite its many run-ins with the law, the organization was fundamentally successful — an all-male, virtually all-White, dues-paying fraternal order with a brisk retail trade in club paraphernalia.

Mr. Barger published two novels, “Dead in 5 Heartbeats” (2003) and “6 Chambers, 1 Bullet” (2006), detailing murder and mayhem in the biker world.

His epithet-strewn autobiography was a New York Times bestseller, and two other books, “Freedom: Credos From the Road” (2005) and “Ridin’ High, Livin’ Free” (2002), received positive reviews. Some were co-written with writers Keith and Kent Zimmerman. He co-authored a sixth book, “Let's Ride: Sonny Barger's Guide to Motorcycling” (2010), with writer Darwin Holmstrom.

In 1982, he was diagnosed with throat cancer — he had smoked three packs of Camels a day for 30 years — and had his vocal cords removed. He learned to speak through a surgically inserted hole in his throat, giving his voice an eerie rasp.

Mr. Barger’s first wife, Elsie George, died in 1967 during a self-induced abortion. His marriages to Sharon Gruhlke and Beth Noel Black ended in divorce. He married his fourth wife, Zorana Katzakian, in 2005. In addition to his wife survivors include a sister, according to Clapp.

In 1998, he moved from Oakland to suburban Phoenix, dropping his official duties in the Hells Angels but remaining a rank-and-file member. He ran a motorcycle repair shop and mellowed in suburban life, doing yoga and continuing to lift weights, a pastime he acquired in prison.

He kept riding the open road, thousands of miles a year, eventually professing a preference for high-powered Hondas and BMWs to the Angels' traditional Harley choppers.

What did his non-conformist life teach him? “To become a real man,” he counseled in his autobiography, “you need to join the army first and then do some time in jail.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/06/30/sonny-barger-hells-angels-dead

[Kiwithrottlejockey]

 
from The Washington Post…

William Anders, Apollo 8 astronaut who shot ‘Earthrise’ dies in plane crash

Anders, part of the first crewed mission to orbit the moon, was 90. His photograph
of the Earth rising over the lunar surface is one of the most famous ever taken.

By FRANCES VINALL | 11:50PM EDT — Friday, June 07, 2024


Lieutenant Colonel William Anders, part of the Apollo 8 crew, looks out a window during the spaceflight in 1968. — Photograph: Associated Press.

RETIRED MAJOR GENERAL WILLIAM ANDERS — the former Apollo 8 astronaut who took the famous “Earthrise” photograph — died in a plane crash on Friday at the age of 90.

His son, retired Lieutenant Colonel Greg Anders, confirmed the death. “The family is devastated,” he said. “He was a great father and a great pilot.”

The sheriff's office of San Juan County, Washington state, said in a statement that a two-seater plane went down into the waters near Jones Island in the San Juan Channel on Friday morning. San Juan County Sheriff Eric Peter said that the cause of the crash is being investigated and that it appeared the pilot was the only person on board at the time.

The Apollo 8 mission of 1968 — the first crewed mission to orbit the moon — carried three astronauts: Frank Borman, James Lovell Jr. and Bill Anders.

On Christmas Eve, Mr. Anders captured one of the most significant photographs ever taken: a blue planet, small and vulnerable, floating in the intimidating vastness of space.


“Earthrise”, one of the most famous photographs ever captured, shows Earth behind the surface of the moon on December 24, 1968, during the Apollo 8 mission.
 — Photograph: William Anders/NASA.

“As I looked down at the Earth, which is about the size of your fist at arm's length, I'm thinking, ‘This is not a very big place. Why can't we get along?’” Mr. Anders said in a video played to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 8 mission in 2018, The Washington Post reported.

“To me it was strange that we had worked and had come all the way to the moon to study the moon, and what we really discovered was the Earth.”

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said on Friday that Mr. Anders had “offered to humanity among the deepest of gifts an astronaut can give.”

“He traveled to the threshold of the Moon and helped all of us see something else: ourselves,” Nelson wrote on social media. “He embodied the lessons and the purpose of exploration. We will miss him.”

Mr. Anders was born in 1933 in Hong Kong, where his father, a naval officer, was stationed, according to the Heritage Flight Museum. (Mr. Anders founded the museum, now located in Burlington, Washington, with his wife.)

The family later moved to California, where he graduated from high school. He went on to achieve an engineering degree at the U.S. Naval Academy and earned his pilot's wings with the Air Force in 1956. Mr. Anders graduated from the Air Force Institute of Technology in 1962 with a degree in nuclear engineering, specializing in space radiation. He was tapped by NASA the following year.

At age 35, Mr. Anders was one of the first three people to leave Earth's orbit through the Apollo 8 mission. The spacecraft circled the moon 10 times before it splashed down into the Pacific Ocean a little more than 147 hours, or about six days, after launch, according to NASA. The following year, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin would walk on the moon's surface.

Borman, Lovell and Mr. Anders were named TIME magazine's Men of the Year for 1968.


From left, James Lovell Jr., William Anders and Frank Borman, the Apollo 8 crew, at the Kennedy Space Center on Merritt Island, Florida, on November 13, 1968.
 — Photograph: NASA.

In a live broadcast on December 24, 1968, the crew read the first 10 verses of Genesis from space to an audience of half a billion people, according to the National Archives.

The same day, Mr. Anders took his famous photograph.

The National Archives writes of the picture: “The crew of Apollo 8 was armed with still and movie cameras to photograph the Moon; but the most enduring image of their mission is this photograph of their own home, planet Earth.” Decades later, the impact of the photograph is still regularly cited.

In a 2018 interview with The Guardian, Mr. Anders said the image changed him, too. “It really undercut my religious beliefs. The idea that things rotate around the pope and up there is a big supercomputer wondering whether Billy was a good boy yesterday? It doesn't make any sense.”

After NASA, Mr. Anders served on government commissions and councils, and was the U.S. ambassador to Norway. He had stints in the private sector, including as the chief executive of General Dynamics, an aerospace and defense company, before he retired to Washington state and took up air racing.

He and his wife, Valerie (Hoard) Anders, were married in 1955 and have six children.

__________________________________________________________________________

• Frances Vinall is a global breaking news reporter based in Seoul. She previously reported for The Washington Post from Australia, her home country. Before joining The Washington Post, she covered the Melbourne courts for NCA Newswire and worked as a newspaper reporter in Tasmania and the Snowy Mountains. | Education: Monash University, Bachelor of Arts in Journalism. | Honors and Awards: Tasmanian Media Awards for Public Service Journalism; Feature, Documentary or Current Affairs, Arts Reporting and Best New Journalist 2020.

• Story updated at 3:50AM EDT — Saturday, June 08, 2024.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2024/06/07/william-anders-dies-apollo-8-astronaut-earthrise
 

[Kiwithrottlejockey]

 
from The Washington Post…

Joe Engle, last of the X-15 test pilots who touched space, dies at 91

After the daring X-15 flights in the 1960s, he took part in two space-shuttle missions.

By BRIAN MURPHY | 6:55PM EDT — Friday, July 12, 2024


Astronauts Joe Engle, right, and Richard Truly in front of the space shuttle Columbia on September 10, 1981. — Photograph: Phil Sandlin/Associated Press.

JOE ENGLE, the last surviving member of the test pilots who skimmed the edge of space on the X-15 rocket plane in the 1960s and who later orbited the Earth on space-shuttle missions, died on July 10 at his home in Houston. He was 91.

A statement by his wife, Jeanie Engle, announced the death but no specific cause was noted. Mr. Engle retired from the Air Force in 1986 and was promoted to the rank of major general.

Within the annals of space exploration, Mr. Engle was hailed as the first person to reach beyond the atmosphere aboard two different winged craft: arcing into space in June 1965 on the X-15, and then in 1981 aboard the Columbia in the second orbital flight of the space-shuttle program.

He was also the astronaut bumped from the last mission to the moon in December 1972. His spot with Apollo 17 was given to geologist Harrison Schmitt because NASA was under pressure to send a scientist to the lunar surface as the Apollo program was winding down. (Plans for future Apollo missions were later scrapped.)

“It was hard to swallow,” Mr. Engle told The Washington Post in 1977, “but I think it made sense. I think that you're betting on the odds that if you've got a guy with a doctorate in geology with experience all over the world and you're going to the moon and you want the most meaningful samples brought back.”

Mr. Engle had set his sights on NASA. In the early 1960s, then an Air Force captain, he was accepted into the newly created Aerospace Research Pilot School led by test pilot Chuck Yeager, who in 1947 was the first person to break the sound barrier. The program was built to train the next crop of astronauts as the space race with the Soviet Union became a national priority.

Mr. Engle applied to be part of NASA's third group of astronauts. One day, a commanding Air Force officer called him into the office. He told Mr. Engle that he was pulling his NASA paperwork. “He said, ‘Well, we have something else in mind for you, but I can't tell you right now’,” Mr. Engle recalled in a NASA oral history.


Staff and contractors lower the North American X-15 rocket-plane from its display position at the Smithsonian in August 2019. It was being placed into storage
while renovations took place in the museum. Joe Engle was the last surviving test pilot who flew the X-15 to the edge of space and back in the 1960s.
 — Photograph: Jim Preston/Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum.

Mr. Engle finished the aerospace school and learned he was assigned to the X-15 program, which began in 1959 to compile data on the effects of punching through the atmosphere and measuring the forces of re-entry. The needle-nose X-15, launched off a modified B-52 Stratofortress, was designed to reach the boundary of space at more than 50 miles above the Earth surface and hit speeds of more than 4,500 mph, or faster than six times the speed of sound.

The flights assessed factors critical for the nascent space program such as hypersonic aerodynamics, life-support systems and how to handle the intense heat of atmospheric friction. For test pilots such as Mr. Engle, the X-15 was beloved because it was still fundamentally a plane, which they controlled from airborne launch to its landing on dry lake-beds in California.

“That just thrilled me to death,” Mr. Engle remembered, “because it was a chance to … fly into space and to do it with a winged airplane, with a stick and rudder.”



On Mr. Engle's first X-15 flight in June 1963, the electrical system malfunctioned. Nearly all the instrumentation was knocked out except for the altimeter, air speed and G-force readings. From his training, Mr. Engle had an intuitive feel for the nose angle and knew the precise burn time for the X-15 rockets. The aircraft brushed the edge of space and Mr. Engle took the controls for the glide down.

He soon realized that, without the full panel readings, he was slightly off course and might miss the landing site. He tried a roll maneuver that was never fully tested on the X-15 — swaying the wings in a seesaw motion to help correct the descent and trajectory.

“One of the engineers came over to me and said, ‘Hey, you didn't roll that airplane, did you?’ … I said, ‘Who, me?’ He said, ‘I didn’t think so’. And it dropped,” he recalled in the oral history.


From left, Mr. Engle, along with astronauts Vance Brand, Henry Hartsfield Jr. and Gordon Fullerton at the Johnson Space Center in Houston on March 3, 1986.
 — Photograph: Elasticsearch Fluentd Kibana/Associated Press.

On June 29, 1965, Mr. Engle qualified for astronaut wings when his X-15 flight crossed 50 miles above the surface, which NASA and the military considered the beginning of space. He recalled being awestruck by seeing the Earth's curvature and the blackness beyond the blue-tinted atmosphere. “You just kind of sat back,” he said.

Mr. Engle made 16 flights on the X-15, his last in October 1965. Nearly two years later, Major Michael J. Adams was killed after his X-15 went into a spin and then a steep dive before breaking apart. The X-15 program ended in 1968.

Mr. Engle was among 19 astronauts selected by NASA in April 1966. In one of the key tests of the Apollo designs, Mr. Engle and two other astronauts, Joseph Kerwin and Vance Brand, spent eight days in June 1968 sealed inside the Command and Lunar modules in a chamber that simulated the conditions of space flight to and from the moon.

Mr. Engle joked that his love of camping came in handy. “Being confined in a tent while it's raining for several days, with a couple of guys, that was good training,” he said.


Mr. Engle, second to left, with other astronauts and flight controllers in the control room during the Apollo 13 mission on April 14, 1970.
 — Photograph: Agence France-Presse/Getty Images.

Mr. Engle was a member of the support crew in 1969 for Apollo 10, which orbited the moon in a test run for the lunar landing of Apollo 11 in July 1969. Mr. Engle had trained as the backup Lunar Module pilot for Apollo 14, which had been delayed until early 1971 during investigations into the near-disastrous system failures on the aborted Apollo 13 moon mission.

Mr. Engle returned to space in 1981 on the shuttle Columbia along with Richard “Dick” Truly. The mission — seven months after the first space shuttle orbital fight — demonstrated that the orbiter could be re-used. The flight was also the first shuttle fitted with its 15-meter-long robotic arm.

What Mr. Engle remembered from the mission was the clatter. “And very loud and noisy, very un-spacey, by the way,” he recalled. “It was like an old pickup truck with a lot of loose tools in the back.”

In 1985, Mr. Engle commanded the shuttle Discovery on a mission that deployed three commercial communications satellites and retrieved another for repairs. Mr. Engle, who was an Air Force colonel when he left NASA, spent a total of 224 hours in space.


Mr. Engle in front of the space shuttle Discovery after it is officially welcomed to the Udvar-Hazy center on April 19, 2012, in Dulles, Virginia.
 — Photograph: Bill O'Leary/The Washington Post.

Friend of Chuck Yeager

Joe Henry Engle was born in Abilene, Kanas, on August 26, 1932, and raised in nearby Chapman. His father ran a farm and taught classes in agriculture; his mother was a homemaker.

In childhood, Joe was fascinated by aviation and was part of a club with nickel-a-week dues to buy airplane magazines and build models, including a cockpit setup in a friend's basement.

He received a Bachelor's degree in Aeronautical Engineering from the University of Kansas in 1955 and received an Air Force commission through the school's Air Force Reserve Officer Training Corps.

He earned his pilot wings in 1958 and served on fighter squadrons. Yeager recommended Mr. Engle for test pilot school. After completing that training in 1961, Mr. Engle was endorsed by Yeager for a spot at the Aerospace Research Pilot School.

His wife, Mary Catherine Lawrence, died in 2004. He married the former Jeanie Carter in 2006. Other survivors include two children from his first marriage and two grandchildren.

Over the decades, a friendship deepened between Mr. Engle and Chuck Yeager. One winter, they flew to Lake Placid, New York, for a winter festival. They talked their way onto the bob-sled course and set off on a two-man sled with Yeager at the controls. At a zig-zag section, the sled flipped and the two former test pilots tumbled down the ice.

“They wouldn't let us make another run,” Mr. Engle said, laughing.

__________________________________________________________________________

• Brian Murphy joined The Washington Post after more than 20 years as a foreign correspondent and bureau chief for the Associated Press in Europe and the Middle East. Murphy has reported from more than 50 countries and has written four books. | Education: Boston College, Bachelor of Arts in Communications and Classics. | Languages spoken in addition to English:[/url] Greek, Italian. | Books by Brian Murphy: “New Men: Inside the Vatican's Elite School for American Priests” (Grosset/Putnam, 1997); “Root of Wild Madder: Chasing the History, Mystery and Lore of the Persian Carpet” (Simon & Schuster, 2005); “81 Days Below Zero: The Incredible Survival Story of a World War II Pilot in Alaska's Frozen Wilderness” (Da Capo Press, 2015); “Adrift: A True Story of Tragedy on the Icy Atlantic and the One Who Lived to Tell about It” (Da Capo Press, 2018). | Honors and Awards: Various APME awards ; Wilbur Award for International Religion Reporting, 2007.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2024/07/12/joe-engle-astronaut-nasa-dies
 

[Kiwithrottlejockey]

 
from The Washington Post…

William Calley, Army officer and face of My Lai Massacre, is dead at 80

He was the only person convicted in connection with the atrocity, in which American troops
killed hundreds of unarmed South Vietnamese men, women and children.

By HARRISON SMITH, EMILY LANGER, BRIAN MURPHY and ADAM BERNSTEIN | 7:38PM EDT — Monday, July 29, 2024


Lieutenant William L. Calley Jr., flanked by two military policemen, leaves court at Fort Benning, Georgia, after being sentenced to life imprisonment in 1971.
 — Photograph: Associated Press.

WILLIAM L. CALLEY Jr., a junior Army officer who became the only person convicted in connection with the My Lai Massacre of 1968, when U.S. soldiers slaughtered hundreds of unarmed South Vietnamese men, women and children in one of the darkest chapters in American military history, died on April 28 at a hospice center in Gainesville, Florida. He was 80.

The Washington Post obtained a copy of his death certificate from the Florida Department of Health in Alachua County. His son, Laws Calley, did not immediately respond to requests for additional information. Other efforts to reach Mr. Calley's family were unsuccessful.

The Washington Post was alerted to the death, which was not previously reported, by Zachary Woodward, a recent Harvard Law School graduate who said he noticed Mr. Calley's death while looking through public records.

Although he was once the country's most notorious Army officer, a symbol of military misconduct in a war that many considered immoral and unwinnable, Mr. Calley had lived in obscurity for decades, declining interviews while working as a jeweler in Columbus, Georgia, not far from the military base where he was court-martialed and convicted in 1971.

A junior-college dropout from South Florida, he had bounced around jobs, unsuccessfully trying to enlist in the Army in 1964, before being called up two years later. As the war escalated in Vietnam, he found a home in a military that was desperately trying to replenish its lower ranks.

Mr. Calley was quickly tapped to become a junior officer, with minimal vetting, and was soon promoted to second lieutenant, commanding a platoon in Charlie Company, a unit of the Army's Americal Division. The company sustained heavy losses in the early months of 1968, losing men to sniper fire, land mines and booby traps as the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong launched coordinated attacks in the Tet Offensive.

On the morning of March 16, 1968, the unit was airlifted by helicopter to Son My, a patchwork village of rice paddies, irrigation ditches and small settlements, including a hamlet known to U.S. soldiers as My Lai 4. Over the next few hours, Mr. Calley and other soldiers in Charlie Company shot and bayoneted women, children and elderly men, destroying the village while searching for Viet Cong guerrillas and sympathizers who were said to have been hiding in the area. Homes were burned, and some women and girls were gang-raped before being killed.

An Army investigation later concluded that 347 men, women and children had been killed, including victims of another American unit, Bravo Company. A Vietnamese estimate placed the death toll at 504.


American soldiers look over the remains of a home in the Vietnamese hamlet of My Lai in 1970. — Photograph: Associated Press.

For more than a year and a half, the details of the atrocity were hidden and covered up from the public. A report to headquarters initially characterized the attack as a significant victory, claiming that 128 “enemy” fighters had been killed. General William C. Westmoreland, the top commander in Vietnam, praised American forces at My Lai for dealing a “heavy blow” to the Viet Cong.

Meanwhile, Ronald Ridenhour, a helicopter gunner who was not at the scene but had heard of the killings weeks later, did his own probing. Back in the United States nearly a year after the massacre, he began writing letters to top political and military leaders about the bloodbath at My Lai — providing information that was credited with sparking official investigations.

Backed with photographs and witness testimony, the Army charged Mr. Calley with pre-meditated murder days before his scheduled discharge.

Although a four-paragraph Associated Press article appeared in September 1969, providing Mr. Calley's name and reporting that he was being held for allegedly murdering an unspecified number of civilians, a more complete picture of the massacre was not revealed until that November, through articles by investigative reporter Seymour M. Hersh.

Acting on a tip by an anti-war activist, Hersh worked exhaustively to track down Mr. Calley. He finally located him in the unlikeliest of places for a man facing court-martial for what at the time was believed to be 109 murders: at the senior officers' quarters of Fort Benning, now called Fort Moore, in Georgia.

Hersh's articles, distributed to newspapers around the country by the independent Dispatch News Service, received the Pulitzer Prize for international reporting, shocked a nation that was already divided over the Vietnam War and thrust Mr. Calley into the national spotlight.

Almost from the very beginning, Mr. Calley polarized Americans who variously deemed him a war criminal or a scapegoat, a mass murderer or an inexperienced officer made to take the fall for the actions of his superiors. Defenders argued that he had been forced into a brutal conflict with an often invisible enemy, then blamed for the horrors of the war.

To some, he seemed like a convenient target for military prosecutors, the lowest link in a chain of command that included Captain Ernest Medina, who was accused of bearing overall responsibility for the attacks, and Major General Samuel W. Koster, the highest-ranking officer charged with trying to cover up the massacre.

Mr. Calley was convicted of murdering at least 22 non-combatants and sentenced to life at hard labor, after a military jury rejected his defense that he was just following orders. Amid appeals, he ultimately served about three years, much of it under house arrest.

“My Lai was the absolute low point in the history of the modern U.S. military,” said Pulitzer Prize-winning military correspondent Thomas E. Ricks, whose book “The Generals: American Military Command from World War II to Today” (Penguin Press, 2012) traces the evolution of the post-World War II Army.

Beyond the atrocities committed by Mr. Calley, Ricks said it was important to remember that “there were 1,000 causes here, bad people doing bad things up and down the chain of command,” including the “second grave sin” of the coverup.

“My Lai forced a re-examination of the U.S. Army,” Ricks noted, referring to its central role in later studies about revamping military professionalism. “It was not just that hundreds of civilians had been murdered, and a score raped, but that the acts of the day were covered up by the Army chain of command.

“The incident was just not the work of a deranged lieutenant,” he continued. “Other officers were aware of what was going on. And the extensive coverup, including the destruction of documents, went all the way up to the rank of general, with two generals and three colonels implicated.”


Mr. Calley, center, flashes the peace sign from a military helicopter in South Vietnam in 1970. — Photograph: Associated Press.

‘Go and get them’

The attack on My Lai came a month and a half after the Tet Offensive. U.S. soldiers had visited the village a few times, interviewing residents while seeking intel about the Viet Cong, or VC. This time, Medina told his men in Charlie Company, the objective was to strike hard against a community believed to be harboring VC.

Destroy anything that is “walking, crawling or growling,” Medina declared in a pre-mission briefing, according to testimony given at Mr. Calley's court-martial. Asked if that included women and children, he replied that according to military intelligence, ordinary villagers should be at a nearby market. Anyone left behind was either a guerrilla or a sympathizer.

“They're all VC, now go and get them,” he said, according to trial testimony.

Around 7:30 a.m. the next morning, Mr. Calley and his platoon arrived at the village expecting heavy resistance. Instead, they found a quiet community sitting down for breakfast.

Some soldiers thought it was a trap, according to court-martial accounts. Viet Cong explosives and mines had accounted for up 90 percent of American casualties in the previous months. As Mr. Calley's men fanned out, some shot villagers while searching in vain for suspected fighters. Others used grenades to blow apart homes.

Mr. Calley's platoon herded women, children and elderly men into groups. Accounts vary on what happened next: According to Mr. Calley, Medina grew irritated by the unit's slow progress and told Mr. Calley to “get rid of” the civilians. Medina denied giving any order to harm civilians, although other soldiers remembered it differently, recalling that Medina made it clear that it was acceptable to “wipe the place out.” A few minutes later, Mr. Calley and a fellow soldier, Private First Class Paul Meadlo, were said to have opened fire.

At the court-martial, soldiers described a systematic slaughter of defenseless civilians. Entire families were wiped out by the attack. Witnesses said Mr. Calley shot a praying Buddhist monk and, when he saw a young boy crawling out of a ditch, threw the child back in and shot him. Pictures taken at the scene by an Army photographer, Ronald L. Haeberle, provided additional evidence of the massacre and were later published in newspapers and magazines.


U.S. troops torch a house during the 1968 My Lai Massacre. Many of the victims were women, children and elderly men.
 — Photograph: Pictures from History/Universal Images Group/via Getty Images.


A scene from the My Lai Massacre in 1968. — Photograph: Pictures from History/Universal Images Group/via Getty Images.

The My Lai killings were further exposed in 1969 by Ridenhour. After leaving the service, he wrote to President Richard M. Nixon, Defense Secretary Melvin R. Laird and members of Congress with his findings. An Army investigation ensued, leading to the indictment of more than a dozen men, but several of the cases unraveled before trial or ended without convictions.

In the end, only Mr. Calley was held legally responsible for playing a direct role in the massacre. He was convicted on March 29, 1971, after one of the longest court-martials in military history.

“My troops were getting massacred and mauled by an enemy I couldn't see, I couldn't feel and I couldn't touch — that nobody in the military system ever described them as anything other than Communism,” Mr. Calley said in a statement to the court. “They didn't give it a race, they didn't give it a sex, they didn't give it an age. They never let me believe it was just a philosophy in a man's mind. That was my enemy out there.”



The outpouring of support for Mr. Calley was captured in a spoken-word song, “Battle Hymn of Lieutenant Calley” — “Sir, I followed all my orders and I did the best I could; … It's hard to judge the enemy and hard to tell the good” — that was performed by Terry Nelson and sold more than 1 million copies.

After his conviction, Mr. Calley was removed from the stockade on Nixon's orders and confined to his quarters at Fort Benning. His life sentence was quickly reduced to 20 years and, in 1974, the sentence was halved again, to 10 years, after the secretary of the Army found that Mr. Calley “may have sincerely believed that he was acting in accordance with the orders he had received and that he was not aware of his responsibility to refuse an illegal order.”


Mr. Calley is taken from the Fort Benning stockade in 1974. — Photograph: Joe Holloway Jr./Associated Press.

Later that year, Mr. Calley was freed on bail and paroled. He seldom spoke about My Lai, although in 2009 he delivered what was reportedly his first public apology for the massacre, at a meeting of the Kiwanis Club of Greater Columbus.

“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.”

During the speech, he also said that he had just been following orders, a declaration that irritated critics who questioned whether he had experienced a change of heart.


Mr. Calley in 1970. — Photograph: Associated Press.

An ‘average’ schoolboy

William Laws Calley Jr., the second of four siblings and the only son, was born in Miami on June 8, 1943. His father, a Navy veteran of World War II, sold heavy construction equipment. As the business prospered, the family began vacationing at a cottage in North Carolina, and a teenage Mr. Calley — nicknamed Rusty for his reddish-brown hair — was given his own car.

Mr. Calley was often described by peers and adults who knew him as an “average” American schoolboy: reserved, polite and pleasant but, at 5-foot-3 and 130 pounds, sometimes struggling for attention in school and social settings.

Academically, he was in a downward spiral. He was forced to repeat seventh grade after being caught cheating on an exam. He later spent two years attending military academies in Florida and Georgia before graduating from Miami Edison Senior High School in 1962 in the bottom quarter of his class.

After flunking out of Palm Beach Junior College, he supported himself with jobs as a hotel bell-hop and restaurant dish-washer. During a bitter labor strike in 1963, Florida East Coast Railway hired Mr. Calley as a switchman and then promoted him to conductor. Among other incidents, Mr. Calley once let freight cars get loose and smash into a loading ramp.

Around this time, Mr. Calley's home life grew unstable. His mother was dying of cancer, and his father, who developed diabetes, saw his business fall into bankruptcy. In 1964, William Calley first tried to enlist in the Army but was rejected because of a hearing defect.

He began drifting west and south in search of work. At one point, he was on assignment in Mexico for an American insurance investigator when he walked off the job, saying he was “bored and frustrated” and didn't understand what he was doing. Mr. Calley left for San Francisco, where his backlog of mail began to catch up with him, including a Selective Service notice saying his earlier rejection was being reconsidered.

On his way back to Florida, his car broke down in Albuquerque. He walked into a local Army induction center, explained his situation and enlisted as a clerk-trainee in July 1966. He was soon selected for officer candidate school by a senior officer who took notice of Mr. Calley's brief stints at military academies.

Despite the Army's acute need for junior officers in Vietnam, historian Howard Jones wrote in his 2017 book “My Lai: Vietnam, 1968, and the Descent into Darkness” (Oxford University Press, 2017), “The Citadel, West Point, and the Virginia Military Institute had been unable to fill the growing demand, and the Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) had fallen out of favor on many college campuses. The army immediately needed more recruits from OCS — which opened the door to Calley.”

Mr. Calley graduated 120th in his OCS class of 156.

“One thing at OCS was nobody said, ‘Now, there will be innocent civilians there’,” Mr. Calley recalled in his 1970 memoir, “Lieutenant Calley: His Own Story” (Viking, 1971), written with journalist John Sack. “It was drummed into us, ‘Be sharp! On guard! As soon as you think these people won't kill you, ZAP! In combat, you haven't friends! You have enemies!’ Over and over at OCS we heard this and I told myself, I'll act as if I'm never secure. As if everyone in Vietnam would do me in. As if everyone's bad.”

After his release from military custody, Mr. Calley moved to Columbus and married Penny Vick, whose family owned a jewelry shop, in 1976. Smithsonian magazine later reported that their wedding guests included U.S. District Judge J. Robert Elliott, who had attempted to get Mr. Calley's conviction overturned.

Mr. Calley and Vick had a son, Laws, and later divorced. Information on survivors was not immediately available.

Mr. Calley reportedly carried an umbrella at times to prevent photographers from taking pictures of him. He wished, he said, to “sink into anonymity.”

Curiously, his death certificate matched known details about his life — including information on his birth, career, name and nickname — but featured one notable omission. On a line asking if he had ever served “in U.S. armed forces,” the answer given was “no.”

__________________________________________________________________________

• Rae Riiska and Monika Mathur contributed to this report.

• Harrison Smith is a reporter on The Washington Post's obituaries desk, where he has worked since 2015. He covers people who have made a significant impact on their field, city or country — a group of the recently deceased that includes big-game hunters, single-handed sailors, fallen dictators, Olympic champions and the creator of the Hawaiian pizza. He previously worked for KidsPost and contributed to Washingtonian and Chicago magazines, among other publications. He co-founded the South Side Weekly newspaper in Chicago before moving to the District of Columbia in 2015. | Education: University of Chicago, Artium Baccalaureus in English and Philosophy. | Honors and Awards: Society of Professional Journalists D.C.'s Dateline Award for series, 2019; Society of Professional Obituary Writers' obituary writer of the year, 2019. | Professional Affiliations: Society of Professional Obituary Writers.

• Emily Langer has been a reporter on The Washington Post’s obituaries desk since 2011. She previously worked for the Outlook and Local Living sections. Before joining The Post in 2007, she was a researcher for “The Almanac of American Politics”. From 2010 to 2011, she was a Fulbright fellow in Trieste, Italy. | Education: Georgetown University, Bachelor of Arts in Italian and English. | Languages spoken in addition to English: Italian.

• Brian Murphy joined The Washington Post after more than 20 years as a foreign correspondent and bureau chief for the Associated Press in Europe and the Middle East. Murphy has reported from more than 50 countries and has written four books. | Education: Boston College, Bachelor of Arts in Communications and Classics. | Languages spoken in addition to English:[/url] Greek, Italian. | Books by Brian Murphy: “New Men: Inside the Vatican's Elite School for American Priests” (Grosset/Putnam, 1997); “Root of Wild Madder: Chasing the History, Mystery and Lore of the Persian Carpet” (Simon & Schuster, 2005); “81 Days Below Zero: The Incredible Survival Story of a World War II Pilot in Alaska's Frozen Wilderness” (Da Capo Press, 2015); “Adrift: A True Story of Tragedy on the Icy Atlantic and the One Who Lived to Tell about It” (Da Capo Press, 2018). | Honors and Awards: Various APME awards ; Wilbur Award for International Religion Reporting, 2007.

• Adam Bernstein grew up Connecticut. He worked at the Bakersfield Californian, covering cock-fighting (“residents are crying foul about crying fowl”) and other news stories; the Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk; and The Gazette in Montgomery County, Maryland, before joining The Washington Post in 1999. One of his feature stories for The Washington Post led to the reprinting of Roger Hall's comic memoir of World War II espionage, “You're Stepping on My Cloak and Dagger”. | Education: University of Virginia, Bachelor of Arts; Columbia University, Master of Arts in Journalism. | Languages spoken in addition to English: Spanish. | Honors and Awards: Society of Professional Journalists “Dateline Award”, first place and finalist for feature writing, 2019; Society of Professional Journalists “Dateline Award”, finalist for feature writing, 2017; American Society of Newspaper Editors, finalist for Best Obituary Writing, 2005; Society for Features Journalism, second place for feature specialty writing, 2022. | Professional Affiliations: The Society of Professional Obituary Writers, president of the society.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2024/07/29/william-calley-dead-my-lai-massacre/