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In 1965, he started drifting west in a brand-new Buick Wildcat. He worked his way across the country to New Mexico, taking pictures of real estate for insurance appraisers from time to time. In Albuquerque in mid-1966, a month before his mother's death, he enlisted in the Army. Once in uniform, he was soon recommended for officer candidate school, commissioned a lieutenant and posted to Viet Nam. His elder sister. Mrs. Marian Keesling, of Gainesville, Fla., reports that Calley clothed and fed a little Vietnamese girl; one day he returned to find the child's house bombed and the girl missing. "He was pretty broken up about the child," says Mrs. Keesling.
He has no qualms about the U.S role in Viet Nam, but rarely talked about it. "I guess everyone has their own feelings about the war," he said recently. "I doubt if I can explain all of mine." Perhaps, after the family reverses at home, he found in the Army a new emotional anchor. "He liked the Army," Queen says. "I think it kind of gave him a home." One of the members of his platoon in C Company, ex-Corporal William Kern, found Calley entirely ordinary. "There was nothing strange about him," Kern recalls. "He wasn't the best officer in the world. He wasn't the worst, either."
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Calley volunteered for extra duty in Viet Nam after his regular one-year tour was over. He came back with a Bronze Star with cluster and a Purple Heart, and thought seriously of making the Army a career—"until this happened." Bearing a charm bracelet for his youngest sister, a ham for his father and a couple of bottles of liquor for his buddies, Calley returned home on leave from Viet Nam last Christmas.This was nine months after My Lai. Tony Massero, a high school friend, says: "He didn't seem like he was nervous or in some sort of shock." To Smith, "he looked like the same old Rusty."
TIME Correspondent Ken Danforth interviewed Calley before the Army announced that the lieutenant would be court-martialed on charges of premeditated murder. Danforth saw him again at Fort Benning last week, but this time was not allowed to speak to him. "He could communicate only with a gesture of recognition," Danforth reports. "He shuffled papers nervously, trying to look busy at his practically empty desk. Under the circumstances, he seemed reasonably cheerful." Calley is attached to the staff of the deputy post commander, Colonel Talton Long, designing plans for the colonel's parking lot and working on an infantry museum project while he helps prepare the defense for his court-martial. One month ago Calley visited his ailing father, who now lives in a trailer park in Hialeah. "I want to help my boy, but I just don't know what to do," the senior Calley says.
Former Captain Fred Brown of Tacoma, Wash., knew Calley for six months while he was on duty in Viet Nam and liked the lieutenant. "He was sort of an all-American boy, a real nice guy. The only hang-up he had was the same one everybody there had, to stay out of the line of fire until you could get home." Says William Thomas, who was dean of boys when Rusty was attending Edison High School: "He was just an average American boy."