LEUT. WILLIAM CALLEY'S secretary, Mrs. Shirley Sewell, had just come back to his apartment with the 1971 tags for Calley's Volkswagen and motorboat. Calley had just got up from a nap when Captain Brooks Doyle Jr., his young deputy military counsel, walked through the door. "They've got a verdict, Rusty," Doyle said. Calley stopped in his tracks, his face a mask of fear, his right fist pounding into his left palm. "So they're finally ready," he mumbled, turning into the bedroom to don his Army greens. Half an hour later, Calley walked shakily before the six-man jury, saluted and heard the verdict: on three counts, guilty of premeditated murder of at least 22 Vietnamese civilians; on the fourth count, guilty of assault with intent to commit murder on a child approximately two years old.
Ashen, Calley marched off to the Fort Benning stockade. The next afternoon he was back before the court-martial to make a final statement before sentencing. Choking back tears, occasionally gasping for breath, Calley spoke first strongly, then in a breaking voice. "Yesterday you stripped me of all my honor. Please, by your actions that you take here today, don't strip future soldiers of their honor." Captain Aubrey M. Daniel III, 29, Calley's brilliant, tenacious prosecutor, followed. "You did not strip him of his honor," Daniel told the jury. "What he did stripped him of his honor. It never can be honor to kill unarmed men, women and children. We know that you will arrive at an appropriate sentence." The next day Calley made his final appearance in the courtroom. Looking up at Calley occasionally, Colonel Clifford Ford, president of the jury, read out the formal phrases of the sentence: ". . . confined at hard labor for the length of your natural life . . . dismissed from the service . . . forfeit all pay and allowances." Quietly Calley replied: "I'll do my best, sir." Later he telephoned his secretary, who was on the edge of tears. "Listen, sugar," said Calley, "don't break down on me now."
Even after months of grisly testimony, the jury's stern judgment came as a shock. It was as though the verdict had finally brought the ultimate horror of My Lai home to Americans, and acceptance of that horror was agonizing. The widespread initial reaction to My Lai—that no American soldier could have done such a thing—in many cases changed to the notion that Calley had only been doing his duty. In a new book called Sanctions for Evil, the title of one chapter sardonically sums up the horrendous confusion: "It Never Happened and Besides They Deserved It." With an astounding, indeed sickening distortion of moral sensibility, many Americans tried to turn Calley into a hero. Many others sought refuge in the oversimple conclusion that Calley was merely a scapegoat. Some echoed the argument of Calley's chief defense counsel, George Latimer, that the Army sent Calley to Viet Nam to kill and should not punish him for doing precisely that. Says Harvard Sociologist Nathan Glazer: "Who is at fault? The people who gave the orders or the people who fought? This question will dominate American politics for the next ten years."
Battle Hymn
Much of the sympathy for Calley seemed to be centered in the South and in the Midwest, and some of