Bizarre as it may seem, an internet search for the name William Calley now leads you directly to his alumni association web page at Edison High School in Miami, Florida. The first thing you see is his graduation picture, class of 1962, in which he already wears the look of goofy vacuity made familiar during his army court-martial and brief period of public notoriety. There follows a short, upbeat paragraph about what he did in the years immediately after high school. Only then does the narrative turn to his involvement in the My Lai massacre and his subsequent prosecution for the mass murder of Vietnamese civilians. The tone is mildly sympathetic, although the narrative also provides links to a My Lai website giving an account of the incident based on testimony presented at trial. An illustration accompanies these paragraphs. It is the famous Alfred E. Neumann caricature of Calley in uniform from the cover of the National Lampoon. One finds it a measure of the casual horror involved that the site designers did not choose the equally famous Esquire cover photo in which he is shown with a lapful of cute Asian children. The National Lampoon illustration has the odd merit at least of looking very much like the graduation picture. The entry then concludes, as if the subject had really spent his life as an accountant or a plumbing contractor, with a brief account of his subsequent attempts to live anonymously in Columbus, Georgia as a manager of his father-in-law's jewelry store.
Thus Miami Edison High School, his alma mater, preserves the memory of William L. Calley, Jr., the former U.S. Army second lieutenant who, on the morning of March 16, 1968, entered the village of My Lai 4 with a platoon of infantry and initiated the slaughter of between 400 and 500 Vietnamese civilians, using automatic weapons, grenades, knives, and bayonets. The killing rampage, eventually involving all three platoons of C Company, 1/20th Infantry, 11th Infantry Brigade, Americal Division, included countless individual acts of rape, torture, murder, and mutilation.
