Calley gives evidence

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32539, 24 February 1971, Page 15

Calley gives evidence

(N.Z.P.A.-Reuter—Copyright) FORT BENNING (Georgia), Feb. 23. A United States Army lieutenant, William Calley, aged 27, is due to give his version today of what happened when he led his platoon into My Lai, the namlet where many South Vietnamese men, women and children were massacred. Calley, who began his testimony yesterday, was about to reach his account of My Lai when the court-martial judge (Colonel Reid Kennedy) adjourned the proceedings until this morning. The defendant, who is charged with murdering 102 South Vietnamese civilians on March 16, 1968, is expected to be in the witness-box all day today and probably for part of tomorrow. His lawyers contend that he was following orders at My Lai. and was suffering from combat stress, which impaired his ability to reject an illegal order. Calley has testified that he jwas taught by the Army that all orders were to be as'sumed legal. “You could be

court-martialled for refusing an order, and for refusing an order in the face of the enemy you could be sentenced to death,” he said. “If I had questioned an order, 1 was supposed to carry the order out and then come back and make my complaint,” he added. Calley said that the Army had also taught him in the field that everyone in Vietnam was a potential enemy,; including men, women and, children. “Men and women are equally dangerous,” Calley said, “and because of the unsuspectability of children, they are even more dangerous.

“Most women are better shots than men are; they fight equally the same.

“Children can be used as warning signals. One of the best ways for a villager to alert the Viet Cong that an American unit has arrived is to give a small child a grenade and let it throw it at American troops. “Children would collect and distribute booby traps and mines. Children are very good at planting mines.” Combat stress had affected him, he said, particularly during the Communists’ Tet offensive in January, 1968, be-

cause his home base came under heavy attack. Testifying in a calm, soft voice, Calley said that he became filled with anger, hate and fear when he saw the remains of members of his company who had been killed in a minefield. “I think the thing that really hit me hard were just the heavy boots,” Calley said. “There must have been six boots there with the feet still iin them, brains all over the i place, and everything was just saturated with blood, just rifles, just blown in half.

“I believe there was one arm on it and a piece of a man’s face, half of a man’s face.”

Calley, who said he had been on a three-day pass when they were killed, told the court that he felt remorse for losing his men in the minefield “remorse that they ever had to go to Vietnam, and remorse for being in a situation where I was completely helpless.” The last witness to give evidence before Calley went into the witness-box, Dr Wilbur Hamman, a psychiatrist, said that Calley was so impaired mentally that he could not form an intent to kill, one of the elements of premeditated murder.