An Average American Boy?

THERE is little in the life of William Laws Calley Jr., whom G.I.s of his old Americal Division now refer to noncommittally as "that lieutenant." to suggest that he would become the focal figure of controversy in so horrible a nightmare as the My Lai massacre. To his hometown friends in Miami, he has always been known as "Rusty," for his reddish-tinged brown hair. He was born in Miami 26 years ago, and grew up with his three sisters in a two-story stucco house in the city's northeastern section. Mrs. Arnold Minkley, who lived across the street from the Galleys for several years, remembers Rusty: "He was a wonderful boy, and would do anything for you."

To another neighbor, Karl Zaret, Rusty was "a good kid." Zaret adds: "I believe Rusty was just carrying out orders. The boy I knew respected his parents. He listened to what they said. He was a very reserved, quiet boy and very cooperative." Rusty's father, a Navy veteran, sold heavy construction equipment, and business was good. The Calleys had a vacation house in North Carolina, and in high school Rusty had his own car. He was too small for varsity sports --even now he stands only 5 ft. 3 in. and weighs 130 Ibs.--but he spent a good deal of time at sandlot football, water-skiing and skin diving.

Rusty left Miami for two years at Georgia Military Academy, but returned to graduate from Miami's Edison High School. His best subjects were government and English history. Rusty was on the debating team, and he was popular enough with his classmates to be elected .to the prestigious Mike and Mask Club. He dated regularly, dressed well, drank beer with his buddies and kept things moving in any group. "He'd come up with things quickly at the right time to make people laugh," says Rick Smith, an Edison classmate. There was a deeper side. Another high school friend, Chuck Queen, calls Calley "a moral character" and "compassionate."

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After Rusty left high school, things did not go so well. He quit Palm Beach Junior College in Lake Worth after a year, dropping out with two Cs, one D and four Fs in his seven courses. "It just seemed like the 13th year in high school," Calley says now. He had an ulcer at 19. After he left college, he worked as a hotel bellhop, then a restaurant dishwasher. He became a strikebreaking switchman on the Florida East Coast railroad; soon he was promoted to freight-train conductor and earning as much as $300 a week with overtime. He once got demerits for letting several cars get loose from a locomotive and smash into a loading ramp. Still, a Florida East Coast terminal superintendent says: "He was a hard worker. I'd like to have him back."

During this time, Calley's father's business was slowing down and his mother became mortally ill with cancer. The father, a diabetic whose health was also failing, was forced to sell the family house in Miami and move to the North Carolina cabin. Rusty stayed on in Florida. Once he and Chuck Queen flew up to visit the Calleys. "He was upset about it," Queen recalls. "It was a bad situation, but Rusty kept it within him." Young Calley always seemed calm and even-tempered. "I can't ever remember him getting mad," says Rick Smith. "He never let things faze him too much."

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."

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