Rusty Calley: Unlikely Villain

Few newsmen have spent more time with Lieut. Calley than TIME Correspondent Peter Range, who in the long course of the trial often joined the lieutenant after court hours. Last week Range met with Calley before the verdict, and the two talked long into the night. His report:

RUSTY CALLEY stands convicted of wanton slaughter, but in his private life he is an unlikely villain. He is not a monster, not a callous warrior, not the tattooed caricature of the professional killer who does target practice on weekends and keeps a rifle mounted in the rear window of a pickup truck. In the evening, casually attired in blue jeans or bellbottoms, he could be any young American.

Calley has no history of anything more violent than waterskiing. He still does not own a gun or even keep a fishing rod around the house. Gregarious and social--during the trial he never liked to be alone--he is a partygoer, a host; in restaurants he is always the one to stand up and welcome latecomers, making sure that the waiters notice their arrival. But it is at home, an apartment on Arrowhead Road in Fort Benning, that Calley most enjoys himself.

In the evenings he holds forth from his favorite spot behind the padded bar in the corner of the living room, or demonstrates his culinary talents in the cramped kitchen. Calley learned to cook in Viet Nam, where "I used to tell about six guys to give me their K rations and I'd fix us up a banquet if they'd dig my foxhole for me. I'd pull wild onions out of the ground and somebody would come along with a rabbit or a chicken, and I'd make us a feast over an open fire." One day recently, he concocted a tomato gravy flavored with every spice in the kitchen, poured it over toast and called it breakfast.

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But the outgoingness, the high spirits, are not to be confused with braggadocio. The stigma of being called a war criminal, the 19 agonizing months of facing charges for premeditated murder, have taken their toll. When the Army first charged him, Calley went into a deep depression. "After about a month," he explains, "I just faced myself and asked, Do you want to quit living?' At worst, t knew I had one year left, and I decided I wanted to do something before 1 die. I decided I would look other people in the eye again."

Galley's thoughts are monopolized by the proceedings against him, his feelings of doubt, his guilt. There has been a regular evening television ritual in which he, his comely, red-haired steady friend, Anne Moore, and a few close friends monitored the trial reports on all three networks. So voluminous has Galley's mail been that for seven months he has employed a secretary, Shirley Sewell, to answer it.

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Though Calley has made no effort to travel incognito, sallies outside the confines of Fort Benning have been painful. "Sometimes, like in airports," he says, "I can feel everybody staring at me. I have stages of feeling very paranoid. The psychological testing showed I was paranoid, but hell, there are people trying to kill me."

Calley has also developed a mortal fear of accidental death, not for the usual reason but because the world might think he was a coward who took his own life. "If I got killed in my car on the way to Atlanta," he explains, "everyone would think Calley copped out. I had a room in Delmonico's Hotel in New York once with a floor-to-ceiling window. I was afraid to go to sleep at night because I thought I might sleepwalk through one of those 18th-floor windows and everybody would think Calley committed suicide."

Despite such stresses, Calley has demonstrated throughout a remarkable restraint, a stiff refusal to lapse into bitterness. He refuses to hate the Army or the country, or even the man trying to take away his life and freedom. At midtrial, Calley said of the Army prosecutor, Captain Aubrey M. Daniel: "He's just doing his job." When Daniel ended the trial with a devastating, impassioned plea for conviction, Calley remarked afterward and with obvious sincerity: "I think he did a great job."

Rusty Calley did kill innocent civilians, though not perhaps out of any inherent murderous impulses. One psychologist who tested him described him as "a rather passive young man harboring a deep-seated sense of inadequacy, insecurity and inferiority." Surmised one of his examiners: "Undoubtedly his ability to carry out the orders [he claimed] he received in the briefing the night before [My Lai] would be interpreted by him not only as a measure of his competence as an officer but of his basic efficacy as a mature male."

That Calley is remorseful is beyond question. At a New Year's Eve party in Atlanta, he proposed a heartfelt toast to "a lot more love and happiness in the world." He speaks of the horrors of war with more than the usual self-serving rhetoric. "I had been told what war is like," he says, "but I never knew until I got there. I was never taught the tragedy of war. After seeing war, you just sit down and cry."

Yet his curious, ill-defined idealism is also a strength, for he professes to believe that if the lesson of My Lai can be universally learned, he will, in part, be exonerated. "I'm sorry anybody had to die there," he says of My Lai, "sorry I ever had to kill a soldier in Viet Nam. In My Lai, I made one of a thousand mistakes I made in Viet Nam. I was just as wrong going to Viet Nam as to My Lai. But I'll be very proud to have been in the U.S. Army and fought at My Lai if it shows the world just what war is." Theatrics? A beguiling appeal for sympathy? Perhaps. But possibly the words of a man who now sincerely hates suffering and killing.

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Calley first heard the news of President Nixon's order releasing him from prison on television; as he left the stockade, one of the 50-odd cheering onlookers remarked: "Now at least he's not a prisoner of war in his own country." Removing Calley from the stockade had an enormous symbolic effect, but it will not change his life all that notably. To his dismay, all beer and liquor were removed from his apartment. He has a permanent MP guard in the apartment. He may leave his home only under escort, to eat at an Army mess hall and to exercise for one hour daily. He may talk on the telephone or see only those friends on a "correspondence and visitation list." All of which makes for a curious, almost pseudo confinement, one dictated not by the gravity of Galley's crimes as much as by the anticipation of public reaction to the price he must pay for them, a bounty of possibilities ranging from life imprisonment to executive pardon.

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