Word: calley
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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...
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...
...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...
...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...
...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...