Villains and Heroes

America lost a villain last week, Lieutenant William Calley, the only soldier convicted for the worse known atrocity in the Viet Nam war, the massacre at My Lai (pronounced mee LYE; the Vietnamese call the village Sơn Mỹ).

Yet for some he was a hero. For many in a divided America, he was the hero celebrated in the 1971 spoken word recording, “The Battle Hymn of Lt. Calley.”