Yesterday, news outlets reported the passing of William Calley, perpetrator of the Vietnam War’s most infamous atrocity. On March 16, 1968 Calley’s platoon massacred hundreds of Vietnamese civilians (the exact number remains in dispute, anywhere from 347 to 503) in the hamlet of Son My, usually rendered as My Lai. Calley’s troops committed a cold-blooded rampage of calculated murder, including mutilation, mass rape and, incredibly, taking a lunch break to rest from the slaughter until they were stopped by an American officer, Hugh Thompson, who threatened to open fire on Calley’s men from his helicopter if they did not desist. A year-long cover-up by the Defense Department slowly crumbled as conscience-stricken soldiers came forward, and journalist Seymour Hersh published a series of reports including grisly, graphic photographs of the massacre.

Calley, and twenty-six other soldiers involved in the carnage, were indicted for murder. Calley was the only one tried, and he became an unexpected cultural flashpoint. While liberals and the antiwar left viewed him as exemplifying America’s unjust war, many conservatives rallied around Calley as being unfairly prosecuted by an oversensitive military. “What do they give the soldiers bullets for,” one Boston man asked a reporter, “to put in their pockets?” A letter writer to the Wall Street Journal insisted that “I don’t believe it actually happened,” claiming that “the story was planted [in the media] by Vietcong sympathizers.” Conservative politicians like George Wallace took up the refrain, with the Alabama Governor even claiming that Army photographer Ron Haeberle‘s ghastly pictures had been staged to discredit the war effort.

This backlash to the backlash led, inevitably, to popular culture. Country music was already making a sharp conservative turn by the early ’70s, and radio stations and record stores were filled with execrable verses either praising Calley’s actions, or viewing him as a scapegoat for failed military policies. This wasn’t, perhaps, that shocking in a country that had made Barry Sadler’s The Ballad of the Green Berets a number one hit, flocked to John Wayne’s propaganda movie The Green Berets or cheered the Kent State shootings and the Hardhat violence against protesters; for many “Middle Americans,” defensiveness towards the military often overruled opposition to the war. Still, it’s mind-boggling to consider that over 60 pieces of My Lai-inspired music, most of them virulently pro-Calley, were recorded between 1970 and 1973.

“We’re a sick, sick society who’s nailed Calley to a tree,” crooned Texas rockabilly veteran Big Bill Johnson in Set Lt. Calley Free, whose outrage was, at least directed at the politicians and brass scapegoating Calley for their unjust war. Free Blue’s Set Calley Free similarly compared Calley to Jesus Christ, complaining that the Lieutenant was “nailed to a cross;” a rock group called The Senators even depicted Calley hauling a cross to Calvary in the art for their single, War’s Cross. Lest these songs seem unusually blasphemous, consider the words of Reverend Michael Lord from Calley’s hometown of Columbus, Georgia. Speaking at a “Rally for Calley” in the spring of 1971, the Reverend admonished his audience that “there was a crucifixion two thousand years ago of a man named Jesus Christ. I don’t think we need another crucifixion of a man named Rusty Calley.”

Other songs traded piety for rage. Billy Starr, a Kentucky country musician, mourned that men like Calley “make the world a better place for everyone to live” (presumably excluding his Vietnamese victims) in A Letter from Vietnam. The most vile was Oklahoma singer Lucky Clark’s My Lai, which praised Calley’s actions in the “commie infested village, the town they call My Lai” and invoked the age-old refrain: “If we can’t stand by our fighting men, what is this country coming to?” Merritt Jordan’s Pardon this Soldier was the most mawkish, pleading with Nixon to “set him free / He was doing his job for you and for me.” Easily the strangest was R&B artist James Armstrong’s Thank God Calley Wasn’t Black, which defended Calley as “fighting here to kill or be killed,” but also pondered if Calley’s defenders would be so vocal if he’d been African-American. Plentiful though it was, little of this amoral kitsch actually charted.

The most successful by far was The Battle Hymn of William Calley. Written by amateur songwriters Julian Wilson (a civil engineer) and James M. Smith (an Alabama attorney), and recorded by twenty-seven year old Russellville, Alabama radio DJ Terry Nelson (accompanied by studio musicians dubbed “C Company” after Calley’s unit), it’s a spoken-word poem set to the tune of the Battle Hymn of the Republic. Nelson, after whimsically recounting Calley’s supposedly idyllic childhood “wearing a saucepan on his head” as he pretended to be a soldier, assumed Calley’s perspective on fighting a godforsaken war that nobody home understood, or cared about. As with Clark’s song, Nelson evoked the civilians who evidently refused to see the soldiers’ perspective, and also stabbed them in the back by protesting the war:

I’ve seen my buddies ambushed on the left and on the right / And their youthful bodies riddled by the bullets of the night / Where all the rules are broken and the only law is might… / While we’re fighting in the jungles they were marching in the street / While we’re dying in the rice fields they were helping our defeat / While we’re facing V.C. bullets they were sounding a retreat

Nelson’s angry lament, released in April 1971, became “the nation’s hottest single property,” selling over two million discs upon its release and reaching #37 on the Billboard charts. Numerous other artists covered the song, which received constant airplay in Southern and small town markets for years to come. A few of these cover versions charted, but Capitol Records balked at allowing country veteran Tex Ritter to record his own version. “If we want to glorify a war hero, let’s find someone other than Lt. Calley,” one Capitol executive commented. The Armed Forces Network agreed, refusing to play this or any other Calley-related songs to soldiers in Vietnam.

Bolstered by such songs, and a general sense that even if guilty, Calley was in fact being blamed for others’ failures (not unjustly, as his commanding officer Captain Ernest Medina received no prison time despite sanctioning Calley’s actions), public sentiment turned towards the Lieutenant. Politicians from Wallace (who visited Calley in prison) to Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter (who asked Georgians to drive for a week with their lights on in protest) rallied around the disgraced Lieutenant, with state legislatures across the country issuing resolutions in support of him. This sympathy spread to the media, with Esquire running a nauseating cover featuring Calley, smiling gleefully amidst a group of uncomfortable-looking Vietnamese children, alongside a sympathetic profile.

Calley was ultimately convicted of murder, but public pressure caused the Army to reduce his life sentence to 20 years in prison. Richard Nixon, always attuned to public sentiment, reduced Calley’s sentence further to house arrest at Fort Benning, Georgia, allowing the Lieutenant to bask in fan mail from admirers and visits from attractive young girlfriends. While Calley expressed newfound ambivalence towards the war, and his own actions, overall he couldn’t complain about a cozy house arrest compared to his earlier sentence.

Ultimately, 79 percent of Americans believed that Calley had received too harsh of a sentence for his actions – even if the motives for reaching that conclusion varied. “Most people don’t give a shit whether he killed them or not,” Nixon concluded with his customary sensitivity. Terry Nelson’s hoped-for recording career went nowhere after a follow-up album flopped, but he went onto a successful career as a songwriter, collaborating with well-known artists like Smokey Robinson, Alabama, The Carpenters and Air Supply. While Nelson never recorded himself screaming what the fuck at his TV, he and the other Calley celebrators set a precedent for angry conservative artists riding cultural backlash to chart success.

After several years of legal appeals Calley was paroled and released from custody, relocating first to Columbus, Georgia, then to Tallahassee, Florida. He worked in his father-in-law’s jewelry store, as a real estate agent and various other jobs. He expressed remorse for his actions near the end of his life, but generally avoided the public eye before his death earlier this year. Remorse or not, history has judged Calley harshly, but the knee-jerk backlash his crimes and trial generated among many Americans remains depressingly familiar.

ETA: This article would not be possible with historian Justin Brummer and the Vietnam Song Project’s diligent compiling of these and other tracks of the war era. Thanks to Liliburne, here’s a great piece by Erik Loomis reflecting on Calley, My Lai and the public’s reaction in more depth. Thanks also to commenters claudewc and Gallopin’ Gulgamesh for corrections and additions to this header.