There’s a song that’s been sitting in my head a long time.
Longer than I’d like to admit.
It comes back whenever the war talk starts up again.
And lately, it won’t leave.
It’s Country Joe McDonald’s old Vietnam song.
Most folks my age can hear it the second they see that count.
One, two, three.
Joe wrote it back in the mid-sixties.
He was a young man out in California, watching the draft pull boys out of every town in the country.
He didn’t write a protest speech.
He wrote a joke.
A bright, bouncing, happy little tune you could clap along to.
And every verse cut like a razor.
He went after the big strong men who were told Uncle Sam needed them again.
He went after Wall Street, making good money selling the tools of war.
He went after the generals, who saw their big chance at last.
And then he went after the mothers and fathers.
The ones who packed their sons off, proud, and got them back in a box.
That was the one that stopped you cold.
Because it wasn’t a joke by then.
It was the evening news.
Country Joe Mcdonald – Feel Like i’m Fixing to Die Rag – Woodstock ’69
In the summer of 1969, Joe stood in front of hundreds of thousands of kids at Woodstock.
He led them in that cheer. Loud. Rude. On purpose.
Then he told them they’d never stop the war if they couldn’t sing better than that.
And they sang.
Louder.
I was not at Woodstock.
In 1972 I got my own draft notice.
I walked into a recruiter’s office instead of waiting.
They gave me Vietnam or Germany.
I picked Germany.
Plenty of boys I knew didn’t get a choice.
So when that song plays in my head, it isn’t nostalgia.
It’s a roll call.
Here’s why it’s back.
This week a report came out, built on people inside the White House who wouldn’t give their names.
It said the President might order a major strike in the Middle East.
It said he talked about destroying the entire nation of Iran.
One adviser called it political suicide.
Now I’ll tell you where my mind went.
It went to the worst thing.
When a man talks about wiping out a whole nation, there aren’t many weapons that do that.
I pray I’m wrong.
The report doesn’t say nuclear. I’m the one saying it, because I’m old enough to know what those words point at.
But let’s walk down that road a minute.
Because somebody should.
If that line ever got crossed, I don’t believe this country would sit still.
Not for a week. Not for a day.
For eighty years, since 1945, we’ve been raised on one idea.
You don’t use those weapons first.
That idea runs through every church, every party, and every kitchen table in America.
It’s not politics. It’s bone.
And there are about 64 million of us boomers still alive.
We’re the ones who did duck-and-cover under our school desks.
We’re the ones who learned what a mushroom cloud meant before we learned long division.
We carried that fear our whole lives.
You think we’d stay home?
I believe the boomers alone would roll their wheelchairs up to his front door.
Walkers. Canes. Oxygen tanks if they had to.
I know I’d feel it in my gut the same day.
And I don’t think I’d be alone.
That’s the thing about Joe’s song.
It asked the question nobody in power wanted to answer.
What are we fightin’ for?
Nobody gave a straight answer in 1965.
Nobody gave one in 1969.
And fifty-eight thousand American names ended up on a black wall in Washington.
So I’m asking again.
What are we fightin’ for?
A war the country doesn’t want?
A threat made on a Sunday afternoon?
Oil prices climbing while folks count the weeks to an election?
Joe’s song made people laugh until they realized they were crying.
That’s what good truth does.
It gets past your guard.
I don’t want to sing that song again for real.
I want it to stay an old record.
Something my grandkids find in a box and ask about.
Not something they live.
But if the men in charge forget what those count-offs cost, somebody has to remind them.
Maybe that’s what we old folks are still for.
We remember.
We sang it once.
And if we have to, we’ll sing it louder.
One, two, three.
Somebody answer the question this time.
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This post was drafted with AI governed assistance and reviewed and directed by Michael S. Faust Sr. before publication.
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