John Prine, War Correspondent
(Scott Hudson and friends, Vietnam, 1971)
John Prine wrote several songs focusing on the American experience in Vietnam. In those songs, Prine conveyed the sense of betrayal to our country’s ideas and the far worse betrayal inflicted on the 58,200 American soldiers killed in the Vietnam War. Prine realized Americans, either in uniform or those safely observing thousands of miles away, came to understand the betrayals.
Americans were expected to sacrifice their own lives and those of loved ones. All the while, Americans were also expected to accept the lies of the presidential administrations running the war. The lies started early on: “We are not about to send American boys nine or ten thousand miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves.” “Light at the end of the tunnel.” “We believe peace is at hand.”
In a great country’s great military misadventure, bad things unraveled for many years. Pain was felt decades after the last helicopter left Saigon. Prine exposes pain’s numerous paths in “Sam Stone.” Stone, a young soldier, carries the American Ideal to Vietnam but returns stateside addicted to heroin. Sam’s children lament “there’s a hole in Daddy’s arm where the money goes.” Finally, Stone’s worn body can take no more and he checks out for good. His family is left without him and left with nothing. They have to sell their home in order to give him a proper burial. His coffin bears Old Glory. It’s a tribute and it’s a death sentence.
“Sam Stone” was included on Prine’s debut album, John Prine, released in 1971. On the album, Prine comments further on the Vietnam fiasco, this time satirically, with “Your Flag Decal Won’t Get You Into Heaven Anymore,” as the man “standing in the pearly gate” explains Heaven is “already overcrowded from your dirty little war.”
Prine followed up the next year with his second album, Diamonds In The Rough, which featured “The Great Compromise,” an allegory about the war and the country the soldiers were serving. He sings of a woman who taunts him with pleasures of the flesh, but she’s just messing him over. They go to a drive-in and he heads to the popcorn stand. Before he returns, she’s in a sports car with some entitled stud. She’s not dancing with the guy who brung her. Jilted, he still thinks of what it would be like for her to be his own, knowing all he could do for her. So, our thoughts go to a young man who wants to be a patriot, give all to his country, and still walk away feeling rewarded, or at least be able to simply walk away once the task was done. It’s a one-sided deal — a dirty deal — in such a “compromise.”
Also on Diamonds In The Rough was “Take The Star Out Of The Window,” a sprightly Appalachian-styled song about a soldier who returns from “the old far eastern war.” The war experience “was foreign to his body” and “It was foreign to his shore.” He wanted the war to remain in his past, a past he wished to forget. He told his folks not to “ask any questions about the medals on my chest,” wishing to banish from his mind grim events he would have never chosen to be part of. His choice or not, the events still haunted him and he begged Mom and Dad to “let my conscience take a rest.”
Seven years pass and Prine records four more albums. As expected, his songwriting remained top-drawer, while a bit surprisingly, the newer recordings possessed a rockier edge. That was especially true of 1979’s Pink Cadillac, recorded at Sam Phillips Recording Studios in Memphis, Tennessee, with Knox and Jerry Phillips, Sam’s boys, producing, and Sam dropping by with suggestions or taking control when necessary. On Pink Cadillac, the sound Prine and his mates created at times took precedence over the words, but Prine the songwriter still made his points, especially on “Saigon,” one of the album’s two songs produced by Sam Phillips. Father knows best.
A hard and loose bottom accompanies John Burns’ distorted electric guitar that opens “Saigon.” Sam Phillips blew out the tubes of Burns’ amplifier so he could make it sound like, according to Prine, “pieces of hot metal flying through the air.” Things flying through the air were easy to visualize in a song called “Saigon.” The things flying through the subject’s head, however, is Prine’s chief concern. Just a year before the term “Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder” came into play, the guy in “Saigon,” back from Vietnam, is slowly and not-so-surely getting his life together in the home of the brave. At the end of the second verse, Prine asserts the theme: “All the static in my attic is getting ready to blow.”
His exchanges with the opposite sex are awkward, offering instructions to a subject of his amorous attention, probably telling her more than she wants to know:
You’ve got everything that a girl should grow
I’m so afraid to kiss you
I might lose control
You can hold me tighter
But turn loose of my gun
It’s a sentimental present
All the way from Saigon
The war vet says his “head is getting tighter” and he’s “starting to squeak.” He recalls seeing the mailman the week before carrying a letter from “stuttering Don” who says “things are getting better back in Sa, Sa, Sa, Sa, Sa, Saigon.” Not hardly. In ’79, even with the American nemesis out of the way, Vietnam was fighting two wars, one with Cambodia and the other with China. Over 200,000 Chinese troops stormed Vietnam’s northern border. Instead of things getting better in Saigon, they seemed to be falling apart — there — and elsewhere. The war vet remains on shaky ground; he’s delusional. He needs help. As the song draws to a close, its brisk pace continues with the war vet repeating “things are getting better back in Saigon.”
But things weren’t getting better in Saigon and in 1979 Americans didn’t want to hear about it. That was history America wished to set aside, even forget, as if forgetting history would keep us from repeating it. Of all people, Joan Baez, who gave as much time to her antiwar activism as to her singing career, took centerstage with the newest tragedy in Vietnam. In late May ’79, Baez placed ads in The New York Times and other newspapers assailing the Communist government’s “brutal disregard of human rights.” Learning of reeducation camps and dissidents being tortured, Baez proceeded to have 83 people, including Lily Tomlin, Ed Asner, Cesar Chavez, Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, join her as signatories on the full page ads. Once again proving no good deed goes unpunished, Baez took some flak from members of the American Left, including a public disagreement with Jane Fonda, her comrade when American armed forces were tearing up Vietnam’s countryside.
We’ve no idea of what political philosophies of Prine’s Vietnam vet possessed as he was adjusting, after a fashion, to life back home. He could have blamed the commies he had to fight or his own government for sending him over to fight. Whatever, he was scarred, just like Vietnam’s countryside — and like the American psyche.
The Vietnam War would have its legacies in America: A credibility gap in the presidency, Agent Orange, PTSD, broken families, and wounds that wouldn’t, couldn’t heal. And despite the military build-up under the Reagan administration, there was still a wide-eyed, but ofttimes legitimate hope we’d lay our weapons down — and not pick them up again, whether in battle overseas or at home against our fellow citizens. As four more decades passed, the nation’s leaders found reasons to go to war again, again, again, and again, all expensive trips overseas. And the soldiers come home and find their fellow citizens gradually more war-like with each other. The results of the election on November 8, 2016 began making that clear to most anyone paying attention.
So it does one good to keep contact with an old friend who’s also been paying attention. Scott Hudson and I have been friends since the late ’60s when we attended the same church as teenagers. Four years older than me, Scott served in Vietnam for a year and returned to his Atlanta-area home in 1972. We spent a lot of time together, attending shows at the Great Southeast Music Hall as well as going to sporting events, films and local watering holes. Coming back to civilian life, he was thanked for his service, but some of those thanking him would not have appreciated his growing opposition to our country’s role in Vietnam. Scott has always been proud to be an American but not like Lee Greenwood puts it. There’s much about America we may not be proud of, but we can be proud enough to work on what ails the country.
Though Scott was glad to see America pull out of the ghastly war, he was concerned over what would become of the Christians in Vietnam. Several years before Joan Baez paid $85,000.00 for those newspaper ads, there was concern over what would transpire at reeducation camps. Scott has long counteracted his hopefulness with a good dash of cynicism. He knew good people would suffer in the aftermath.
Scott’s time in Vietnam was more about providing security at his base, breaking up fights at the bars; not so much Khe Sanh. He did get to know some of the locals in the country and perhaps he thought he would see them again. In recent years he and his wife Kathy have taken advantage of opportunities to do some mission work in Southeast Asia. They really care for the people of Vietnam, people who could teach the world a lot about forgiveness. Other friends have also mentioned how the Vietnamese love Americans. Scott Hudson got to go back to a country he couldn’t wait to leave and come away feeling quite rewarded.
(Scott Hudson and friend in Vietnam, 2020)
Sam Stone and the protagonist in “Saigon” weren’t so fortunate. They went from struggling to stay alive in the jungles of Vietnam to seeking recovery back in their own country, only to run headfirst into another series of struggles. The recovery was not forthcoming.
John Prine served in the U.S. Army in the mid-60s, but not in Vietnam. He worked on construction equipment in a motor pool in West Germany. Fortune smiled upon him. His service was no holiday, but at least he came home to his loved ones and to a career that would often be influenced by the men who didn’t make it back alive, or in one piece, or in their right minds. We can say that Prine’s real service to his country was using his art to share those men’s stories.
But Prine had his own battles — two bouts with cancer between 1997 and 2013. Being a tough customer, he prevailed against the destructive condition both times. After surgery in 2013 to remove cancer from his left lung, he began a rehabilitation calling for him to run up and down the stairs of his house, then huffing and puffing, grab his guitar and sing two songs. The unconventional process worked. His stamina reborn, Prine was giving concerts six months after surgery. He dodged the bullet as a serviceman and though too humble to mimic John Wayne, he beat the “Big C.” Twice.
In February 2020, at 73, Prine was still on the road, with five newly-recorded albums released in the first eighteen years of this century. He gave his last concert in Paris, which was great fun for him, but a collapsed hip caused him to cancel the rest of his tour. He and his wife, Fiona, stayed in Paris a few more days, enjoying the room service at an exquisite hotel before heading back to the United States.
Prine empathized with the young men of his generation who were victims of the lies emanating from the White House regarding the Vietnam War during the Johnson and Nixon administrations. Talk about high crimes and misdemeanors. As Jimmy Carter told Playboy interviewer Robert Scheer in his 1976 presidential campaign, “I don’t think I would ever take on the same frame of mind that Nixon or Johnson did — lying, cheating and distorting the truth.” Looking back at that famous (or infamous) interview, Scheer acknowledged the lies in question “resulted in the deaths of millions in Vietnam.”
Donald Trump, president of the United States, 2017-2021, rarely makes truth a priority. Lying is his stock-in-trade. In early ‘20, he went into overdrive with the distortions and lies. The world was in the beginning stages of the COVID -19 pandemic, unlike any health emergency the United States had faced in over 100 years. Trump, more concerned with his reelection chances than the lives of 330,000,000 Americans, publicly downplayed the dangers of the coronavirus. He admitted to some aides he did so because he didn’t want to start a “panic.” On February 26, he told a gathering, “This is a flu. This is like a flu.”
Just a few weeks prior, on February 7, Trump, speaking with famed investigative reporter, Bob Woodward, revealed that he and China’s President Xi had discussed the virus the night before. Woodward was gathering material for the second of his three books on the Trump presidency and though Trump told Woodward previously, “You’re probably going to screw me,” his ego was never sated. Therefore he would devote hours of his time proving to Woodward what a duplicitous and negligent leader he was.
Trump called the virus “a very tricky situation.” Asked what made it tricky, Trump told Woodward, “It goes through air. That’s always tougher than the touch. You don’t have to touch things. Right? But the air, you just breathe the air and that’s how it passed. And so that’s a very tricky one. That’s a very delicate one. It’s also more deadly than your strenuous flu.”
“Deadly.” The President of the United States didn’t want to use that word publicly when he was coming up for reelection. For his own benefit, he would just say “this is like a flu.”
On the day Trump and Woodward discussed the seriousness of the virus, Prine gave a concert in Gavle, Sweden. Near the end of his 22-song set, he played “Sam Stone,” a song with fictional characters who experienced betrayal and heartbreak, mostly due to the distortions and lies that began in the 1960s White House. More administrations and more lies at critical moments would follow: “I did not trade arms for hostages.” “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Ms. Lewinsky.” “Simply stated, there’s no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction.” “This is like a flu.”
Since February 29. 2020 over 1,127,000 Americans have died of COVID. Compare that to the 5,000 Americans who died of the flu in the 21-22 influenza season. (“This is like a flu.”) Had he not died of COVID on April 7. 2020, John Prine would have accumulated and stockpiled thoughts of the lying and rapacity of President Donald Trump. However, converting those thoughts and observations into a song could have been more demanding than what Prine did with his Vietnam era songs. The lies of Vietnam that shaped the narratives in Prine’s “Sam Stone” and “Saigon” were part and parcel of the Cold War. To paraphrase Walter Cronkite, it’s the way it was. For decades, the Cold War mentality was ingrained, even when tens of millions rejected it. It was easy to see how the pieces added up. It’s also easy to understand the plight of the characters in those songs. It’s history.
The deaths of over 1,127,000 Americans just minding their own business as their president dithered and pursued his own coarse desires make for a maddening story. John Prine could have created a sad, angry and perceptive song about what his country went through. It’s history. And it would have broken his heart.