Henry's Songbook

Chorus:
Won't you send me back to Georgia
Before I fight another day
Let the water from the mountains
Wash the bloodstains all away

I was raised on grits and Jesus, my country wrong or right
Just a poor North Georgia farm boy, scared to death and quick to fight
Mother said, He's born to trouble, Father said, Low down and mean
So I joined up in the army soon as I turned seventeen

In a place I'd never heard of, that they call El Salvador
Where the mountains look like home and the fields all smell of war
They may say we're just advisors, wash their hands of all the dead
But when you see the things we're doing, Lord it's hard to turn your head

I was proud to be a soldier, I was proud to hold a gun
But there's a difference between fighting and just shooting people down
Well I will never be a preacher, but I do know wrong from right
And a war against poor farmers - that ain't no war I want to fight

(as sung by Roy Bailey)

[1982:] As you can now see, Korea was our first political war. The train of events since then indicates that the role of the military is coming to be [...] one of intervention in underdeveloped countries on a so-called "advisory" or "assistance" level with the object of molding the affairs of the client country to suit the adviser's purpose. The role has already developed its task force and training program in the Military Assistance Officers Program at Fort Bragg. According to its formulation, the task is to "assist foreign countries with internal security problems" - a nice euphemism for counter-insurgency - "and perform functions having sociopolitical impact on military operations." In short, the mission of the military in this sociopolitical era is to be counter-revolution, otherwise the thwarting of communism or, if euphemism is preferred, nation-building, Vietnamizing [...] some willing or unwilling client. This is quite a change from defense of the continental United States which the founders intended should be our military function. [...]

One wonders what proportion of officers in Southeast Asia today get through a tour of duty without asking themselves "Why?" or "What for?" As they make their sociopolitical rounds in the future, will that number uncomfortably grow? That is why the defunct principle that a nation should go to war only in self-defense or for vital and immediate national interest was a sound one. The nation that abides by it will have a better case with its own citizens and certainly with history. No one could misunderstand Pearl Harbor or have difficulty explaining or defining the need for a response. War which spends lives is too serious a business to do without definition. It requires definition - and declaration. No citizen, I believe, whether military or civilian, should be required to stake his life for what some uncertain men in Washington think is a good idea in gamesmanship or deterrence or containment or whatever is the governing idea of the moment.

If the military is to be used for political ends, can it continue to be the innocent automaton? Will the time come when this position is abandoned, and the Army or members of it will question and judge the purpose of what they are called upon to do? [...] What happens if we blunder again into a war on the wrong side of history? [...] When fighting reaches the classic formula recently voiced by a soldier in the act of setting fire to a hamlet in Vietnam, "We must destroy it in order to save it," one must go further than duty and honor and ask, "Where is common sense?" " (Barbara Tuchman, Generalship, in Practicing History 281 ff.)