I haven't read ALL the comments, but this is a very sophisticated lyric. It tugs you every which way.
Certainly there's sympathy for the Vietnam vet, but the narrator's line about going to a "foreign land to go and kill the yellow man" reflects not just the government's policy miscalculation, but its racist underpinning, which the narrator fully adopts and endorses.
The line about "they're still there, he's all gone", is heartbreaking, and yet bears within it resentment of enemies still living in what is in fact their home country, in which the narrator was an invader.
From the first verse, the narrator's been fucked his whole life, and by the final verse, of what does he have to boast? The simple geographically accident that he was born here; to the extent that amounts to patriotism, it is patriotism as empty gesture a desperate grab for self-worth, from a man whose experience has provided him no reason to be patriotic at all.
I haven't read ALL the comments, but this is a very sophisticated lyric. It tugs you every which way. Certainly there's sympathy for the Vietnam vet, but the narrator's line about going to a "foreign land to go and kill the yellow man" reflects not just the government's policy miscalculation, but its racist underpinning, which the narrator fully adopts and endorses.
The line about "they're still there, he's all gone", is heartbreaking, and yet bears within it resentment of enemies still living in what is in fact their home country, in which the narrator was an invader.
From the first verse, the narrator's been fucked his whole life, and by the final verse, of what does he have to boast? The simple geographically accident that he was born here; to the extent that amounts to patriotism, it is patriotism as empty gesture a desperate grab for self-worth, from a man whose experience has provided him no reason to be patriotic at all.