Dixie Chicks
“Travelin’ Soldier,” from Home (Open Wide/Monument)
"Travelin’ Soldier,” the current single by the Dixie Chicks, is the most powerful antiwar record of the moment. Partly that’s because it’s the one now being heard by the most people—it sits at No. 1 on Billboard’s country chart and No. 26 on the pop chart. But it’s also because the song, written by Bruce Robison, doesn’t sidestep war’s inevitable human costs. A high school girl falls in love with a boy who is eventually shipped to Vietnam. At the record’s end, she stands beneath the bleachers, sobbing; her sweetheart has come home, but he’s dead.
The record is careful not to take a stand on war either way. It neither threatens revenge, as Toby Keith did in “Courtesy of the Red, White & Blue (The Angry American),” nor does it denounce military action, as John Lennon did when he implored, “Give Peace a Chance.” Even so, “Travelin’ Soldier” is an antiwar song of the most persuasive variety: It makes plain the need for alternatives to war by speaking honestly of war’s fatal consequences. (The Dixie Chicks’ lead singer did make the band’s stand on war explicit last week when she told a London audience, “We’re ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas,” prompting a strong reaction from some American fans and radio stations.)
The song’s personal, as opposed to political, approach to military conflict has long been a part of the country music tradition. The young girl in “Travelin’ Soldier” is reminiscent of characters in earlier recordings where Americans have had to bury their dead: Jimmie Rodgers’ “The Soldier’s Sweetheart” (which looks back to World War I), Ernest Tubb’s “The Soldier’s Last Letter” (from World War II), Loretta Lynn’s “Dear Uncle Sam” (from the Vietnam War), among many others. Country artists have also sung about the loneliness experienced by soldiers far from home (Gene Autry’s “At Mail Call Today” and Floyd Tillman’s “Each Night at Nine”) and about the terror of combat. “I am so afraid of dying,” Glen Campbell sang in “Galveston,” the record’s arrangement exploding around him like incoming rounds of fire.
Still, for many listeners, country music is more typically associated with jingoism. It’s hardly an unfounded connection. Keith’s recent hit, for instance, follows in the footsteps of Merle Haggard’s 1970 chart topper “The Fightin’ Side of Me,” Johnny Wright’s 1966 hit “Hello Vietnam” and Red Foley’s jaunty “Smoke on the Water.” A pop and country hit during World War II, Foley’s record predicted, with transparent glee, that the Land of the Rising Sun would soon be a “graveyard” populated by “vultures” feasting upon dead Japanese.
It’s the glee many of these records express that’s disturbing—not the human necessity to protect oneself and others, or even the all-too-human desire for revenge, but the bald-faced revelry at the anticipation of spilling enemy blood. We hear a great deal of talk these days about good and evil. The former might best be represented by Alan Jackson’s “Where Were You (When the World Stopped Turning),” which at each chorus embraces “faith, hope and love.”
By contrast, Keith’s “Angry American” may not be evil, exactly, but it does indulge a sickening moral relativism: Our lives are precious, and our deaths mourned; your lives are not precious, and your deaths will be celebrated. “We lit up your world like the Fourth of July,” Keith exults. That doesn’t sound like war he’s singing about; it sounds like a party. “A mighty sucker punch came flying in from somewhere in the back,” Keith adds, before taunting, “We’ll put a boot in your ass.” In Keith’s estimation, our nation’s foreign policy and the safety of our citizens are of no more consequence than, and just as much fun as, a parking lot fight on a Saturday night.
Similarly, Darryl Worley’s current single “Have You Forgotten?” speaks of events in language more appropriate to barroom fisticuffs than to armed global conflict. “Some say this country’s just out looking for a fight. After 9/11, man, I’d have to say that’s right,” he sings, shaking his head as if to ask, “How could it be otherwise?” Worley’s anthem has generated some controversy. When he announces in its first line, “I hear people saying we don’t need this war,” it’s nearly impossible not to read “this war” as “the coming war with Iraq.”
The rest of Worley’s lyrics make plain that he’s speaking more broadly of a war on terror, though that only confuses the matter. Who are these people Worley claims have forgotten about Bin Laden and al-Qaeda? Still, it’s not the way Worley’s song blurs the line between defensive and preemptive wars that rankles; it’s the notion that any grievance, even one as horrific as the terrorist attacks of 9/11, could justify the actions of a nation that is “just out looking for a fight.” That’s a wholly different proposition from being determined to fight, if we must.
Of course, how the United States fights is also a matter of concern. And on that point, Toby Keith’s “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue” portrays one reality of war, or at least one reality of how the U.S. wages it, with more honesty than perhaps any record before it. “It’s going to feel like the whole world’s raining down on you,” Keith warns. This is true. In the first rush of attack, U.S. military might doesn’t take the form of boots on the ground. Rather, it overwhelmingly rains missiles and bombs on enemy combatants and innocent civilians alike. The stated intent will be to drop those bombs only on the enemy combatants, but we know that even smart bombs will maim and kill husbands and wives, senior citizens and babies, lovers—people who are, in the most basic respects, no different from you and me.
“[E]very war is both won and lost,” novelist Barbara Kingsolver has written, “and that loss is a pure, high note of anguish like a mother singing to an empty bed.” Every dead soldier creates a scene similar to the one of the young girl standing beneath the bleachers in “Travelin’ Soldier.” Her boyfriend has returned, at last. But he has made his long, lonely journey in a body bag, and he’s not headed home, but to a graveyard. The girl is crying, weeping, sobbing and she can’t stop. Then the record is over. Because there is nothing left to say.
