Our Country Needed Us
Back in the late 60’s a bunch of us got together and decided to go on a great adventure together. Fresh out of High School, the draft was breathing heavily down our necks. Women were burning their bras, guys were burning their draft cards, and many went "over the hill" to Canada. Jane Fonda was making trips overseas to make propaganga films for the Vietnamese, to show how terrible Americans were for being in "their" country. Yeah, it was the 60’s.
Uncle Sam wasn’t really giving us much choice you see. It was either choose our own time or let Sam do it for us. None of us much cared for the idea of going to jail in protest, or leaving everything we ever knew and running out of country.. and all any of us ever thought about Fonda was as Barbarella. Besides—our country said they needed us, and good men were dying trying to defend some poor little country in Asia. If not us, then who?
So we figured "what the hell" and marched our asses down to the local enlistment office. Not like we knew what we wanted to do when we grew up anyway… and our country needed us.
A couple of months later, most of us were wondering what the hell we were doing in a training camp with a bunch of smelly guys crawling around under barbed wire, while bullets whizzed over our heads, and charges went off around us. Then we’d see the news about the latest casualities, and we knew… our country needed us.
A lot of us never made it back from that little adventure. We died in places most couldn’t even pronounce. We died in rice paddies, and in jungle soo deep you couldn’t see the sunlight. We died in villages, killed by little kids, and on hillsides black with war— but we were proud to go… because our country needed us.
So is it too much to ask that you remember us on Veteran’s Day? There was a time when our country needed us.