MOG

the war.....god what a mess. I think about the poor folks with all this devastation in their back yard. I was living in NYC when the disaster happened and I can't even imagine what it would be like having to deal that shit and worse everyday.

such a great song. CCR gives me hope.

The suicide rate among soldiers is apalling; there's a culture in the Army - exemplified at its worst by Patton slapping the soldier - that says that admitting you're stressed/afraid is cowardice. Soldiers in Iraq have actually been brought up on charges of cowardice for asking for psychological help...

Speaking of songs about war:

This track is called 1916

(If you're not familiar with this track, it may come as a shock to you when i tell you it's Motorhead...)

What shocks me is it's the title track to a Motorhead album. No Voices in the Sky, indeed. If I'm posting war songs I'll have to see if I've got the Pogues on this pc. Cuz 1916 reminds me of And The Band Played Waltzing Matilda, which I prefer. Or if I just want to depress myself I could reread Johnny Got His Gun.

"Mercenaries are usless, disunited, unfaithful They have nothing more to keep them in a battle Other than a meager wage Which is just about enough to make them wanna kill for ya But not enough to make them wanna die for ya"

- John Cale, Mercenaries (Ready For War)

Jenny - no soldier who goes to war is ever the same when they come back, even the ones like myself who never actually saw the elephant in my year at a Naval Communications Station in Viet Nam.

David Drake's SF novel Redliners (published by Baen Books, also publishers of my brother [David Weber]'s SF) is a story of troops who are stressed to or over the "redline", who are offered something that our generation (Drake definitely did see the elephant in The Awful Place) nor the redliners created by the current war have ever seen or are likely to - redemption.

Somewhere mong the reviews of Redliners on Amazon, you'll find one entitled An Allegory of Redemption, by Yours Truly, which begins:

Any veteran of Viet Nam (and i don't mean just combat vets like Drake, i mean REMFs like myself) ought to recognise what this story is about; it's about damnation and about people who don't deserve it who were sent to Hell, and about redemption.
It's about something we didn't get.
"I think my country got a little off-track; took 'em twenty-five years to welcome me back..." (Johnny Cash, "Drive On")

...and i'm starting to cry for my brothers who were less fortunate than i, just re-reading my review.
Rolling Hot - directly inspired by the Tet Offensive - which is contained in the collection The Tank Lords i have a review of that on mazon, too - but i'd like to direct your attention to the review by SF writer and real-world veteran Michael Williamson.
At an SF convention, i once told Drake that the first time i read Rolling Hot - specifically wan io read Chapter 13, which is two paragraphs long, the only thing that kept me from throwing it up against a wall and speaking loudly and with feeling about the way soldiers get treated by politicians was that i was sitting in a busy restaurant. I thought the man was going to have a fit, he was so happy. "Yes! Yes!! That's exactly what I wanted people to feel!" he crowed...

Let's just say that Cale seems to know very little about mercenaries - while many are as he describes, it historically applies more to single sellswords than to organised mercenary uinits.

Some of the crack units of history were mercenaries; Swiss mercenaries were so universally feared that they were banned by the Pope - only the Vatican could employ them. To this day, the Swiss Guards are the Vatican's security forces.

Hmmm, anti-war songs. Let see if I can make this audio work. Lee Hazelwood "No Train To Stockholm" from his Cowboy In Sweden album. Pretty good song despite the flute.

My other suggestions would be 1980s Oi! bands, but most people besides me hate that stuff. So I'll share some Hazelwood with you all.