Roll of the Dice: Vietnam

“It’s like when you’re walking down a dark street at night, and out of the corner of your eye you see somebody getting hurt in a dark alley. But you keep walking on because you think it don’t have nothing to do with you, and you just want to get home. Vietnam turned this whole country into that dark street, and unless we can walk down those alleys and look into the eyes of those men and women, we’re never gonna get home.”  –Bruce Springsteen, August 20, 1981

In the autumn of 1981, the plight of Vietnam veterans was very much on Bruce’s mind.

From the time he first met Ron Kovic and read his book Born on the Fourth of July a few years earlier, Bruce’s awareness of and concern over the neglect and poor treatment and afforded America’s returning heroes had steadily grown.

In August, Bruce had held a benefit concert specifically to highlight and support the work done by Vietnam Veterans of America, a non-profit group led by veteran Bobby Muller. Bruce’s efforts significantly raised public awareness of the crisis, not just with the event itself, but through his words–spoken on stage that night–that lodged deep inside the hearts of those in attendance, and those who read published accounts afterward:

But August gave way to September and the end of the River Tour, and Bruce retreated to his home studio in Colts Neck, New Jersey, where he’d spend the next several months writing and recording the material that would eventually become Nebraska.

Out of the public eye, Bruce’s ability to continue to raise awareness for the VVA was diminished. So instead of speaking publicly, he did what he does best: he wrote a song.

He wrote many songs, actually: Out of the fertile period that generated both his Nebraska and Born in the U.S.A. albums, several dealt with characters either directly or indirectly affected by wartime experiences: “Born in the U.S.A.” is the obvious one, but “Shut Out the Light,” “A Good Man is Hard to Find (Pittsburgh),” and “Highway Patrolman” also date from this period and show how large the war loomed in Bruce’s mind. Each song spotlights an ordinary person grappling with the trauma inflicted by the war and making their way in a world that no longer makes sense to them.

Many artists focused on the horrors of wartime, but Bruce was one of the very first to focus on the horrors that come after.

And it all started in the autumn of 1981, when Bruce sat down with his acoustic guitar and attempted to answer the question: what happens to soldiers when they come home?

Bruce recorded “Vietnam” in the autumn of 1981, and although he never released it, the lyrics eventually found their way into two of Springsteen’s most poignant songs: “Shut Out the Light” and “Born in the U.S.A.” There are two versions of the song in the clip below; the second is the stronger and more finished one, so it’s that one we’ll analyze.

The first verse begins with some familiar lyrics–the first couplet of “Vietnam” would eventually introduce “Shut Out the Light” instead:

The runway rushed up at me, I felt the wheels touch down
Stood out on the blacktop, and took a taxi into town
Got off down on Main Street, to see what I could see
All I seen was strangers, watchin’ a stranger pass by
And that stranger was me

Bruce actually tries two options for that final line: “and no one was stranger than me” is the alternate. We could debate which line is stronger, but both serve to communicate the alienation our returning hero feels from his town.

The second verse also features some vaguely familiar lyrics, but unlike the foreman in “Born in the U.S.A.” the desk man in “Vietnam” isn’t is almost brutal in his brush-off:

Went for my job back at the factory, down at the factory
The only thing I heard from the man at the desk
Is, “Son, understand if it was up to me”
‘Bout half the town’s out of work
Ain’t nothin’ for you here
From the assembly line to the front-line
But I guess you didn’t hear:
You died in Vietnam.

That chorus–“you died in Vietnam”–is devastatingly powerful. If “Born in the U.S.A.” is an ambiguous clarion call, there’s absolutely no mistaking the message of “you died in Vietnam.” It works on two levels at once: as irony (“we heard you died over there”) and as metaphor (“the person we knew died in the war; the person who came back is a stranger”).

My favorite verse, though, is the final one:

Went to see my baby, down on First and Grand
To tell her I’d come home from away in Vietnam
Her mama came to the door and told me
Her mama told me she ran away
With a singer in a Rock ‘N’ Roll band
She said, “I’m sorry son, but we understand”

Geez, that’s quite a knife twist, isn’t it? Not only did his girl not wait for him, but check out the clear reference to the Rolling Stones’ classic “Street Fighting Man.” Our hero risks his life only to find that his girlfriend left him for a poor boy who couldn’t answer the question “what else can I do but sing in a rock and roll band?” In these six lines, Bruce lays out a fascinating, morally ambiguous circumstance that’s far more thought-provokingly gray than any of the songs that would spin out of “Vietnam.”

“Vietnam” had the seeds of two great songs but was destined to never see the light of day. Although Bruce has never shied away from instrumental tracks that belie his lyrics, in this case, the brutally direct chorus and upbeat melody of “Vietnam” were both too overt for the polar approach to work.

But Bruce didn’t seem to realize that yet, so he kept working on the song. In this next version (still from the autumn of 1981), the melody of “Vietnam” persists, the “Shut Out the Light” lyrics are all but gone, and more familiar lyrics begin to emerge–most notably a new chorus, taken from the title of a screenplay Paul Schrader had sent him in the hopes that Bruce might write a title song for it. (He would indeed, but not before the title of the film changed to “Light of Day.”)

This version of “Vietnam” has a new refrain, and now we can clearly see the destination where the song will ultimately lead Bruce.

This version of “Born in the U.S.A.” (we may as well call it by that name now, since it’s clearly the song’s refrain) is almost the inverse of the song we’d eventually hear on the radio three years later. It’s almost a prequel, in fact–Bruce spends the whole song singing about the dirty town of Glendale where his protagonist grows up. Many lyrical snippets would make their way into the final version of “Born in the U.S.A.,” but at this point, they serve to flesh out the narrator’s backstory.

I was born in the shadow of the Glendale refinery
With air so dirty you could hardly breathe
The dirt gets so deep it colors your skin
you can scrub all day and scrub all night but it ain’t never coming out again

Our hero reaches a dead end–we never learn exactly what kind of scrape he gets into, but it’s serious enough that his only options are the military, jail, or running. He chooses to stand with (or at least for) his country:

Now we come down from Glendale, now you don’t count
Coming from Glendale, they just count you out
I’m warning you mister, you better not get in a jam
’cause the only choice they give you is the barracks or the jailhouse, take it on the lam

I just turned eighteen, I got in a roadhouse jam
gave me the choice, to the jailhouse or my country, I did stand
The runway rushed up at me, the wheels touched land
The heat hit me in the face, and I stood in Vietnam

Born in the U.S.A.

The song ends with our narrator arriving in Vietnam. (Ironically, when those lyrics appear again in “Shut Out the Light,” the runway will be the one that greets him upon his return home.)

Obviously, “Born in the U.S.A.” still has miles to travel before it reaches its final form, but it’s important to note just how early Bruce latched on to the power of that phrase. Here, as in the final song, it serves as a statement of birthright, an indictment of the social inequality that leaves him no other choice but to enlist, and a symbol of the narrator’s alien presence in a foreign land.

To be continued in Roll of the Dice: “Born in the U.S.A.” 

Vietnam
Recorded: Autumn 1981
Never released
Never performed

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