Count Me Out
The song „Draft Resister“ by the band Steppenwolf tells of an American draft resister whose search for adventure was interrupted by his conscience.
It takes plenty of naivety and delusion to mistake war for an adventure rather than murder tourism or a „betrayal of humanity“, as this song puts it. Unfortunately, history teaches that stupidity is not on the list of endangered species. Yet late insight is still better than none at all and sometimes — perhaps because it contains remorse — even strengthens the commitment against war. „Draft Resister“ from 1969 is part of a highly political album that notes very bluntly that the American dream is built on violence and exploitation.
In Carl Sandburg’s prose poem The People, Yes from 1936, a man explains to a girl what soldiers are.
What are soldiers?
They are for war. They fight and each tries to kill as many of the other side as he can.
The girl thinks it over, then says:
Sometime they’ll give a war and nobody will come.
Decades later, the line was slightly varied into one of the peace movement’s best-known slogans: Imagine there’s a war and no one shows up.
Steppenwolf’s fourth and thoroughly political album Monster appeared in November 1969, when the anti-Vietnam-War wave in the USA was reaching a peak. Shortly before, in October, Washington had been the setting for a mass demonstration of an estimated two million people, the Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam. Draft Resister, the second song on the pleasantly rough, if musically rather unspectacular album, tells the story of a draft resister during the Vietnam War. As a reminder: anyone who dodged military service risked ostracism by the self-appointed righteous part of American society and harsh punishment from the war-loving US government.
A prime example was the boxer of the century Muhammad Ali, who raised a verbal middle finger to the induction center with this wonderful line:
„My conscience won’t let me go shoot my brother, or some darker people, or some poor hungry people in the mud for big powerful America. And shoot them for what? They never called me nigger, they never lynched me, they didn’t put no dogs on me, they didn’t rob me of my nationality, rape and kill my mother and father. (…) Shoot them for what? How can I shoot them poor people? Just take me to jail.“
It did not come to that. Muhammad Ali was indeed convicted, but remained free on bail. Of all the world championship titles Ali won, this was by far his best fight.
The sound of Steppenwolf’s restrained, gloomy Draft Resister feels almost jazzy in places, as one critic noted, and is a little reminiscent of Riders on the Storm by the Doors and, toward the end, of the instrumental section in Chris Rea’s chilled-out On the Beach. The lyrics sum up the development of a draft resister who at first went along because he took the war for an adventure and wanted to prove that he was a man, until they tried to break his will, but his conscience thwarted their plans:
But they tried to crush his spirit / ‘Til his conscience ruined their plans.
This evokes strong associations with Erich Maria Remarque’s novel Im Westen nichts Neues, whose new film adaptation was actually supposed to be shown in the Bundestag. Steppenwolf’s Vietnam adventurer becomes not only a war refugee but a determined opponent of the war who wants to rouse people:
„Here’s to all the draft resisters
Who will fight for sanity
When they march them off to prison
In this land of liberty.“
For all the perceived successes of the anti-Vietnam movement — the number of resisters added up to more than 200,000, whereupon US President Jimmy Carter declared a general amnesty in 1977, though not because he retroactively conceded they were right, but because the sheer number of proceedings would have overwhelmed the justice system — the song’s final verse is addressed to a minority humiliated by the state and the media:
„Shame, disgrace and all dishonor
Wrongly placed upon their heads
Will not rob them of the courage
Which betrays the innocent.“
Taking a stand is never in vain. And everyone who refuses makes war harder to wage.