Enter Tom Paxton in the search box.........lots of stuff. Basically, he is a war vet and one of the greatest songwriters to emerge from the folk scare of the 60's. His breadth and girth of material is remarkable and his songs are second to none....on almost every subject. Roger, you say......

If I have to go war, I would like to know the real reasons behind that war first, and I hope the poor bastards trying to kill me will know why they are there too.

Go back and read some of the other threads on Vietnam.....like Songs of the Vietnam period......and you'll see that what made VietNam different was that many young people came to the realization at different times that perhaps the government we trusted and believed in and had been honorable in other wars, was somehow not telling the truth anymore. We grew up believing in our country and knew the stories of WWII, of Ira Hayes and Audie Murphy amd all those folks like our parents who fought that war. That's the black and white we knew. Suddenly it seemed the blacks and whites were all grays and like the good fans of Davy Crockett that we were, we knew "a man has to do what he thinks is right." In a variety of different ways we did and made choices as 18 or 20 year olds based on what we knew and what we were seeing. Its no accident that there is more post traumatic stress from that war than any other. Read what you wrote and think about the end result.

Spaw