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McNamara's War

from A Landscape of Ghosts by Rob Siegel

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about

Written after watching the Erol Morris film "The Fog of War," an interview with McNamara near the end of his life. I never realized how much was behind the body counts we heard every Friday night on the news.

lyrics

he was the best and the brightest
the numbers guy from Ford
anything he couldn’t measure
could simply be ignored

with his whiz kid friends from Harvard
handpicked for the new frontier
analysis of data
crunch the numbers answers clear

so when the ghosts of Dien Bien Phu
started rapping at the door
events were set in motion
for McNamara’s war

he analyzed the bombings
he yields and the troops
he parametrized the models
he anesthetized the truths

a rational objective
they’d let the war expand
to the point where the north’s losses
should be more than they can stand

he tracked all of the metrics
from the air and ground attacks
the inputs were the people
the outputs body bags

half a million strong
so the Vietcong
should choose to fight no more
a fundamental error
in McNamara’s war

‘cause the dominos were never going to tumble
the hearts and minds were never ours to win
the red tide sure flowed when it came out
58,000 soldier’s veins
the master of the details had to flee
the picture was too big for him to see

the flawed extrapolation
focused through the fog of war
the vulgar escalation
to construct the winning score
bent with age and wisdom
he admitted they were wrong
there were things they couldn’t measure
they killed a million Vietcong

and so it’s now another country
it’s now another fight
it’s not a cold war proxy
this time maybe we’re right
but there’s American soldiers dying
and every week I read their names
and our leader might be lying
and I’m worried just the same

and though I hope this time it’s different
I’m not entirely sure
we ever learned the lesson
from McNamara’s war

credits

from A Landscape of Ghosts, released March 24, 2018
Guitar and vocal: Rob Siegel
Fiddle: Tim Roper
Upright bass: Peter Tillotson
Keyboard and percussion: Doug Kwartler

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Rob Siegel Boston, Massachusetts

Rob Siegel is well-known in Boston folk music circles as an innovative songwriter who draws from his idyllic yet stressed- out middle-class suburban existence and produces memorable, intelligent, well-crafted songs.

His first new CD in 14 years, "A Landscape of Ghosts," will be out in April, with a CD release show at Club Passim on Monday April 30th. ... more

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