In a way, this 1968 anti-war song was evidence that public opinion had turned against American involvement in Vietnam. Eric Burdon and the Animals didn’t exactly have a peace-loving hippie image, so it wasn’t a good sign for warmongers that even a bunch of British yobs who weren’t in any danger of being drafted were inveighing against it.
Though more than 536,000 American troops were deployed to Southeast Asia in 1968, up from 184,000 in 1965, there were fewer anti-war songs than there had been during the Great Folk Music Scare just a few years earlier. This wasn’t just any anti-war song, though. The tale of an Army chaplain with a troubled conscience was over 7 minutes long so, like “American Pie” a few years later, it was released on two sides of a vinyl 45. Radio stations usually played a shortened version that only included side one, so it wasn’t until a friend bought the single that I got to hear the B-side’s battle sounds and illicitly-recorded British Army bagpipes. It was a complex production for the times.
Happy Veterans Day.