In 1985, British musician Paul Hardcastle issued an unlikely hit single with the title 19. It is a reference to the average age of a combat soldier: in the Second World War it was 26, in Vietnam, it was 19.
The claim as to that average age has been disputed, even if the age of 38 per cent of those returning home dead from Vietnam was 19 or 20 years. Hardcastle was inspired to compose the song in reflecting on the fun he had had when he was 19 years of age, and the horror that many young Americans had lived and died through at the same age. That is what we call empathy.
Here’s how one of those young Americans would describe his experience (caution: the expletives are not edited out):
The blood is still rolling off my flak jacket from the hole in my shoulder and there are bullets cracking into the sand all around me. I keep trying to move my legs but I cannot feel them. I try to breathe but it is difficult. I have to get out of this place, make it out of here somehow.
Someone shouts from my left now, screaming for me to get up. Again and again he screams, but I am trapped in the sand.
Oh get me out of here, get me out of here, please someone help me! Oh help me, please help me. Oh God oh Jesus! ‘Is there a corpsman?’ I cry. ‘Can you get a corpsman?’
There is a loud crack and I hear the guy begin to sob. ‘They’ve shot my fucking finger off! Let’s go, sarge! Let’s get outta here!’
‘I can’t move,’ I gasp. ‘I can’t move my legs! I can’t feel anything!’
I watch him go running back to the tree line.
‘Sarge are you all right?’ Someone else is calling to me now and I try to turn around. Again there is a sudden crack of a bullet and a boy’s voice crying. ‘Oh Jesus! Oh Jesus Christ!’ I hear his body fall in back of me.
I think he must be dead but I feel nothing for him, I just want to live. I feel nothing.
And now I hear another man coming up from behind, trying to save me. ‘Get outta here!’ I scream. ‘Get the fuck outta here!’
A tall black man with long skinny arms and enormous hands picks me up and throws me over his shoulder as bullets begin cracking over our heads like strings of firecrackers. Again and again they crack as the sky swirls around us like a cyclone. ‘Motherfuckers motherfuckers!’ he screams. And the rounds keep cracking and the sky and the sun on my face and my body all gone, all twisted up dangling like a puppet’s, diving again and again into the sand, up and down, rolling and cursing, gasping for breath. ‘Goddamn goddamn motherfuckers!’
And finally I am dragged into a hole in the sand with the bottom of my body that I can no longer feel, twisted and bent underneath me. The black man runs from the hole without ever saying a thing. I never see his face. I will never know who he is. He is gone. And others are now in the hole helping me. They are bandaging my wounds. There is fear in their faces.
‘It’s all right,’ I say to them. ‘Everything is fine.’
Someone has just saved my life. My rifle is gone and I don’t feel like finding it or picking it up ever again. The only thing I can think of, the only thing that crosses my mind, is living. There seems to be nothing in the world more important than that.
The harrowing opening lines of the autobiography Born On The Fourth Of July by Ron Kovic.
Kovic’s story would be told in a 1989 Oliver Stone film of the same name, in which the central character is played by Tom Cruise. Hardcastle’s song reaped widespread criticism. He was shunned in the States for being anti-American. The irony is that so was Kovic.
His frustrations and his anger mounted at having been duped by Marines recruiters into fighting what he came to see as an unjust war against women and children, against ardent nationalists repulsing an imperialistic invader, for which he relinquished his political innocence before he had even relinquished his sexual innocence.
The average age of those protesting at American universities against the Vietnam war in the student revolutionary year of 1968 will also have been not far off 19. Those who protested then will now be in their mid-seventies (as, of course, is Kovic) and those faculty who are now protesting at American universities in a bid to uphold their moral integrity, at the cost of jeopardising their financial integrity, are of an era that post-dates 1968, even if the sentiments of that year are evoked by those reporting on the current unrest.
There are some, like reporter Juan González, who stood and made his voice heard at Columbia University in ’68 and whose voice is still heard, through the channels of Democracy Now! but, in today’s 2024, the great powers that be still see sense in the waging of battles against the defenceless in the interests of the Complex.
Whether in military struggle or in climate danger or in evening out inequalities or in a fight for universal brotherhood, it is the young whose voice is now loudest. Whether that voice will be silenced, as was that of the rioters of ’68, in favour of the moral desert that is their pension fund, lies within them. For now, they have raised it. For now, their integrity is intact. For now, the world is theirs and everything that is in it. For now.
19
Written by Paul Hardcastle, William Coutourie, Mike Oldfield and Jonas McCord
Performed by Paul Hardcastle
From his 1985 album Paul Hardcastle
Are you really sure what is going on?
Just occasionally, a voice is raised. Pavel Filatyev; Aaron Bushnell; Ronald Kovic. Classic. And timeless.
