man...i really like this song. i'm not aware of the original but this version is great.

This is a song written by Fred Small about the U.S. involvement in El Salvador, which was probably at least 4-5 Vietnams ago, and possibly many more, depending on how you count.  Alan Moore, in a comic written in part about the same conflict, devised the ingenious metric of swimming pools full of blood for visualizing the human cost of violence.  Slightly over-estimating the amount of blood in a human body at one gallon, and estimating 20,000 gallons as the capacity of a typical family pool, he rates the El Salvadorean civil war at approximately 3 1/2 swimming pools full of blood.  That may be nothing next to the 150 swimming pools worth of blood spilled in Vietnam, but it's still enough for a backstroke.

My parents were highly interventionist in my early exposure to media.  I never saw violent movies or television, and I didn't have any toys related to guns or soldiers or even battle robots.  And so, as it ended up, my only early exposures to genre horror came in the form of protest literature and folk music.  This song, with its scenes of graphic disembowelment and "a harvest of human carnage" constituted a first step on the journey that wouldn't bring me to Hellraiser and Lovecraft for another half-dozen years.  I only mentioned ths because I want you to understand why I want you to remember, if you click that <PLAY> button: 3 1/2 SWIMMING POOLS, FILLED WITH BLOOD.

(The timing is way off in this track.  I spent most of an evening puzzling out and recording parts, and didn't realize how stumbling and cluttered the whole mess was until the next morning.  But I'm not really one to come back for retakes, at not least once the fog has lifted, so let's all just be forgiving with that, shall we.)

No More Vietnams

I am trying to teach myself how to play the guitar, and then I get into these situations with an unscheduled evening, a cheap acoustic with scarred nylon strings, and the Multitrack DAW app for iPad.


No More Vietnams

Asphodel Mead

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Jon Lee Hicks