No safety for the safety
No solace for the sane
No justice for the hero
Just an end to his game.
Fragged by a sniper
From the very same team
That’s not how you play the game,
“The death of war dreams.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
We saw September 11
If you believed your eyes,
We took it all in
The gut-wrenching surprise.
But you took it on
As your own war to fight
Enlisted to help out,
And make the wrong right.
“Hmm,” said the leaders,
“Hmm,” said The Man,
Smells like a winner
For our propaganda plan—
“NFL Safety Quits Season
To Fight Terror War”
Trained you up, shipped you out
Moved you to a distant shore.
[Chorus]
Sent you to Iraq
And then Afghanistan
Out on patrol
Don’t know what you saw.
Can’t see with your eyes
Your diary disappeared
And your voice
And your soul.
First it was a hero’s death
By hostile enemy fire
But wait, no, that’s not right
Oh, yeah, it was friendly fire—
It happened at night
Where no one could see
But info trickled out
All contradictory.
From rookie to veteran,
You’d had a change of heart
As you found out the ugly truth
About the illegal war.
[Chorus]
Three shots to the head
In a tight little group
With medical proof.
M–16 bullets
The kind Americans use
From ten yards away
There’s no way to goof.
They can see your face
They can smell your fear
They can taste your death—
It was your life they feared.
You were gonna shout it out
About the War Against Iraq
“‘You know, this war is so f— illegal.”
You’d say to Chomsky, that’s a fact.
But The Man heard your plans
And had to silence your storm
The stumping for peace
Would unsettle the norm
The exposure of the lies
That brought the war to be
So your diary went missing
Your death clothes all destroyed.
Where was the investigation?
Like the one for 9-11?
Remove the evidence first
And ask questions—or not—later.
They painted you a hero
To promote their cause
But your goal of speaking truth
Was the real heroic loss.
Demote the general and call it a day
Whine mea culpa and collect their pay?
Your life tackled by a ranger
Dressed just like you
“just following orders, ma’am,”
In this vicious zoo.
[Chorus]
But number 40 never made it to 40—
Dead at 28.
The last man to see you alive
Told not to lay it straight.
Will we ever know
What it is that you knew?
Executive privilege keeps
Your story in a safe.
But time will reveal
All that, sadly, must be true.
[Chorus]
