MERC MUSIC

Everyone adopts the music of others and creates a soundtrack for their lives (unless you are one of the rare and talented few to make your own music).

Jungle Work


Of course, you remember the song that you adopted as "our song" between you and your sweetheart. In the late 1970's I had missed going to Vietnam (too young at the time), and was frustrated to no end that then-President Jimma Carter was on a world-wide surrender tour, pulling the rug out from under our allies, surrendering the Panama Canal, Iran, Southern Africa, Central America and any place he could surrender to the Soviets or Chi-Coms of radical Muslims.

Certain countries, however, still were holding their own and even winning against Communist forces, such as the South Africans, Rhodesians and SW Africans. America was not officially involved in those countries. Indeed, Jimma Carter was busy undercutting them as well.

But there is a little known but time-honored tradition of Mercenary, Soeldner or Francs-tireurs. They had both noble and ignoble reasons for going to war before their own government actually got involved.

During the Revolutionary War, we had Germans, French and Poles fighting with us and at the very top ranks. Americans would later go on to serve in the French Air Force in the First World War in Lafeyette Escadrille (Squadron), in the Guardia Nacionale against the Sandino Guerillas during the Banana Wars in Central America, for the British and Nationalist Chinese against the Germans and Japanese before Pearl Harbor (Eagle Squadron and the Flying Tigers, respectively).

The Cold War was called that because an open conflict between the US and the Soviets or the US and the Red Chinese could easily have escalated into full-blown nuclear war. And as they said in WARGAMES, the only way to win a Nuclear War is not to fight it.

So it was War by Proxy. Wars fought in Third World Countries, using private armies for us, arming, backing and training Communist guerillas and terrorists for them. (for the most part, we were defending, containing Soviet aggression).

And various points I toyed with the idea of going to fight overseas in certain units, and had even been in a recruiting station for the French Foreign Legion in Paris.

But an old, war-torn vet suggested just joining the Corps and hope to get lucky, because if caught fighting under a foreign flag, you could lose your American citizenship (now, who came up with that new, hare-brained rule?).

Nonetheless, I needed a soundtrack, and the first on the list of MERC ("MERK" short for 'Mercenary') MUSIC was Warren Zevon's STRENGTH AND MUSCLE AND JUNGLE WORK. Kinda tongue-in-cheek funny, but great to drink gin to, in some sweaty bar in Mombasa.