Rings of Fire
by Doug Bradley
The angriest I’ve ever been at Christmas occurred in 1972. That was when, barely a year home from Vietnam myself, I thought the war in Vietnam would soon be over.
Was I ever wrong! President Nixon and Secretary of State Kissinger had other ideas, namely bombing North Vietnam “back to the stone age.” Their Christmas present gift wrapped for the Paris Peace Talks consisted of dropping more than 20,000 tons of ordnance on military, industrial, and civilian areas (including hospitals) in Hanoi and Haiphong killing nearly 2,000 civilians. The operation, code name Linebacker II, ran from December 18 to December 29 and was the largest bombing campaign involving heavy bombers since World War II.
Why that hit me so hard and pissed me off so much had something to do with my own close encounters with aircraft and ordinance. While serving as a U.S. Army combat correspondent in April 1971, I was dispatched to the USS Ranger in the Gulf of Tonkin to do a story about the Navy for The Army Reporter newspaper. I was amazed to discover a small floating city with a hospital, post office, library, gym, and about 4,000 residents. Most notably, there were about 75 aircraft that flew bombing missions over North Vietnam.
And bombs. Lots and lots of 500-pound bombs.
I wasn’t used to sleeping in such cramped quarters — literally a bunk on top of me and one below — so I lay in bed awake, wondering how all this technology and firepower hadn’t ended this war long since. And then I heard a rumbling, a heavy, brassy, ominous rumbling that was gliding down the passageway near my bunk. Felt like the weight of the world. And then I heard a voice, a couple of them, and they, the voices, were singing.
“I fell into a burning ring of fire,” the first voice sang. “I went down, down, down and the flames went higher,” came the response. And then both voices crooned in harmony “And it burns, burns, burns/the ring of fire/the ring of fire.”
I shuddered. Were they happy? Heartless? Murderous?? Diabolical? Or were they just doing their jobs, following orders?
Since that day, every time I hear Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire,” I’m haunted by images of fires and explosions and destruction, 500 pounds of it raining down one after another after another…thousands upon thousands that Christmas season in 1972.
As Ebenezer Scrooge would testify, “Bah humbug.”
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Vietnam veteran Doug Bradley is the author of Who’ll Stop the Rain: Respect, Remembrance, and Reconciliation in Post-Vietnam America, co-author with Craig Werner of We Gotta Get Out of This Place: The Soundtrack of the Vietnam War, which was named best music book of 2015 by Rolling Stone magazine, and DEROS Vietnam: Dispatches from the Air-Conditioned Jungle, now available as an audiobook. His music-based memoir, The Tracks of My Years, will be released by Legacy Book Press in 2025.
Image: CC0 Public Domain
