The Tenor of Those Times

by Doug Bradley

When I heard the news this week of the death of Peter Yarrow, the smooth tenor of the folk trio Peter, Paul, and Mary, I didn’t flash back to their singing at the 1963 March on Washington or covering Bob Dylan songs or even my own “Leaving on Jet Plane” flight to Southeast Asia in 1970.

No, I recalled the Peter Yarrow-penned “children’s song” “Puff the Magic Dragon.” And therein lies a story about the U.S. war in Vietnam that only Vietnam veterans truly recognize…

But first the song. “Puff the Magic Dragon” was among the tunes included on Movin’, the trio’s 1963 album. According to Yarrow, the lyrics were based on a poem that his friend Lenny Lipton had written which, in turn, was inspired by an Ogden Nash poem, “The Tale of Custard the Dragon.” “Puff” is imaginative, childlike, and easy on the ears. A child’s lullaby about a land called Honah Lee where the magic dragon “lives by the see and frolics in the autumn mist.” But eventually, as in a William Blake poetry world, innocence gives way to experience, little Jackie Paper grows up, and “Puff, that mighty dragon, sadly slips into his cave.”

Not satisfied with that explanation, numerous joint smokers and tokers of the 1960s thought the song was about marijuana. It’s possible that some folks did get high and might’ve tripped out listening to the song.

But if you ask a Vietnam vet, you get a different, albeit darker, tale…

Constantly striving to add more firepower to ground-attack aircraft in Vietnam, the U.S. Air Force, under the leadership of Captain Ron Terry, reviewed all aspects of air operations in counter-insurgency warfare, and came up with the Douglas AC-47 fixed-wing gunship. Armed with three miniguns mounted on locally fabricated mounts that allowed them to be fired remotely out the port side, the newly dubbed “FC-47” operated under the radio call sign — you guessed it — “Puff.” But this was no happy-go-lucky dragon. Our Puff was fire in the sky and could put a bullet or glowing red tracer bullet (every fifth round) into every square yard of a football field-sized target in potentially less than 10 seconds! This Puff’s “painted wings and giant’s rings” rained down terror on the enemy below.

Curiously, when “Puff” was later deployed to Tan Son Nhut Air Base near Saigon, its call sign was changed to “Spooky.” But that name pre-dated the Classics IV hit record and was more a commentary on just how damn scary those night aircraft were. Still, as Michael Herr, author of the classic Vietnam narrative Dispatches, liked to point out, Vietnam was indeed America’s first rock ’n’ roll war.

I eventually had my own Peter Yarrow encounter. After the trio disbanded, he remained active in the anti-war movement, including showing strong support for amnesty for Vietnam veterans with less than honorable discharges. He visited Madison, Wisconsin, to sing at a pro-amnesty event at which I was speaking in support of my Vietnam brothers. His voice was as clear and mellow as ever, and he remained steadfast in his politics. He even gave me a hug after my remarks, uttering a sincere “thank you” and wishing the movement success. He struck me as sweet and decent as the magical world he’d created in “Puff the Magic Dragon.”

Years later, Peter Yarrow told a Reuters reporter that he believed folk music had a positive effect on the decency, humanity, and empathy of society. “Peter, Paul and Mary had a huge audience,” he said, “some of whom did not agree with our politics. But they were touched by the human essence of our songs.”

Touched more, perhaps, by “Puff the Magic Dragon” than its fire and brimstone namesake in Vietnam.

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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: ITA-International Talent Associates — Public Domain
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