The Ballad of Penny Evans: War Widow, Age 21
Steve Goodman's haunting reminder of young patriots decimated by old patriarchs and generals
War widows, fatherless children, deceased sons and brothers burying brothers.
These are the surviving casualties of war.
Left to take pride in patriotic rituals to honor the dead, and left to cry alone when the parade passes by.
America markets their young soldiers as dutiful democracy defenders saving the world from bad actors. Only the bad actors are on both sides of the war profit equation.
Young women like Penny Evans know the truth: Thank God for daughters.
That is the only way to avoid mourning dead sons, dead husbands and dead fathers.
“The Ballad of Penny Evans” is told by storyteller Steve Goodman. It arises out of the rotted remains of the Vietnam War. It lingers in its message of young love turned into young devastation.
War shatters lives, especially young families.
I grew up as one of those young military families. My mother had three boys by age twenty-five. Luckily, my father, who served a tour in Vietnam, came back to a home of five kids.
Steve Goodman Sings Stories
A native of the Chicago suburbs, Steve Goodman did not live a furious life, but he did live a fast one.
In his early twenties, Goodman discovered his chronic fatigue was due to leukemia, a blood cancer.
He played with pain and periods of remission. He “never felt that he was living on anything other than borrowed time … and his music reflects this sentiment.”
He died at age 36.
It’s hard to know how much a fatal disease influences your songwriting. Goodman’s wife gave us some insight into the process:
Steve wanted to live as normal a life as possible, only he had to live it as fast as he could.... He extracted meaning from the mundane.
As a more folk and country singer-songwriter, Goodman observed the American landscape and wrote stories about trains, silly country lyrics and politics.
His most famous song was “City of New Orleans,” that other artists, including Arlo Guthrie, Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson and Lynn Anderson, brought to a bigger audience.
The song became an American standard.
Military Wives, Wasted Lives
While dealing with the ups and downs of leukemia, Goodman released his second album, “Somebody Else's Troubles,” in 1972.
Among the usual Americana mix of songs was one outlier: “The Ballad of Penny Evans,” a song about a Vietnam widow.
Goodman sang it a cappella.
In a strange juxtaposition, the good-natured and jovial Goodman makes you stop in your tracks when the ballad starts to sink in.
Oh my name is Penny Evans and my age is 21
A young widow in the war that's being fought in Viet Nam
And I have two infant daughters and Thank God I have no son
Now they say the war is over, but I think it's just begun
That’s a powerful stanza.
Young lives shattered by a foreign war, leaving a new family to pick up the pieces with one missing. And the only comfort is knowing that there are no sons to sacrifice to the war machine.
And now every month I get a check from an Army bureaucrat
And it's every month I tear it up and mail the damn thing back
Do you think that makes it all right, do you think I'd fall for that
And you can keep your bloody money, it won't bring my Billy back
A military paycheck arrives each month as a reminder of the madness. It’s an act of torture and contrition. Blood money for Billy.
In the silent halls of the Pentagon, war planners dismiss the costs of young men, while bureaucratic administrators process paychecks to the wounded and widowed.
And I have two infant daughters and I do the best I can
Now they say the war is over, but I think it's just begun
The casualties of war are not all left behind on the battlefield. They remain alive in the tranquil suburbs, congested cities and open farmlands of America.
Each one left to suffer the fate of fighting for “freedom and democracy.”
Each one left trying to protect the next generation from the ravages of a war machine that never runs out of precious human fuel.
Coda
Truth lies in the sadness of war statistics.
Over 58,000 U.S. military personnel died in the Vietnam War:
the 18 to 20 age group accounted for 19,200 deaths (approx. 33%)
the 21 to 24 age group accounted for 29,700 deaths (approx. 51%)
Young men, representing the next generation, accounted for over 80% of all war deaths.
This is the real tragedy of sending virile patriotic kids to fight for politicians, elitists and oligarchs.
In Ukraine, the official death counts are not reliable due to the continuation of the conflict and the propaganda of underreporting.
However, the true story reveals itself in other ways.
At the start of conscription in Ukraine, the 18 to 29 age group was exempted from service.
Why? Many of these young men had yet to marry and have children. The authorities knew they couldn’t risk killing off the next generation.
As the war progressed, the draft exemption group was limited to those in the 18 to 25 age group. War machines require immediate bodies, the concerns about national demographics be damned.
The number of war widows, like Penny Evans, has no official count.
[NB: This song came to my attention from Social Issues in Songs. Give it a look over.]
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