(Credits: Far Out / Bruce Springsteen)
Wed 4 March 2026 20:30, UK
There’s probably no one in the music industry prouder to be an American than Bruce Springsteen.
Even though many people like to wave the flag and consider themselves patriotic because they do everything that the president says, ‘The Boss’ is the shining example of someone who was willing to speak their mind and speak up for the everyman, a lot better than any of his colleagues, when he had that Fender Telecaster in his hands. But even if he had a ton of great tunes about the blue-collar workers that he knew back in New Jersey, his heart also went out to the people that he knew back in the day that got lost along the way.
Because, really, you can’t have a good story without at least a little bit of heartache involved in rock and roll. Some of the greatest rock and roll stars of all time have cut their teeth on songs that took a lot out of them, and given how Springsteen’s heart was broken on Tunnel of Love and completely lost on Nebraska, it’s not like he didn’t have that same kind of depressing feeling running through some of his songs.
But his music wasn’t about moping all the time about the hand that someone was dealt in life. If anything, he wanted to give people a reason to believe that they could make it one more day every single time they heard one of his songs. The characters in ‘Badlands’ aren’t going through the best phase of their lives by any stretch, but they are willing to keep pushing through every major setback until they start getting treated better.
Once Springsteen looked at what his friends had seen in the Vietnam War, though, he was more than a little bit disgusted with what his country was doing. There was a large resistance to the war once the hippie generation started turning their voices up, but Springsteen had a more nuanced argument from people who had seen it firsthand. He fortunately never had to serve in the military, but ‘Born in the U.S.A.’ isn’t coming from a place of ignorance.
He had seen a lot of his friends come home permanently damaged, and a lot of the flag-waving set that didn’t understand the lyrics of this song missed the gory details of what was happening. Springsteen talked about one of his friends going to the other side of the world to fight, but he can’t even finish one of the lines when he talks about having a picture of him lying dead in his wife’s arms.
While Springsteen did have a lot more compassion for all servicemen, it took him a long time before he found the courage to talk about his friend Walter Cichon on ‘The Wall’, saying, “Walter went missing in action in Vietnam in March 1968. He still performs somewhat regularly in my mind, the way he stood, dressed, held the tambourine, the casual cool, the freeness. The man who by his attitude, his walk said ‘you can defy all this, all of what’s here, all of what you’ve been taught, taught to fear, to love and you’ll still be alright.’ His was a terrible loss to us, his loved ones and the local music scene.”
Cichon had already been one of the foundational members of the New Jersey band the Motifs, so to see one of his heroes completely disappear was something Springsteen needed to make sense of. A lot of soldiers never got to say their final goodbyes, and listening to the song, you can hear Springsteen wrestling with every emotion in his body, being both angry, hurt, and finally hopeful that Cichon was able to find some sense of peace.
Because that’s what anyone should strive for even when they see soldiers coming back from a war that they didn’t want. A lot of the Vietnam veterans weren’t given the kind of help that they deserved after coming back home, but just because someone was forced to do something that they didn’t want to do doesn’t mean that they need to be chastised for it.