Universal Soldier -- Buffy Sainte-Marie

He's five foot two  and he's six feet four, he fights with missiles and
with spears.  He's all of thirty-one and he's only seventeen,
He's been a soldier through a thousand years.  He's a Catholic, a Hindu,an atheist,
a Jain, a Buddhist, a Baptist and a Jew.  And he knows he shouldn't kill  and he knows
he always will  kill you for me my friend and me for you.


And he's fighting for Canada, he's fighting for France,  he's fighting for the USA. 
And he's fighting for the Russians  and he's fighting for Japan, and he thinks we'll put
an end to war this way.  And he's fighting for democracy, he's fighting for the Reds,
he says it's for the peace of all. He's the one who must decide,
who's to live and who's to die, and he never sees the writing on the wall.


But without him, how would Hitler have condemned him at Dachau,
without him Caesar would have stood alone. He's the one who gives
his body  as a weapon of the war, and without him all this killing can't go on.


He's the universal soldier, and he really is to blame, his orders come
from far away, no more. They come from here and there and you and me
and brothers can't you see, this is not the way we put the end to war.


Buffy Sainte Marie wrote this song in the basement of  coffee house in Toronto in 1963 after witnessing wounded soldiers returning from Vietnam. She has described the song as being "About individual responsibility for war and how the old feudal thinking kills us all." The song became an anthem of the Vietnam Peace movement                                 (songfacts.com)




U.S. military involvement ended on 15 August 1973 as a result of the Case–Church Amendment passed by the U.S. Congress. The capture of Saigon by the Vietnam People's Army in April 1975 marked the end of the war, and North and South Vietnam were reunified the following year. The war exacted a huge human cost in terms of fatalities  Estimates of the number of Vietnamese soldiers and civilians killed vary from less than one million to more than three million. Some 200,000–300,000 Cambodians, 20,000–200,000 Laotians, and 58,220 U.S. service members also died in the conflict.                                                    (Wikipedia)  

                                

                                     (From  Google images)