When John Fogerty and Creedence Clearwater Revival released Fortunate Son in October of 1969, the band didn’t consider it a protest song. The idea for the song came from a December, 1968 photo of President Nixon’s daughter Julie at her wedding to David Eisenhower, grandson of former President Dwight D Eisenhower. According to CCR’s drummer, Doug Clifford, the song wasn’t so much about Vietnam as it was about class differences and the way the rich are insulated and protected. About whose sons are made to do society’s dirty work. In the words of the song, “No not me. I ain’t no senator’s son.”
The year 1968 was a pivotal one for the war. The brutal Tet Offensive that began in January of that year went on for months across Vietnam, resulting in heavy casualties within the military and the civilian population. On February 27, 1968 TV anchorman Walter Cronkite, back from covering the Tet Offensive, delivered his now famous “We Are Mired In Stalemate” broadcast in which he said the war was unwinnable.
Though it would not be known to the public until November of 1969, in March of 68, two hundred American soldiers massacred more than three hundred civilians in the hamlet of My Lai. In May of that year, Catherine Leroy, a tiny Frenchwoman who had made a name for herself as a combat photographer published a searing photo essay in Look Magazine. Titled This Is That War, her essay persuaded the editors at Look to publish a piece calling upon the government to admit that Vietnam had been a mistake and to extricate the country from the war. You can read more about Catherine in an earlier post.
By year’s end, 16,899 Americans had lost their lives in what would turn out to be the bloodiest year of the war. Those deaths represented nearly 30 percent of all the lives lost during the conflict. The US estimates that over 190,000 Vietnamese died during the same year.
Long before Fortunate Son became a war anthem, the band’s music resonated with American troops serving in Vietnam. In his 2015 memoir, Fortunate Son: My Life, My Music, Fogerty wrote of meeting a Vietnam vet he met in the 1990’s. The vet told Fogerty “every night, before we’d go into the jungle, we’d turn on all the lights in our encampment, put on Bad Moon Rising (another of the band’s hits) and blast it as loud as we could.”
Then came the movie Forrest Gump, released in July of 1994 featuring a sequence in which Forrest and his new Army buddy Bubba arrive in Vietnam, Fortunate Son blasting as their helicopter set down. This set the stage for at least 18 other films in which Fortunate Son plays. If you’ve seen Live Free or Die Hard, or Battleship, or The Manchurian Candidate, you may have heard some version of Fortunate Son.
Fogerty wasn’t especially happy that Fortunate Son became an unwritten rule of movie making: if it’s about fighting in Vietnam, or about protesting Vietnam, the soundtrack must include Fortunate Son. But by then he had signed away his rights to the music.
If you’re reading this post you know that I wrote a novel about the young female journalists such as Catherine Leroy and others who covered the war. I chose to anchor A Season In Saigon in 1968 because that year marked a turning point in the public’s perception of why American troops were there and what they were intended to achieve. If you’re a student of history I hope this novel adds to your understanding of this chapter in our country’s story. If you like stories about strong women forging new paths, if you enjoy stories about female friendships, if you enjoy sweet love stories, you might like A Season In Saigon.
