Pull Out the Pin (Patreon)

Pull Out the Pin

2018 Remaster 

In the years following the Fall of Saigon and U. S. President Gerald Ford’s withdrawal of the United States’ armed forces from the surrounding region, the Vietnam War acquired a legacy as America’s failure, an epic tragedy where nobody could remember how long the war had lasted or why they were fighting it to begin with. Such mythologization and naturalization are part and parcel of neoliberal historiography, which metastasizes to obscure the material circumstances and geopolitics that shape cultural history. It hardly takes a postgraduate degree in American history to familiarize oneself with the John F. Kennedy administration’s tacit support of the 1963 in Saigon, or to have even a basic knowledge of how the Johnson, Nixon, and Ford administrations followed suit in the interminable war that would see a presidential assassination and the United States’ one presidential resignation before it ended. During the most straightforward wars narrative clarity is rarely prioritized. With an endless bloodbath like Vietnam, war became a bellicose eternity.

Myths rode roughshod over cultural trauma and violent atrocities. The myth of the deranged American veteran, immortalized in films like Apocalypse Now and First Blood, both exaggerated and downplayed an epidemic of PTSD among young people deployed to fight a particularly vicious war. The generations of Vietnamese people devastated by the slaughter of loved ones and the systematic butchering of their country were likelier to receive a collective knighthood than reparations or even acknowledgment. While the Vietnam War was broadly understood to be a tragedy, the contours of its horrors were largely overshadowed by mythologizing. In the positively harrowing classic ITV documentary Four Hours in My Lai, a retrospective of the day United States soldiers committed mass murder and rape in an event that killed as many as 504 Southern Vietnamese civilians, elderly survivor Truong Thi Le tearfully recounts watching the people around her being shot and burned en masse, surviving more gunfire under the literal cover of dead bodies, and eventually falling to her knees in grief, saying “I miss my mother, my children. I think of them there lying dead and my heart is cut to pieces.” Many people around her suffered similarly. Even on the opposing side there was trauma, as many soldiers’ account of their atrocities sound like cadaverous husks recalling their obliteration of their own humanity. The Americans who returned from that massacre couldn’t pretend to themselves any longer that the myth of trenchant, noble soldiering under the Star-Spangled Banner applied to reality. Yet the events of My Lai had a negligible influence on future events of the war — soldiers who turned on their genocidal fellows were penalized to a greater extent than the murderers and rapists in their midst. Part of the Vietnam War’s cultural tragedy is that it was commemorated as a noble failure, rather than a civilizational breakdown of the kind neoliberalism uses to construct itself. In the end, the battle for hearts and minds was narrowly won only by long-term narratological distortion and military-industrial brutality.

With “Pull Out the Pin,” Kate Bush continues to dialogue with geopolitical uncertainty through Vietnam War nostalgia. Compelled by a PBS documentary in which Australian cameraman Neil Davis’ surveyed Vietnamese soldiers on the frontlines of the War, Bush developed an interest in the oft-abjured Vietnamese perspective of the conflict. Of the Davis film, she remarked that Davis had “portrayed the Vietnamese as this really crafted, beautiful race. The Americans were these big, fat, pink, smelly things who the Vietnamese could smell coming for miles because of the tobacco and cologne… you got the impression that the Americans were so heavy and awkward, and the Vietnamese were so beautiful and all getting wiped out.”

It would likely be news to Vietnamese people if you told them they had been “all wiped out,” but Bush’s observation of how rare a non-American perspective of Vietnam is rings true. In “Pull Out the Pin,” The Dreaming’s A-side threnody for Vietnam, Bush unravels the tragedy of Vietnam through the eyes of a Viet Cong fighter. Ushering in her guerilla agent with a metallic, echoing quasi-oriental riff of the kind that pervades Western cultural depictions of Second Indochina, Bush deploys The Dreaming’s oft-utilized technique of panto deliveries to the camera, relating the thrills of guerilla warfare to whoever will listen: “just as we hit the green/I’ve never been so happy to be alive.” Making good on her perception of the Viet Cong as supersoldiers who could smell an enemy from leagues away, she has her fighter’s olfactory savvy “smell[ing] the child/the smell of the front line’s survival.” “Pin’s” soldier is a bucolic specter, eluding the “city-births” enemy as the Vietnamese loner “learn[s] to ride the earth.” Distressingly, Bush gives the character a racist broken dialect found in works like, say, Full Metal Jacket with its Vietnamese sex worker, eliding the present tense/second person in the line “who need radar?/we use scent,” and continuing this clunky scansion through the following lines “they stink of the west/stink of sweat/stink of cologne and baccy/and all their Yankee hash.”

The culmination is the genuinely astonishing refrain, which passes up the verse’s troubling racial dynamics for a genuinely harrowing sonic look at war. Brian Bath’s guitar soars menacingly as Bush muses on the existential horror of chucking a grenade at a clueless soldier, “just one thing in it… me, or him,” then quickly screaming “I LOVE LIFE,” met by surprise cameo David Gilmour intoning “pull out the pin!” It’s urgent and chilling, and one of the highlights of the album.

But the chorus is not the whole song. For all that Bush deserves credit for asking “how did Vietnamese people experience the war,” her answer being to clothe her Vietnamese narrator in the still racist trappings of a belly-crawling beast who speaks broken English hardly distinguishes “Pull Out the Pin” from other Western post-Vietnam works. Despite her intentions — which come across clearly on record — she’s limited by her perspectives.

The Dreaming can similarly be appraised. While it’s far from a failure, and has been unfairly tarred by some factions over the years, and contains some of Bush’s finest songs and innovations, its attempts at mind expansion are frequently derailed by Bush’s tone-deafness to her own cultural making. While The Dreaming is hardly a transitional album and any assessment of it that defines it as a Hounds of Love prologue is lazy and foolhardy, it is primarily a document of itself, full of triumphs and sonic breakthroughs, but only achieving its true potential in gulps.

(Bush.) Bush — vocals, piano, production. Heyman — drums. Thompson — string bass. Bath — electric guitar. Gilmour — backing vocals. Bendall — engineering. Dawson — assistant engineering. Backing tracks rec. Spring ‘81 at Abbey Road Studios. Redubs and mixes; Mar-May ‘82 at Advision Studios. Released on The Dreaming