“A terrible cosmic arrangement”: Joan Baez’s Vietnam War project
Alongside her celebrated folk albums since the late 1950s, singer-songwriter Joan Baez was a fiercely committed social activist and dedicated pacifist throughout some of America’s most turbulent political episodes, vociferously campaigning against poverty, environmental ruin, and the Iraq War. Shaped by her parents’ Quaker convictions, Baez was present at numerous civil rights marches as a teen and formed a close friendship with the movement’s leading champion, Martin Luther King Jr.
Often presented as a secondary figure in Bob Dylan’s 1960s lore, Baez was following a much more compelling path than her former lover and muse. While Dylan was flexing his Hollywood chops for Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, Baez spent 13 days in north Vietnam during some of the most devastating bombings of the entire conflict.
As morale among the American populace and the troops were reaching rock bottom, coupled with the breakdown of the private Paris negotiations between National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger and Politburo general Lê Đức Thọ, US President Richard Nixon ordered Operation Linebacker II, resulting in hundreds of B-52 aircraft dropping at least 20,000 tonnes of explosives across the Hanoi and Haiphong areas across December 1972, killing over 1,000 Vietnamese.
The North Vietnamese Army was supplied with Soviet-made surface-to-air missiles and numerous MiG-21 fighter jets, and effectively recuperating during the Christmas Day break in the bombing campaign, put up fierce resistance until the operation’s abandonment on the 29th. One airman documented on a radio recording during a Boxing Day attack summed up the nightmare starkly: “I’ve never seen so much triple-A [Anti-aircraft artillery] in my life.”
Amid this terrible destruction, Baez and her peace delegation, including fellow activist Barry Romo, St Louis Reverand Michael Allen, and human rights lawyer Telford Taylor, were hiding in their Thong Nhat Hotel bunker during the attacks on Hanoi’s Hoàn Kiếm district. “That was my first experience in dealing with my own mortality, which I thought was a terrible cosmic arrangement,” Baez confessed to The Christian Science Monitor in 2013. “It is OK for everyone else to die, but surely there was another plan for me?” Baez quipped mordantly.
Armed with a portable tape machine, Baez recorded 15 hours of audio documenting the Linebacker II’s nightly raids in stark detail. It captured the booming explosions above them, children playing among the ruins, a philosophical exchange with a stuck Cuban sailor, and a Christmas service held by Baez and Allen as the war waged in the distance.
Titled after the traumatised utterances of a war-weary mother during an intense night of bombing, ‘Where Are You Now, My Son?’ occupies the entirety of its 1973 namesake LP’s second side, presenting a 22-minute collage of edited gonzo material and poetic, spoken-word narrative. Part journalistic document and hymn for peace, the cut is a powerful and haunting exploration of the US imperial war machine and the trail of blood it leaves.
While Baez is now painting portraits for Kamala Harris’s failed electoral campaign during her party’s devastating inaction on Israel’s ongoing slaughter in Gaza, there was a time when she was truly living and breathing political action the likes of John Lennon never went near. Among a voluminous body of work, Where Are You Now, My Son? stands as her boldest piece, wrestling fraught humanity from conflict’s darkest corner.
