‘Daniel’: How Elton John captured an American soldier’s reality of the Vietnam War
War is not the plaything that the likes of John Wayne professed it to be. For those who actually fought, honour and freedom were words buttressed beyond recognition by the rather more palpable reality etched onto 19-year-old Larry Wayne Chaffin’s helmet: “War is hell”. This was a reality that the counterculture revolution tried its best to reinforce.
As the real war veteran Kurt Vonnegut would write in his novel Slaughterhouse-Five, in a scene when he muses over the concept of fictionalising his experiences: “‘Well, I know,’ she said. ‘You’ll pretend you were men instead of babies, and you’ll be played in the movies by Frank Sinatra and John Wayne or some of those other glamorous, war-loving, dirty old men. And war will look just wonderful, so we’ll have a lot more of them. And they’ll be fought by babies like the babies upstairs.’ So then I understood. It was war that made her so angry. She didn’t want her babies or anybody else’s babies killed in wars. And she thought wars were partly encouraged by books and movies.”
Elton John’s lyricist, Bernie Taupin, didn’t want to fall foul of this aggrandising trick of literature when he was confronted by truths while leafing through a newspaper. “I’d seen this article in Time magazine on the Tet Offensive. And there was a sidebar next to it with a story about how many of the soldiers that were coming back from ‘Nam were these simple sort of down home country guys who were generally embarrassed by both the adulation and, depending on what part of the country you came from, the animosity that they were greeted by,” he explained.
He was moved by these stark realities. “For the most part, they just wanted to get back to a normal life, but found it hard, what with all the looky loos and the monkeys of war that they carried on their backs,” he continued. Songs like the masterful ‘Sam Stone’, with its unforgettable lyric, “There’s a hole in daddy’s arm, where all the money goes,” captured the lives of these returning veterans with brutal and righteous reality. Taupin wondered whether he could do the same with a straight pop song.
So, he pored over the Time magazine article and weaved his own little tale. “I just took it from there and wrote it from a younger brother’s perspective,” he said of ‘Daniel‘, “made him disabled and wanting to get away. I made it Spain, basically, because it rhymes with plane.”
While, of course, that hints at the limitations of pop and its rhyming platitudes, the fact that an anti-war song hit number two in the American charts in 1973 proves that Taupin had triumphed. It is wrapped up in its own nebulous narrative that disguises the point, but the inspiration behind the song comes to the fore in the revealing line, “Do you still feel the pain of the scars that won’t heal?” Although subtle, this single lyric was one that many identified with.
Moreover, the narrative itself, of a troubled soul heading to Spain, is indicative of the fact that many veterans did not want to return to their homelands with open arms but rather a desire to get away. The plaintive ‘Daniel’ might not spell that out clearly, but the longing in its morose melody and the corroborated backstory put forth by Taupin coalesce to form a saddening tale about the realities of the babies who fight in bloody battles.
