War & Peace Quote by James Rado

A single sentence, built like a punchline, lands because it refuses the comfort of “service” as a neutral civic ritual. James Rado, a key voice behind the anti-Vietnam War musical Hair, compresses centuries of American violence into a color-coded ledger: white power conscripting Black bodies to fight Asian bodies on land taken from Indigenous peoples. The blunt chromatic shorthand is doing deliberate work. It’s not trying to be polite; it’s trying to be unforgettable, the way protest art has to be when it’s competing with patriotic myth.

The intent is accusation, not nuance: the draft isn’t framed as shared sacrifice, but as an extraction system. “Sending” is the operative verb, stripping draftees of agency and highlighting who gets to decide what counts as duty. The subtext is that the state’s moral narrative collapses once you track who pays the price. Black Americans, disproportionately drafted and disproportionately placed in combat roles during Vietnam, become the clearest proof that “national defense” can function as racial management. “Protect the country” is quoted without quotation marks, but the sarcasm is audible.

Context matters: Hair premiered in 1967, when Vietnam was escalating and civil rights victories were curdling into backlash. Rado’s line isn’t a history lesson; it’s a protest chant sharpened into theatre. Its power comes from refusing to isolate Vietnam as an aberration. It recasts the war as one chapter in a longer story of conquest, policing, and coerced labor - and it dares the audience to keep calling that story patriotism.