Hello everyone! This is my first post about a specific song so I'm kind of excited. Please excuse me if this subject has been previously discussed - if so, please fill me in on what has already been said.
Anyway, this song for me showcases Suzanne's masterful songwriting skills. It took me a long time, years perhaps, to decide what I thought the song was about. For the longest time I thought Suzanne had used the wrong word at the end of the line where she's describing the woman who "lay on the cot, mute and staring, not feeling the thing that she DID..." I always assumed Suzanne meant to use the word "had", since earlier in the song she had been describing things that people once had and could still feel (like the lost limb, eyesight, etc.) I thought the point of the line was ironic, that the girl, instead of feeling what she no longer had, did not feel what she did actually have. It wasn't until many years of deliberatly mis-hearing this song that I figured out that no, Suzanne didn't use the wrong word at all, the girl was rather engaged in an unpleasant act (possibly a bad sexual experience) that she had mentally retreated from, not feeling the thing that she DID. I must say this changed my view of the song considerably, taking on a much darker, sinister tone. The music is so deceptively jaunty, though! I find much of Suzanne's music is like that, though, cleverly concealing a darker subtext which is revealed only late into the song. Bad Wisdom, for example.

Anyway, this has turned in to kind of a long post! Do messages posted to the board also get sent out as emails to those on the list?

Thanks a mil,
Brady (going to the Austin concert soon!!!!)

"Not feeling the thing that she did"

I think the word did could be linked back to the verb in the sentence. So I think it's not a thing she did, but a thing she did feel.

"Not feeling the thing that she did feel"


Spikey

Yeah, that's what I believed for the longest time, that the sentence should read:
"Not feeling the thing that she did (have)"
But now I feel that "did" does refer to an action, that she was engaged in some activity while laying (lying?) mute and staring on the cot.
Nice to know I'm not the only one who has interpreted this sentence that way.

Brady

What I meant was "Not feeling the thing that she feels" or something.

I'd possibly go for both interpretations as options... she did not feel the thing she felt and did not feel anything, kinda compete numbness her real situation ... sounds a bit tricky and weird, and referring to grammar and linguistics, Spikey is probably right, yet I like the vagueness of English grammar here, because Brady's way of reading the sentence isn't completely ruled out by it...
Maybe she is completely numb in the situation she is in, like being in complete emotional coma...

Cheers,

Rolf

I'm a guy, but it looks like all of these comments are from guys and are testosterone contaminated. I'm new to this forum and I do not know what else has been posted, so please excuse me if I restate what has already been said before. I think that this is a song about an abortion. No matter which side of the line you are on in the question of "when does life begin", most women having an abortion, by any technique, find it frightening and uncomfortable. Even for less bothersome medical procedures (some recent dental work) I may find myself "drenched in a sweat" and trying to focus on something else ("Not feeling the thing that she did"). Not feeling the thing that she did can be more emotional than that (dissociation) There is an old psychological article that compares the emotional effect of stillbirths on women to an amputation. I think I could find it if Suzanne wanted it. The idea was that a lot of the grief a woman feels after a stillbirth is for something that isn't there anymore. I do not know if that idea is still considered relevant at this time but I could check that out too.

Welcome Daniel -

You can see video of Suzanne talking about "Men in A War" here:

http://www.suzannevega.com/video/interviewVideo2.h tm

Testosterone contaminated? Why? [BTW this is scary I opened the thread and a live version of Men in a War starts playing on my stereo]

Brady and I were discussing how to interpret a sentence linguistically. No testosterone in there. I suspect that you are referring to some sort of sexism (though I don't see how BTW explain). Since the world suffers from heterosexism a lot, and gay people like Brady (if I remember correctly) and me live in that very same world, we would never make sexist comments.

I even suspect that the song originally excluded the strophe that's about the woman, cause in the early version I listen right now, it's not there.

According to my (and other people's) website http://rustedpipe.vega.net/men_in_a_war.htm Suzanne wrote Men in a War because she felt as if she was missing a part of herself, but couldn't put her finger on it. So the song "is about missing a piece of yourself, whether it's a physical piece or a part of your will or spirit. I put the woman in the song because I wanted to show these two people in opposite circumstances, both of them feeling incomplete. The man is feeling something he doesn't have, and the woman is not feeling something she has." according to her own saying.

Somehow, people put sexual content to this song. I did as well at one point in my life: I once wrote a story about it, about a man that was on a warbed telling the doctor that his leg hurted, and then the doctor told him that it was actually gone. He met a woman there who was also a soldier, and was raped, and she makes the comparison. I know this song isn’t really about a physical war, but about missing a piece of your body or mind (“Men in a war if they’ve lost a limb, Still feel that limb as they did before”) and not feeling something you do feel. This song brings up the theme of a man and a woman in a war. (“He lay on a cot, he was drenched in a sweat, he was mute and staring and feeling a thing he had not” and “She lay on her back she was sure she was hid, she was mute and staring not feeling the thing that she did”)

This subject of a man and a woman and a war is brought up several times in other songs, like in the Queen and the Soldier, where the Soldier tells the Queen that he won’t march again on the battlefield, since he sees no point in it and they lose more battles than win them anyway. This connects the battlefield to love, since the Soldier is leaving to search for love.
A less obvious variant on this we can find in Marlene on the Wall (again, love, war, man and woman are combined), where someone is not really a soldier, but feels like it. Here is a distinction between the beautiful Marlene Dietrich and the soldier as an opposite. This is like the Machine Ballerina and the Soldier of Tin.

There are a lot more references to war.

Greetz,
Spikey

If that is Suzannes explanation, I stand corrected. "the woman is not feeling something she has." And I admit that one can interpret some of the lyrics as what the psychiatrists call dissociation, a kind of blanking out when dealing with unpleasant situations. It is commonly seen in Post traumatic stress disorders including combat situations and sexual abuse.

Hearing about a woman in a cot, drenched in a sweat with no other context, I would try to interpret it by considering that she might be involved a sexual situation (rather engaged in an unpleasant act). But I agree that the key point of the song is really about loss.

In this case, it sounds like loss in a medical situation, the consequence of a volitional action (the thing that she did). And that is how some have described their experience with the loss of a child. Your argument is that the loss is one of feeling or awareness, and it is valid. Nice to talk with you.

Daniel said: "Hearing about a woman in a cot, drenched in a sweat with no other context, I would try to interpret it..."

I would put forward that there is an intentional blurring going on here between the man in a war and the woman. It makes me think of a soldier on a cot after field surgery. The woman should be on a table at a clinic, hospital, etc. One is drenched in sweat because of the tropical humidity, the other out of nevers and fear.

Uncwilly
Song of the day: Will the Circle be Unbroken
Cheese: Lincolnshire Poacher

I think of both of them as being in a forced sexual condition, comparing them to soldiers. Dunno why.

"Men" in "Men in a war" most likely refers to the human species in general.

Spikey

Anyone ever watch the intro to this song on the 1990 documentary (posted on this site, I believe)? There's a suble, fantastic moment when she laughs at herself saying "that's great" about people in the crowd having pieces of themselves missing. Basically, she just gets tickled over what she's saying. It's four or five remarkable seconds. She looks - ironically - very, very complete, comfortable and happy.

Makes me think that the missing parts become whole suddenly at random, unexpected moments when one forgets about the fact that they are gone, or simply no longer cares. Just fleeting flashes of something significant. If only you could bottle whatever that is, and not care about the parts that have been slashed away whenever you needed to not care.

ANYWAY, it's a rockin' tune.

---

The wind kicks up with the smell of rain
The kids are gone but the souls remain

As long as I'm talking to myself about this song, it's another case of a lyric I got wrong. Apparently, it's "A piece of the SCAN, gets filled in by hand" I always thought it was "A piece of the SKIN, get filled in by hand" Now, after all these years, I suddenly have no idea what she's talking about. Scan? WTF? Like a cat scan? Anyway...

Regarding the previous post, I went back and watched the clip and it's entirely possibly that there actually was nothing transcendant about it - she may, upon reflection, have simply looked hot.

---

The wind kicks up with the smell of rain
The kids are gone but the souls remain

i've always felt "the scan" to be someone's inner horizon. if a piece of it gets erased, cracked or broken, you have to fill it in by hand, because "you know that it was / and now it is not / so you just make do with / whatever you've got". it's "that thin thread / i call my horizon" which also appears in "rock in this pocket (song of david)".

---

chance is the only thing that doesn't happen by chance

Really like this song, hope to hear it live!

---

The wind kicks up with the smell of rain
The kids are gone but the souls remain