SEND ME! || HORSE CACTUS MUSIC

Every eligible member of my family since 1790 has served this great nation through volunteering for our various military forces, maybe with a cry of SEND ME!, the title of our heartfelt tribute to American war volunteers, as performed here by Nashville's inimitable vocalist, Mr. Ron Wallace and the BMG superband.

At the end of January 1973, the US Secretary of Defense announced our U.S. military would, going forward, fill its ranks exclusively with volunteers rather than with draftees. The decision has been proved sound.

George Orwell wrote that “People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.” Most of those rough men volunteered for their military duty, no matter the cost. What they were fighting for wasn’t in front of them, it was left behind, in those small towns and villages and cities where mourners still weep.

This song is intended to pay tribute to every military volunteer who’s ever fought for this country. My uncle, S/Sgt William Ralph Brooks, volunteered for the Army Air Corps during WWII when he was only nineteen, along with four of his brothers including my father. On his thirty-fourth and final mission with the 544 Bomb Squadron out of an airbase in France, his B-17 Flying Fortress, flak-wounded and crippled, was lost with all hands to a German Bf-109 over the English Channel on 19 Mar 1945, just before the war ended.

My grandmother, eighty-two years when she died, never got over it. Ralph lies at rest in a guarded and tended US cemetery in France. That graveyard is the subject of and surrounds the theme of this song.

After 50 years, the all-volunteer force remains the best model for our U.S. military and has delivered for the United States operationally and socially. Over the last half-century, in periods of conflict and in times of peace, volunteerism has continued to be the right decision. SEND ME!