John Prine
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The death of John Prine, a survivor of cancer who was lost Tuesday to the coronavirus, takes from us one of America’s greatest troubadours of what we call the Vietnam generation. We were almost exactly the same age and had been in the army at roughly the same time, albeit in different theaters. Yet, in an irony, we failed to fully appreciate Prine’s art until we were educated by our children.
Prine wrote and sang scores of songs, and by no means all about Vietnam; some crackled with humor, others ebbed with sadness. The one that rivets us the most, though, is the ballad “Sam Stone,” about a veteran who survived Vietnam only to be lost to heroin. “There’s a hole in daddy’s arm where all the money goes,” is one of the lyrics. We found ourselves listening to it on the internet several times this morning. It is a haunting ballad.
The song took us back to our days covering combat for Pacific Stars & Stripes and a dispatch brought in by a fellow GI reporter, Dan Evans. He’d just come back from Hue, where, out and about well after curfew, he’d been stopped by an American military policeman. When Evans showed his DoD press card, the MP asked him whether he’d like to join in on patrol. “I’ll take you to every brothel in Hue,” he said.
The pursuit turned out to be not for women of the night. Rather, the MP was on patrol against North Vietnamese agents pushing heroin on American GIs. GIs were often targeted in bars they frequented. Evans’ reporting was one of the most important scoops that Stripes helped bring in during Vietnam — an early glimpse of the fact that the communists were pushing heroin as a war tactic.
So daddy’s arm wasn’t the only thing with a hole in it. It would not be too much to say that heroin pushed against us as a formal war tactic in Vietnam left a hole in the heart of a whole generation. “And the gold rolled through his veins” John Prine sang, “Like a thousand railroad trains / And eased his mind in the hours that he chose / While the kids ran around wearing other people’s clothes.”
It’s hard to think of anyone who captured the sadness of the result more poignantly than John Prine. He ranks with Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, and Bob Dylan, among others, in mastering the power of the song to move us and tell stories. Prine’s songs were often both deeper and more subtle, disclosing him as an artist who grows until he catches the imagination of a new generation and connects it to an earlier one.