Afraid To Shoot Strangers

Sometimes, musicians other than Roger Waters have good takes too

I already mentioned my age in the last post, and if you’re around the same then you might’ve been an Iron Maiden fan back in the day. Or you could be younger and be one now, I guess.

I actually wasn’t a big fan myself back then; I’d heard everything they’d play on the radio and on tv like “Run To The Hills”, “Number Of The Beast”, “2 Minutes To Midnight”, etc. And I heard a couple of singles from the same album that the song I’ll talk about was on, namely “Be Quick Or Be Dead” and “From Here To Eternity”. I enjoyed those songs, but not enough to actually part with my money to get at least one of their albums.

It wasn’t until I could stream most music for free on YouTube or Spotify that I decided to listen to all the stuff I didn’t buy when I was younger. Whether I was listening to Maiden’s catalogue, or Duran Duran’s, or REO Speedwagon’s, or whoever’s, I’d almost always feel like I missed out by not listening to any of it sooner.

Before I go further, a word of advice: whatever artists in the music industry that you’re a fan of, you probably do NOT want to know their politics in the year 2023 if they’re still alive to have an opinion. That’s because they’ll probably disappoint you. Bono is the rule rather than the exception from the looks of things. I started listening to more current stuff like Billie Eilish in 2020 or so, but I hadn’t heard more than a couple of songs before she made me not want to listen to any more by speaking at the Democratic National Convention on behalf of Joe Biden.

Then there was the singer/rhythm guitarist of another band which I won’t name because it might ruin that band for anybody reading here who might enjoy their work (I wasn’t afraid to name Eilish because it would be hard to miss her appearance at the DNC, whereas this is something which might have escaped people’s notice). Anyway, this person said that they were voting against Donald Trump. They didn’t talk about Biden’s problems in detail and pretty much just made a vague reference to how he wasn’t perfect or whatever, but the post they made said something like “I’m tired of all the namecalling.” Really? Does that mean you’d be okay with a president who killed a lot more people than Trump did but was polite?

Seeing stuff like that makes me wary to start being a fan of anybody relatively new, but I’d be kidding myself if I believed older artists were any wiser. Gene Simmons of KISS, for example, has got really dogshit takes on everything.

Which is why I was pleasantly surprised when I decided to look at what Genius said about Maiden’s “Afraid To Shoot Strangers”.

It isn’t the band’s first song about war. “The Trooper” is sung from the point of view of a doomed soldier, and it doesn’t make war seem glamorous or fun at all. “2 Minutes To Midnight” is, as you may have guessed, about how dangerously close we were to nuclear war at the time of its release. That one’s relevant again now, of course. “Aces High” could maybe be taken as glorifying war, but I don’t believe that was bassist Steve Harris’ intent when he wrote it.

The difference between “Afraid To Shoot Strangers” and the others is that this song was written in response to the Gulf War.

Harris wrote this one too, but on the Genius page for it, it’s singer Bruce Dickinson who’s quoted:

“[This song] was written about the people that fought in the Gulf War. It’s a song about how shitty war is, and how shitty war is that it’s started by politicians and has to be finished by ordinary people that don’t really want to kill anybody.”

When the Gulf War happened, it seemed like everybody agreed that the US was in the right for going to war and that Saddam was just a megalomaniac who invaded Kuwait because he wanted to conquer the world and Kuwait was as good a place as any to begin. Also, that it all worked out fine because barely anybody on the side of the “good guys” got killed. That’s what I believed, and I didn’t read or hear about how many Iraqi civilians were killed (while different sources have different numbers, it’s always in the hundreds of thousands), or about how Saddam actually invaded because Kuwait was slant drilling under Iraqi soil to get its oil and ignored Iraq’s demands that it stop, until well into this century. I’d heard about Saddam’s meeting with US diplomat April Glaspie earlier than that, where Glaspie assured Saddam that the US had no problem with him attacking Kuwait, but even that was something I didn’t find out about until well after the US went to war with Iraq for the second time.

So I’m pretty impressed that Dickinson and Harris were able to look at that and realize what I failed to realize at the time and what so many others failed to realize too: that it was wrong. And regardless of whatever they believe today (I’d like to think that they’re too smart to fall for propaganda about Ukraine and everything too, but I know better than to get my hopes up too high), I’m still impressed.

Here’s the song to listen to if you care to, and the lyrics to read if you don’t care to listen.

[Verse 1]
Lying awake at night
I wipe the sweat from my brow
But it's not the fear
Cause I'd rather go now
Trying to visualize
The horrors that will lay ahead
The desert sand mound a burial ground

[Verse 2]
When it comes to the time
Are we partners in crime?
When it comes to the time
We'll be ready to die

[Verse 3]
God, let us go now
And finish what's to be done
Thy Kingdom come
Thy shall be done on Earth
Trying to justify to ourselves
The reasons to go
Should we live and let live?
Forget or forgive?

[Verse 4]
But how can we let them go on this way?
The reign of terror, corruption must end
And we know deep down
There's no other way
No trust, no reasoning, no more to say

[Chorus]
Afraid to shoot strangers
Afraid to shoot strangers

[Guitar Solo]

[Bridge]
Afraid, afraid to shoot strangers
Afraid, afraid to shoot strangers
Afraid, afraid to shoot strangers
Afraid, afraid to shoot strangers
Afraid, afraid to shoot strangers
Afraid, afraid to shoot strangers
Afraid, afraid to shoot strangers
Afraid, afraid to shoot strangers