A song about what we did. What we chose.

Michael “Gene” Scott · Dec 04, 2025

Men in the water.

Hands raised.

One still clutching a plastic jug to stay afloat.

A sinking boat off the coast of Yemen. Drone footage, grainy and time-stamped.

Then a voice crackles over the radio: circle back.

Finish it.

I couldn’t stop watching. The way my grandmother watched Korea footage—hands frozen on the dish towel, mouth a tight line. Fourteen seconds. A camera that doesn’t flinch.

I wrote a song about it. First draft asked if we’d “become Russians.”

Read it back a week later and heard the dodge.

That framing makes the crime about turning into somebody else. Lets us off the hook. We didn’t become anything. We uncovered what was already there.

These hills taught me what refusal costs.

I’ve seen it in the pill mills that turned our people into profit margins. In the stripped seams that bled the mountains and left us with slurry ponds and buyouts. In the boys we send to wars we forget before they’re over, then act surprised when they come home with ghosts behind their eyes.

Same sickness. Different wounds. A signature on a memo. A briefing that turned drowning men into coordinates.

Why did someone give that order when the men had their hands in the air? I keep thinking about the hand on the trigger. The eyes that watched the screen go dark.

I don’t know the names of the men who drowned. I know what got reported. Who stayed quiet. What got buried under the next news cycle.

That’s enough to write a song. Enough to sit up past midnight asking what I owe the dead when my tax dollars paid for the hand that held them under.

We cannot heal what we refuse to see.

But we can witness. Name the thing. Refuse to change the channel when a man grips a plastic jug and hopes it floats.

We are more than our silence.

We carry this now—the way these hills carry every scar, every absence, every boy who didn’t come home whole.

The Line We Swore

[Verse 1]

I walk the halls where orders land,
No dirt, no blood, just steady hands.
No shouted charge, no battle yell,
Just quiet men who planned too well.
They crossed a line and called it fate,
Then turned their backs and locked the gate.
But I remember what they do,
And I’m the voice that follows through.

[Verse 2]

The boat was hit — they stayed afloat,
Hands in the air beside the boat.
The call came down: “Go in again.”
And fire was dropped on drowning men.
The stories spread of who approved,
How higher ranks were never moved.
The tapes exist. The dead remain.
The stain is ours. We gave it name.

[Chorus]

This wasn’t foreign, wasn’t far —
It happened here beneath our star.
Don’t say “become,” we crossed that line.
We broke the oath we called divine.

[Verse 3]

The laws of war were carved from pain,
So war could end — and not profane.
But they were mocked as weak and small
By men who never heard the call.
The ones who served were left to drown,
Then smeared for laying burdens down.
Their ghosts still rise — not out of hate,
But just to ask: is this our fate?

[Bridge]

I’m not a curse, I’m not revenge,
I’m just the line you let unhinge.
You may forget what you allowed,
But I still speak, and I speak loud.

[Chorus]

Don’t look to Moscow, don’t deflect —
This wound is ours, and ours to reckon yet.
We fed the dark and praised the fire.
We fooled ourselves and called it higher.

[Final Chorus]

We are the ones who knew the law.
We are the hands that held them down.
No foreign name can bear this weight —
This is our ghost. This is our state.

Gene Scott grew up on a tenant farm in Sheffield, Illinois, where strip mines swallowed the prairie and Euclid trucks hauled coal past the kitchen window. His father welded for International Harvester winters and pulled hogs from collapsed mine shafts. His mother drove a hundred miles round-trip to Bradley University three days a week, graduated with honors, and never let them miss a meal. Scott earned degrees from Illinois and Tennessee, married Lana Ferguson on her family’s front porch in Hancock County—the oldest residence in the county, where her Confederate ancestor is buried at the edge of the woods—and raised a son in the Appalachian foothills. His writing draws on Midwestern magical realism, generational memory, and the stories told around oak kitchen tables where stoker men and snake women once drank coffee.