Blood Road (Ho Chi Minh Trail)
2005 · Sevared SR-024 · Netherlands
- Artist
- Toxocara
- Title
- Blood Road (Ho Chi Minh Trail)
- Release
- Imminent Repulsion (Suffice to Prevent)
- Year
- 2005
- Label
- Sevared # SR-024
- Format
- Album
- Country
- Netherlands
- Genre
- Metal · Brutal Death Metal
- Primary theme
- Post-War
Annotation
Brutal Death Metal band formed in 2003 in Groningen. Netherlands. They disbanded 2012. The song "The Blood Road (Ho Chi Minh Trail)" (Sevared Records # SR-024) reimagined the Ho Chi Minh Trail (Đường mòn Hồ Chí Minh, also know as the Annamite Range Trail), a network of road and trails, from North to South Vietnam, via Laos and Cambodia, to provide manpower and resources to the Viet Cong: "walk the blood road... assembled in the deepest jungle", while the US dropped bombs: "bombings never end... 1 million tons of bombs". Note the rare reference to Robert McNamara, US Secretary of Defense under the presidencies of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson (1961-1968). He commissioned the famous "Pentagon Papers", a top-secret study on the history of US involvement in Vietnam in 1967, leaked to the New York Times and other newspapers by Pentagon official Daniel Ellsberg in June 1971, which increased the credibility gap and support for withdrawal from Vietnam: "McNamara Line would not have stopped us to reach the final end" - the McNamara Line was a strategy by the US to prevent the infiltration into South Vietnam. (1) This is an interesting reference to a specific strategy, the only…
Annotation by Justin A. Brummer
About the artist
Brutal Death Metal band formed in 2003 in Groningen, Netherlands; disbanded 2012.
Themes
Ho Chi Minh Trail · Jungle · McNamara · VC