My buddy Wil Willis was a buzzcut, fire-breathing Army Ranger when we landed together in a dorm full of Air Force recruits on Day 1 of our pararescue selection class. He was crossing over from the Army after his Ranger time, and it was killing him.
Everyone immediately called him ‘Ranger Willis,’ naturally, as he struggled to get his Ranger Regiment-bearings tuned to the lower frequencies of Air Force life, while facing the daily buzzsaw of the PJ selection course, all while trying to quit smoking. As our class dropped in a few weeks from over 100 to half that, and then half that again, most of us kept our heads down. Not Willis. As a Ranger cross-trainee, he couldn’t hide and he wouldn’t have anyway. He was a screaming, freakish force of nature beyond anybody I’d ever encountered in civilian life, angry and wild and fearless, even by the Type-A standards of selection course wannabes.
But the times he would really scare the shit out of me were on fast-paced training runs when Wil would sing “War Pigs” as our running cadence.
I was a good runner, but Wil was better, so it didn’t matter how blistering the pace — the song’s hellscape vision followed us in left-right-left time:
“Gen-erals. Gath-ered. In-their. Mass-es.
Just-like. Wit-ches. At-Black. Mass-es.”
To me, Willis belting out “War Pigs” has always been the sound of hard training and the mental furnace of PJ selection (in July and August, in south Texas, no less). I actually didn’t know “War Pigs” was a Black Sabbath song until much later. I thought it was some hellfire-cantation that Rangers taught each other.
But I thought back to it Monday when the news broke that Ozzy Osbourne had passed away. Two decades later, I think “War Pigs” is probably as close to an anthem for “GWOT” — the weird acronym for the Global War on Terror we use for 20 years of indecisive war in Afghanistan and Iraq — as anyone has ever come up with.
“Evil minds that plot destruction
Sorcerer of death’s construction”
The two decades of war in Afghanistan and Iraq never really congealed around a song or even a genre, the way wars of the past seemed to. The Huey-blade backbeat of “Fortunate Son.” Or big band swing of World War II.
Early in the war, Drowning Pool’s “Let the Bodies Hit The Floor” was everywhere, but its sugar high faded as all those bootleg strike videos circulating on laptops somehow failed to end the conflict. Toby Keith tried with “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue,” which was maybe sorta fun but obviously clueless and cornball. A better effort on the country side was “I Drive Your Truck” by Lee Brice, a gorgeous ballad that’s too damn sad and true for anybody to crank up in a make-shift tent gym in Bagram.
But “War Pigs” — written during Vietnam, but a stadium rock staple in the five decades since — is that song.
It’s a barren, ugly song, delivered by Osbourne’s shriek, the human-voice version of the air raid siren that opens the track.
“In the fields, the bodies burning
As the war machine keeps turning”
The drums and guitar triangulate their energies, like direct and indirect fires — not well-matched, not hyper musical, just punishing.
All four members of Black Sabbath are credited with writing “War Pigs,” which the band released in 1970, just as the Vietnam War crested past its bloody peak, still far from over. It was far too metal for radio and was never a single, but is now among both the band’s and Osbourne’s best-known songs. In recent years, critics have come to see it as one of the key songs that launched Heavy Metal as a genre.
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If you want metal-as-hell lyrics as a call to action — as a running cadence should be — it can be that. If you hear it as a howl of protest against GWOT’s “turning the corner” leadership, it can be that. It wasn’t a top 40 hit, so it’s unanchored to a summer or a year or a decade.
But mostly, it’s a song about a violent wasteland and the ravages of war. It matches the blurry snapshots of 2001’s horse soldiers, camcorder video from the 2004 streets of Fallujah, the helmet cams of the 2011 Bin Laden raid, and the drone-feed horrors over the fall of Kabul in 2021.
“Day of Judgement, God is calling
On their knees, the war pigs crawling”
By coincidence, just as Willis and I were finishing the Pararescue pipeline, a civilian friend of mine got a job as the sound technician on a new show on MTV, following around a wacky family in Beverly Hills — the Osbournes. My friend, a hippified-Hollywood techie who Willis actually would have loved, said nobody was more in on the joke than Osbourne as the show became a sensation, loving every minute of playing the wacked-out, slightly spooky dad.
He even played that role — proud elder — over “War Pigs” itself. Just this year, he told T-Pain he had made “the best cover of ‘War Pigs’ ever. Why didn’t you guys call me?”
It’s a nice lesson to consider as Ozzy Osbourne’s final legacy to the GWOT generation: there’s life after “War Pigs.”
