PARTICIPANTS: V / G / D / B

COLE: Hi. I’m Adrian Cole with The Northline Post. We haven’t met before.

V: It’s good to meet you.

COLE: My daughter told me about you.

She asked me to get your autographs while I was here.

D: If mine’s good enough.

G: Quit grinning.

G turns to D with an exasperated look.

D seems to think he’s the one girls like best.

COLE: (wry smile)

She made it pretty clear I wasn’t coming home without them.

D: Who’s she a fan of?

G: Don’t worry. Not you.

D: You don’t know.

COLE: (laughs)

All right. Shall we get started?

COLE: When I first heard the song, I thought it was pretty sentimental.

It sounds like you’re speaking directly to one person—

“You don’t have to be strong.”

“I want you to stay.”

The lyrics feel very feminine.

V: That’s true.

COLE: But the visuals are different.

I watched the limited-release video before I came here.

It feels like the exact opposite of the lyrics.

V: As the song came together, I started to see a broader picture.

I found myself wanting to show the people going off to fight, too.

COLE: I see.

Still, that surprised me a little.

With lyrics like these, you could have put the horrors of war front and center.

V: I never really thought about taking it in that direction.

COLE: Why not?

V: Because I didn’t want to dismiss the will to fight.

COLE: So you’re not rejecting the will to fight itself...

V: What’s right changes depending on the person and where they stand.

Cole goes quiet for a moment and looks at V.

After years of covering the military and politics, the idea itself is hardly new to him.

Still, something about hearing this young musician say it without hesitation strikes him as slightly odd.

COLE: So what about you?

What would you fight for?

D: For someone I love.

D answers without hesitation.

G: Pussy.

D: What about you?

G: To be a hero.

G says it without changing his expression.

Cole can’t tell from his expression whether he’s joking or serious.

For a moment, the answer doesn’t quite fit with the slim punk musician sitting in front of him.

Just as Cole is about to speak, D cuts in.

D: Right. One of those heroes who doesn’t exactly follow the law...

G says nothing and just shrugs.

As if to say, “So?”

COLE: What about you, V?

V: For honor. To defend my country.

There’s never just one reason to fight.

COLE: ...I see. And B?

B: I don’t like fighting.

G: Yeah, riiight.

B: I mean it.

B smiles a little.

COLE: (laughs)

Different reasons for each of you.

So, V—did you write this song from the point of view of the one leaving, or the one being left behind?

D: The one left behind, right?

D cuts in as if the answer were obvious.

V nods and continues.

V: It actually started with a poem I wrote when I was a kid.

COLE: Really? How old were you?

V: Early teens, I think.

COLE: So even as a kid, you were writing from the point of view of the one left behind.

That’s a little surprising.

That “don’t go”—who was that meant for?

V: No one real.

There was an anime I watched as a kid where the hero died at the end.

He saved the world, everyone praised him, and that was it.

But I hated endings like that.

COLE: So you wrote, “You don’t have to be a hero.”

V: Yeah. Something like that.

D: V was cute when he was a kid.

V: You could at least call me a genius. (laughs)

Cole looks at V again.

Pale, refined features. A calm, gentle manner.

And yet, despite writing such sentimental lyrics, he says he doesn’t want to dismiss the will to fight, and names honor and defending his country as reasons to fight.

Which side is V really on?

COLE: But there’s something else I’m more curious about.

Why did you keep that poem all these years?

V: Why did I keep it...?

V falls silent, as if searching for the right words.

B: You probably just left it tucked inside a magazine somewhere. (laughs)

D: You found it when you were stuck for ideas, right?

The other two answer for him, but that isn’t what Cole is asking.

COLE: I see.

But when you found it, you could’ve thrown it away.

Why did you turn it into a song now?

V: ...

This time, no one cuts in.

V thinks for a while, then gives a slightly awkward smile.

V: Maybe there’s a contradiction in me.

COLE: What kind of contradiction?

V: As I got older, I started to understand both sides—

the one leaving and the one left behind.

D: Yeah. I get both, too.

G: I don’t.

D: Yeah. You wouldn’t.

COLE: So now, who are you singing this song to?

The person leaving, or the person being left behind?

V: Neither one in particular.

I wanted both in there—the feelings of the person sending someone off, and the will of the person leaving.

I just broadened the perspective to include both.

People can take from it whatever they want.

COLE: So it isn’t a song meant to give people an answer.

V: Of course not.

In the end, V gives a careful, measured answer to every question.

COLE: All right. Thank you.

One last thing. I still have to keep my promise to my daughter.

D: So, who’s she a fan of?

COLE: I forgot to ask. Her taste does lean toward punk, though.

Cole plays along with them a little.

G: See?

D: That doesn’t mean it’s you.

COLE: (laughs)

She’ll be happy to have all four.

And with that, the interview is over.

There’s still one thing bothering Cole.

As he puts away the four autographs, he calls out to V.

COLE: V. This has nothing to do with the interview. Can I ask you something?

V: Sure.

Cole takes out his phone and shows V a frame from the limited-release Visual Version of “Chased the Stars,” which he watched before coming here.

COLE: This number here—do you know why it was added?

V leans in to look at the screen.

In the upper right of the old military photograph is a small string of characters that looks like some kind of identifier.

V: I’m not sure. I think the image itself is in the public domain, but G put this one together, so you’d have to ask him...

V turns around, but G is already gone.

V: Looks like he already left.

COLE: I see.

Cole swipes the image away.

With G gone, there’s no way to check now.

Before coming here, Cole looked up the number.

He’d seen this image before, and he didn’t remember any number like that being on it.

The number itself was real—an identifier actually assigned to a military photograph cataloged by the U.S. National Archives.

But when he traced the number, it led not to this image, but to a photograph of a different battleship.

If G had added the number during editing, Cole could ask him later. If it had simply slipped in from another source, there was nothing more to it.

But what if the number was already on an official version of the photograph? When had it been added—and why?

YouTube

https://youtu.be/HtyL84BLvZ8

When the editors handed me this assignment, I had a fairly good idea why they had chosen me.

There was a limited-release Visual Version of Chased the Stars.

Old fighter aircraft. Naval vessels. Soldiers.

Most of it was assembled from public-domain military photographs.

As a piece of filmmaking, to be frank, it was nothing particularly elaborate. It looked like what it was: something put together by a garage band that had started as a hobby, using whatever material was readily available. To exaggerate only slightly, it had the feel of a school project put together over summer break.

The lyrics, by contrast, were strikingly sentimental.

“You don’t have to be strong.”

“You don’t have to be a hero.”

“I want you here.”

So why put such martial images of fighter aircraft and soldiers over a song like that?

An ordinary music journalist might have asked about the contrast between the lyrics and the images and left it there.

I suspect I had been brought in to ask a slightly less comfortable question.

Do you actually know what these photographs show?

For a younger generation, are uniforms and fighter aircraft things to be consumed as cool symbols before they are understood as history?

The editors did not put it quite that bluntly, but that was more or less the brief.

Then I met the four of them.

The short version is that they were a perfectly likable garage band.

I had expected as much going in, and speaking to them did little to change that impression.

They had not made the video in order to communicate some particular political doctrine about war.

Nor did it seem quite as simple as lining up fighter aircraft because they thought they looked cool.

“What would you fight for?”

I asked them that, and all four gave different answers.

For someone I love.

To become a hero.

To defend honor or country.

I don’t like fighting to begin with.

Hardly a tidy set of answers.

But perhaps that is as it should be.

At least they were not trying to come up with a single political answer as a group.

According to V, the song originally began with a poem he had written as a child.

He had seen a story in which the hero saves the world, dies, and is celebrated by everyone at the end, and decided he hated that ending.

So, guitar in hand, he wrote: “You don’t have to be a hero.”

As childhood logic goes, it is easy enough to understand.

I have a wife and daughter myself.

If either of them told me, “You don’t have to be a hero. I just want you to come home,” I would understand the feeling perfectly well.

Not many people want an honorable death for someone they love.

But I have spent a long time covering military affairs and politics.

So I know the other side of it as well.

There are things that cannot be defended if no one goes.

There are times when someone has to go where it is dangerous.

The feelings of those who send someone off and the resolve of the person who goes cannot simply be reduced to one side being right and the other wrong.

V said that as he grew older, he came to understand both.

He called it a “contradiction” within himself.

It did not strike me as an especially unusual one.

Age tends to give you more of them.

Things that were easy to answer when you were young gradually become harder to dispose of in a single sentence.

In the end, Chased the Stars was not a song intended to provide an answer.

Some people go.

Some stay behind.

There are reasons they have to go, and reasons others do not want them to.

Perhaps all the band had done was put both of those things into one song and one set of images.

I am not sure whether I came back with the clever conclusion about young people today that the editors may have been hoping for.

At any rate, I have no intention of taking four young people and making them stand for an entire generation.

Still, perhaps young people have always been more or less like this.

They naturally project their own emotions and stories onto whatever happens to catch their eye.

And, come to think of it, perhaps young soldiers were not so very different before they were sent into actual combat.

They put on uniforms, laughed with their comrades, struck poses, and some of them probably dreamed of becoming heroes.

Others probably thought of little besides the lovers and families they had left at home.

At that point, they did not yet know what they would later see.

It is easy to say that war should not be romanticized.

But no one can stop the young from dreaming of heroism. Perhaps no one should.

After the interview, I had all four of them sign something for my daughter.

I will leave it to the reader to guess which one she is actually a fan of.

At least I managed not to go home without the signatures.

Compared with the military and political pieces I usually cover, it was a remarkably peaceful assignment.

—Adrian Cole, The Northline Post