Ballad of the Columbia Eagle
Channel: David Rovics
Date: 2023-05-06

One of the things I got to do while I was on the east coast last week was spend some time with Al Glatkowski.  In March of 1970 he and fellow merchant marine Clyde McKay led a mutiny aboard the SS Columbia Eagle, in an effort to prevent a massive delivery of napalm bombs from reaching Thailand, where the US Air Force would be loading it onto planes in order to drop on Vietnamese villages.  I wrote this song over the course of a couple days after I got home from the trip.