Bruce Cockburn - If I Had A Rocket Launcher

Bruce Douglas Cockburn is a Canadian singer-songwriter and guitarist. His song styles range from folk to jazz-influenced rock and his lyrics cover a broad range of topics that reveal a passion for human rights, environmental issues, politics, and spirituality.

                "If I Had a Rocket Launcher"  Bruce Cockburn, ( album Stealing Fire.)

The song was inspired by Cockburn's visit, sponsored by Oxfam, to Guatemalan refugee camps in Mexico following the counterinsurgency campaign of dictator Efraín Ríos Montt.^[1] Although Cockburn had occasionally touched on political themes in his earlier songs, "If I Had a Rocket Launcher" was his first explicitly political song to be released as a single, and earned him a new reputation as an outspoken musical activist.
In the song, Cockburn despairs of waiting for a political solution to the crisis, and expresses the desire to take matters into his own hands. Each verse ends with a line stating what Cockburn would do if he had a rocket launcher: in the first verse, I'd make somebody pay. In the second, I would retaliate. In the third, I would not hesitate.
The fourth and final verse ends with the song's most famous and controversial lyric: If I had a rocket launcher, some son-of-a-bitch would die.

 Here comes the helicopter, second time today
Everybody scatters and hopes it goes away
How many kids they've murdered only God can say, hey
If I had a rocket launcher, if I had a rocket launcher
If I had a rocket launcher, I'd make somebody pay

I don't believe in guarded borders and I don't believe in hate
I don't believe in generals or their stinking torture states
And when I talk with the survivors of things too sickening to relate
If I had a rocket launcher, if I had a rocket launcher
If I had a rocket launcher, I would retaliate

On the Rio Lacantun, one hundred thousand wait
To fall down from starvation, or some less humane fate
Cry for Guatemala, with a corpse in every gate
If I had a rocket launcher, if I had a rocket launcher
If I had a rocket launcher, I would not hesitate

I want to raise every voice, at least I've got to try
Every time I think about it water rises to my eyes.
Situation desperate, echoes of the victims cry
If I had a rocket launcher, if I had a rocket launcher
If I had a rocket launcher, some son of a bitch would die