Songfacts®:

• In this #4 country hit, Loretta Lynn sings from the perspective of a woman whose husband is killed in the Vietnam War. Lynn was skeptical when her husband, Doolittle, suggested she write a war song after they heard one of several news bulletins on the radio about the conflict. "He looked over at me and said, 'Loretta, why don't you write a song about the war?'," she recalled in her 2012 book Honky Tonk Girl: My Life In Lyrics. "I said, 'Doo, I don't know anything good about war, so I really don't know what there is good to write about it.' He said, 'What's wrong with writing to Uncle Sam?' And I realized he's the man that all the mothers ought to write to."
• That's Nashville saxophonist Boots Randolph playing "Taps" throughout the climax. Lynn said they had to do a little creative thinking to get the right sound: "They put him in the bathroom of the studio with the door open because the sound was not sounding right in the studio."
• When Lynn plays this live, she always dedicates it to her husband.