Hand of Doom - 2012 - Remaster

"Hand Of Doom" is about American soldiers returning from the Vietnam War, often injured or traumatized. The song reflects the disoriented feeling that afflicted many of these veterans, who often used drugs to cope. That's reflected in lines like, "drop the acid pill" and "holes are in your skin, caused by deadly pin."

Running 7:08, "Hand Of Doom" is part of the second Black Sabbath album, Paranoid, a breakthrough for the band with the songs "Iron Man" and "War Pigs."

Black Sabbath is from the UK and hadn't yet come to America when they wrote this song. Geezer Butler, the band's bass player and lyricist, was inspired by a concert that band played at an American army base in Germany. "It was a sort of halfway house when soldiers were coming back from Vietnam so they could face family life and ordinary life when they came back to America," he explained to Songfacts. "They'd stop in Germany to decompress. They'd tell me these horrendous stories about being stuck in the mud in Vietnam and how many of them were on heroin. Of course, they didn't tell you that on the news. I just thought I'd write about that." The UK didn't fight in the Vietnam war, so there weren't a lot of songs by British groups that tackled the subject.