Stathol wrote:
To this day I have no idea what the actual lyrics are.
I am pretty sure Eddie Vedder is with you in that boat.
Supposedly, the original song is about how when Eddie's friend learned his brother had been killed in Desert Storm and while they were walking down the street his friend saw a flag hung on an neighbor's house. His friend, in a moment of grief and respect for his brother, saluted the flag. But the neighbors "out on the porch" gave them a dirty look because they thought they were just no-good teenage punks probably trying to humiliate them in some way, and that kind of pissed Eddie off.
This is where the line "I don't know whether it's a box or in a bag" is about not knowing how his friend's brother's body would be shipped back.
Since then, the song has been kind of known to be fairly tough to understand and Eddie just kind of went with that. He's even been quoted at some point saying "There's lyrics to that song?" Heh. But, yeah, supposedly they were originally about a pretty serious and deep subject.