"Three-Five-Zero-Zero" is an anti-war

Anti-war

An anti-war movement is a social movement, usually in opposition to a particular nation's decision to start or carry on an armed conflict, unconditional of a maybe-existing just cause. The term can also refer to pacifism, which is the opposition to all use of military force during conflicts. Many...

 song, from the 1968 musical Hair

Hair (musical)

Hair: The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical is a rock musical with a book and lyrics by James Rado and Gerome Ragni and music by Galt MacDermot. A product of the hippie counter-culture and sexual revolution of the 1960s, several of its songs became anthems of the anti-Vietnam War peace movement...

, consisting of a montage

Sound collage

In music, montage or sound collage is a technique where sound objects or compositions, including songs, are created from collage, also known as montage, the use of portions of previous recordings or scores...

 of words and phrases similar to those of the 1966 Allen Ginsberg

Allen Ginsberg

Irwin Allen Ginsberg was an American poet and one of the leading figures of the Beat Generation in the 1950s. He vigorously opposed militarism, materialism and sexual repression...

 poem "Wichita Vortex Sutra

Wichita Vortex Sutra

"Wichita Vortex Sutra" is an anti-war poem by Allen Ginsberg, written in 1966. It appears in his collections Planet News and The Fall of America: Poems of These States...

". In the song, the phrases are combined to create images of the violence of military combat and aspects of the Vietnam War

Vietnam War

The Vietnam War was a Cold War-era military conflict that occurred in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1 November 1955 to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. This war followed the First Indochina War and was fought between North Vietnam, supported by its communist allies, and the government of...

. In its first line, for instance, "Ripped open by metal explosion" is followed by "Caught in barbed wire

Barbed wire

Barbed wire, also known as barb wire , is a type of fencing wire constructed with sharp edges or points arranged at intervals along the strand. It is used to construct inexpensive fences and is used atop walls surrounding secured property...

/Fireball/Bullet shock".

Notable aspects of the song include:

• the line from the repeated refrain, "prisoners in Niggertown / it's a dirty little war", echoing Ginsberg's lines

  The war is over now —

  Except for the souls

  held prisoner in Niggertown

• the song's two longest grammatical sentences, which follow the title:

  Take weapons up and begin to kill

  Watch the long long armies drifting home

• the cryptic line that gives the song its title. The text of the poem attributes the phrase "Viet Cong losses leveling up three five zero zero per month" to General Maxwell Taylor and/or Robert McNamara
  Robert McNamara
  Robert Strange McNamara was an American business executive and the eighth Secretary of Defense, serving under Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson from 1961 to 1968, during which time he played a large role in escalating the United States involvement in the Vietnam War...
  
   in what it calls "Front page testimony February ‘66".

On the soundtrack it is a combined track with the song "What A Piece Of Work Is Man", a slightly shuffled recitation of the What a piece of work is a man

What a piece of work is a man

The phrase "What a piece of work is a man!" comes from Shakespeare's Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, Act II, Scene 2, and it is often used in reference to the whole speech containing the line.-The speech:...

 speech from Hamlet

Hamlet

The Tragical History of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, or more simply Hamlet, is a tragedy by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written between 1599 and 1601...

.